Lord of the Rings Gaming

Merlin and myself not only played a small Kings of War game, we also squeezed in a Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game.
Now I've not played the game for quite a while, last time was the start of a Battle Companies campaign with Merlin. That campaign never really got going, as my orcs suffered such great losses against his dwarves. Part of the issue was the difficulty damaging high Defence targets, the orcs needed numbers to give them a chance, but the starting companies don't seem to support this. I should say I still had a lot of fun losing to Merlin, but I think we both felt that the campaign wasn't worth continuing.

Now one of Merlin's other gaming friends has got the new starter set, so it seemed a great opportunity to dust off the old Lord of the Rings minis and give it another go.
We both invested in the new rulebook and the Lord of the Rings army lists (as opposed to the Hobbit). As an introduction we worked out 250 points of Mordor orcs in my case (obviously) and Lothlorien elves in Merlin's case (of course).
I chose the Reconnoitre game where warbands start off table and roll to appear. The main objective for each side was to get as many troops off the opposite table edge, while preventing the enemy doing the same.

Anyhow, enough words, here's some pictures.

Initially we both managed to bring only one of our two warbands on to the table. 

All warbands in play now. The smaller but(theoretically) tougher band of Morannon orcs and Uruk-hai use the small wood to shield their advance while the larger group of orcs get bogged down by elven shooting and combat.

Warg riders charge the elven line

I was very lucky here, the cavalry rules gave me quite an advantage*. Merlin was also unlucky with his Duel rolls.

The Morannon orcs observe their lesser kin fighting the elves. They seem to be providing sufficient distraction.

A Heroic March brings one orc warband close to the table edge.

Sadly we had to finish here, I suspect if we had continued, I might have got just enough orcs over the line for victory, but things did seem to be going Merlin's way in the big scrap.

Another very enjoyable game. I look forward to more in the near future.

I have some work to do still on my Mordor force. This was essentially a grab bag of what I had painted. I'd like to add some highlights to some of them, and finish off others. The Morannon orc captain and the Warg riders were started more or less from scratch, when they are finished I do a dedicated blog post.

Again I need to sort out scenery. I'm starting another terrain box for 28mm, rather as I did in 15mm here.  I'll start with a generic collection, but I'd like to have a box for Middle Earth, perhaps even several different ones (Rohan, Gondor, Mordor etc) eventually.

*actually, too much of an advantage, as I was including the Warg's attack as well. Not sure how much difference overall it made, but I'll not make that mistake again.