Madness and mayhem: The conclusion of Bilbo's Birthday Bash

Oh my... with all the craziness of the last 24 hours, I completely forgot to post this!  My apologies, folks.

This is Game Six of the tournament.  It is my Knights of the Blood Rose once again, gearing up to face some elite orcs, Marghul Knights, the Shadow Lord and Grishnakh

The scenario was Recon once again.  After the debacle of the previous game, I made a decision.  The was not even going to try to get anyone off the board.  With so few of the enemy (I think we might have had the same number of troops) and terrain that was ideal for my twin stormcaller list, I wanted to go for breaking the bad guys and killing as many as I could.

You can see my deployments in or near the buildings.  I wanted to make the orcs come to me.

This started to work right away, and I spent my first few turns positioning myself in the buildings.  I wanted to make sure that Delilah on the right would not have will sapped away...

Speaking of the Morghul knights and the Shadow Lord, aren't those amazing paint jobs?  Incredible!!!!  Pity they all had to die. :-)

More positioning, waiting for the bad guys...

I was hoping to see a commitment by the orcs and knights so that the traps could be set.

Now the traps are set on both the right and the left.  Gwaihir and the cavalry will try to take advantage of the Nature's wrath spell aftermath on the left.

Gotta love random elf bow shots!

Now the trap is sprung!  Out comes Sam on the left, and down go the orcs!  I made sure to avoid Grishnakh, so there was no way for the spell to be resisted.  I also rolled a '6', so all my will came back!

Same for Delilah on the right.  The knights had stalled in their advance.  If I could hit them and avoid the Shadow Lord, they would be tossed from the horses.  If anything else, they would lose the movement and the cavalry charge bonus.

You can see that the eagle and cavalry were able to trap the downed orcs this time, unlike the previous attempt in Game Two to pull off this maneuver.  By getting back the will, and walling off the downed orcs, I could move Sam over a bit to KO the other advancing orc unit!  And down they went!  yea!

Gwaihir flew away from that combat after chewing on an orc in a heroic fight.  I was going to go for broke, and have Gwaihir land on the Shadow Lord himself.  I had to take him out as soon as possible.

It was a big risk, but it was the last game, and I said what the heck.  He is fight skill 8 after all!  Check out those talons...

Amazingly enough, the Great Eagle dispatched the foul servant of the Dark Lord with a single blow!

Delilah, who had spent the last bit of her will to knock down the knights a second time, now led the charge against what remained.  Terror would prove to be useless, as it almost always seems to these days.  I had plenty of spears to charge in to join the fight skill 5 party.

The orcs by Grishakh are taken down in bunches.  With each loss, I was able to outnumber and surround them, causing more deaths.

The orcs in the center make a mad dash for the goal line.  If they get away, I would end up losing.  Fortunately, I had the 2 elf archers on either side of that road, and an eagle with a giant base to get in their way.

More orcs die to repeated elven assaults

It would not be long before Grishnakh himself would be surrounded and killed.

Same for the last of the dismounted Morghul Knights.  I really want to make these part of my army, but they will be going along with my chariots and Easterlings.  This terror causing power could make a big difference in my games.  The Shadow Lord can keep down the shooting, which already has a tough time getting past the chariots as it is.  If I can intersperse the terror knights in key places, I can keep my own cav from being charged.

Anyway, with the orcs broken, and all their leaders defeated and dead, they start running away.  Most importantly, the orcs trying to get to my deployment zone are the first to go.  I am able to kill off almost all the remaining orcs, for my most convincing victory of the tournament.

I learned a ton over the weekend.  If I were to be able to do it all over this next weekend, I think I could have a lot of success.  Unfortunately, next time might be a year away.  Bummer!

Thanks again to Brent and Chris, and everyone who helped make it a great weekend!

Up on the soapbox. Time to rant!

Notice this rather unique "battle" image from my 5th game of the tournament.  

Yes, you see that correctly.  Jamie has narry a figure on the table, and the game is about to begin.  That is not by choice, that is just the pure playtesting genius that is GW.

We were playing the dreaded Recon scenario, which made everyone's lives much more difficult.  It should be a fun scenario, but it is poorly designed, to say the least.  The FAQ that came out just before the tournament only made things worse.

Speaking of worse, this matchup (and the resulting reinforcement rolls), was the worse case scenario for this scenario.  You had arguably the fastet army in the tournament... my Easterling Alliance, vs dwarves.  Ouch.  My infantry was moving more than double the speed of the stunties, thanks to the war drum.

What made things a disaster was the bad reinforcement rolls of the dwarves.  As you can tell, they did not show up.

To make matters worse, you have to deploy off a specific point of the board, which creates a very small area in which to deploy.  There was barely enough room for the 4 chariots and for the 6 cav.  Anything bigger... who knows what happens.

That lead to this situation.  I am almost half way across the board, and there are no dwarves!

The objective is to get as many of your troops off the board via the opponents deployment zone as possible. Great for me, right?  Not so!

Since none of the guys I would run off the board would count as casualties,  I would never reach my 25% break point (when the game is supposed to end).  So, if I ran off all my guys early, Jamie would simply move all of his dwarves (slowly, of course) off the board unopposed.

Sounds like a fun 2 hours, doesn't it?

Jamie even had to use a point of might to get the archers on the table (the figures in the right hand corner).

Basically, this is where I lost the game.  I was already feeling very bad about the situation.  All I had to do was weave back and forth with all my fast stuff, and just run by the dwarves.  If they spread out to stop me, they would get pummeled, creating a gap, through which the rest of my cav would run through.

I went off to the left to deny the archers any shots,and started marching my infantry forward as well.

I fake to the left, with the intention of hitting the weaker dwarf warriors in the center.  My original intent was go go all the way over to the right, hitting the archers, who had already spent a point of might.  The infantry would trade places, and form a wall against the dwarves hustling on over to join that fight.

However, I felt really guilty about this, and I decided against that dance move.  That is where the game would go from a prefect storm for me to a complete disaster.

I was able to make a decent charge at the warriors, but flubbed all the rolls.  Yes, I survived all the throwing axes and such, but now I would be really stuck there if I lost priority.  If I won it, I could escape...

I think you already know how that turned out.  Lose priority, get stuck, etc.  Spend might, lose roll off, etc.  Getting my foot troops all the way down there helped to even things out a bit, while the terrain did keep the Iron Guard and Khazag guys away from me for the time being.

I do manage to get some kills, but I cannot extract myself.  This is bad.  On the far right, my infantry engages the archers as much as possible to prevent shots at the pikemen, and to keep those archers from marching off the board themselves!

I did have a chance, however, to rescue the situation.  Jamie called a heroic combat with Balin and buddies on the chariot you see surrounded.  I knew that he wanted to kill that to get to the king.  Since he had priority, there was no way to avoid it.  However, both characters were fight skill 6.

In the inevitable combat, I managed to roll a 6.  I think he used a point of might to make his a 6 as well, which lead to the most important roll off of the game.

If I won that roll, I would probably not do any damage to him, but I would be pushing away all his best combat units well away from the fight, into terrain, etc.  That would be just enough to let me kill off the weaker warriors and get to the finish line, using the war drum.

So, it was all going to some down to a 50/50 roll, which I really hate.   Sadly, it went for the dwarves, and that ended the game.  Neither of us would get anyone off the board, so that +3 for killing the general would be the difference in the game.

I had killed twice as many dwarves as I had lost, but they were nowhere near their break point.  Time expired, and that was it.

As I have said, this scenario is pretty badly designed.  I would have to play it again with the elves, and I was going to take a very different approach.. Stay tuned!

The Knights of the Blood Rose go to war! Round Two

Round Two of Bilbo's bash saw me bring out the Elves for another objective based Domination scenario.  600 points, as before, with another bonus mission.  Both of our bonus missions were exactly the same as the first game.  Neither of us would even come close to achieving those.

The philosophy behind the Elf army was much more simple than the Easterling Alliance.  Here, it was all about the stormcallers, Delilah and Sam.  If you are familiar with the training games that Rich and I have done, you know Delilah very well!

Basically, the stormcaller lies in wait for an advance (preferably by some sort of mounted or cav type unit), and then jumps out to cast Nature's wrath, using all my will dice in hopes of 'wild channeling', which would give me back my used will points!

Once the enemy is on the ground, they are pounced on by the elves, with spear support.  My cavalry and Gwaihir slip around the back of the piles of downed enemies so that those guys cannot get back up and help out their fallen comrades.

After our setup, you can see that I have both stormcaller units on the extreme right and left.

As it would turn out, I would have been better off putting the unit on the left inside that ruined building, risking the bow shots from the Uruk-hai I was facing.  You will see why soon.

The Isenguard orcs advanced quickly, seeking the objectives on my side.  The archery for the orcs did not do a whole bunch, but it was something I had to consider each turn with the objectives relatively exposed.  Here you can get a better view of the unit on the left.

The shaman had cast fury, and I knew what I had to do.  The stormcaller tried to get into position to do his Nature's wrath...

Gwaihir waited behind them, with the thought that if the whole unit was knocked down, the Great Eagle would be able to fly over everything and squeeze the shaman.  Even if he didn't kill him, the fight would be lost, and fury would be gone

In the center, I had to feign a few charges by the elf cavalry to make the orc unit in the center hesitate as much as possible.  My plan was to have the stormcaller unit with Gwaihir wipe out the orcs on the left, link up with the Knights, and sweep the board to the right.

At this point, everything is setting us very well.  Even on the right, I have a chance to do a big knock down with Delilah on some unsuspecting orcs...

The knights do a select set of charges in the center, hoping for some cheap kills, while Delilah prepares to KO the advancing marauders in front of her.  This is where things would start to go awry.  It started with the cavalry doing very poorly.

I lost priority for this crucial turn (a very very common theme for the weekend), but that is actually a good thing when I want to pull of this sort of 'blast and bash' attack combo.  As long as the stormcaller is free, he can knock down all the enemy, and free up my own troops to whack them when they are down.

You can see that I pulled that off, and even killed the shaman!  However, trying to come around the corner as I did limited the amount of guys I could get in there, and I did not kill enough orcs in the initial strike.  This would cast me the game, eventually.

With repeated loss of priority, I have way less control of all the fights, which starts to bog me down on the left.   I bring the cavalry over there to try and assist... the banner should certainly help!

Well, not really.  Not only did I not kill the orcs on the left, I started losing troops of my own!  Even with Seregond my champ, and the banner.  Not good .  Plus, time is starting to run short.  Delilah does her knock down, which slows the orc advance, but they have too many troops over there for me to kill them all.

I do manage to extract myself from the orcs on the left, with one of my cav holding that objective.  I needed to get the center objective to be contested, as the orc archers grabbed the one in the rear on the right side

I sent Gwaihir and one cav in a desperate charge in the center, positioning myself between the orcs and the objective.  The idea was to win the fights and push them away from the objective if I could not kill them outright.

I did something similar on the objective in my right corner with some infantry.  I made a ring around the objective, and shielded with everybody.  I won almost all the fights, and pushed enough orcs out of the way to get that objective.

In the center, however, I was not able to kill one of the three remaining orcs, so we tied at 2/2 on that one.  In fact, we tied on the objectives overall.

Only one more victory point opportunity remained.  Wounds on the army general.  Sadly, that early combat in the center with the cav charge put an unsaved wound on Seregond.  This would give the orcs the one point they needed to win.  Bummer!

However, the Knights of the Blood Rose would get some serious revenge on Day Two...

Game Time! Bilbo's Birthday Bash Game One

Well, folks, it is time to start looking at the actual games that I played over the weekend!

The format was a 2 day, six game event, with each person playing 3 games each with their 600 point evil and good armies.  There were 3 scenarios.  I believe this first one is Domination, and objective based scenario (they are the 5 little gems that BBB had custom made for the event!).

First, I want to talk about what I had hoped would happen with each army, starting with my Easterling / Khand alliance. 

 It seemed to me that most LOTR players are really keen on having archer groups of 6-10 guys.  They end up in a corner somewhere so that they have more shots.  That's great, but it also tends to keep them out of the fight.  So, I thought that my low miniature count (only 23), would not be as much of an issue since the group of archers would mostly stay out of the combats.  This would even up the numbers by default, and since my army was so fast, I would be in melee so quickly that they would not get many turns to shoot.  If they did shoot at the chariots (which would always take the lead), they would find out the hard way how hard they are to kill with shooting.

Since my cav and chariots would be getting 2 attacks on those charges, that would further help to even up those numbers, if not give me more oomph at the point of attack.

I had a very nicely painted Rohan army in front of me, which was great!  You can see archer, Royal Guard on the left, and Cavalry with the character that makes them Fight 4.

Here is our deployment.

Note the very nice theme terrain.  Each table had unique terrain with some kind of theme.  Very cool!

I am going to have to spoil some of the suspense here by revealing that this game was not going to go my way no matter what, as I did some unfortunate cross-pollination of game systems.  Possibly due to fatigue (2 hours of sleep), I mistook the 40k rules for 'contesting' objectives, as opposed to the LOTR method, which is entirely different (you will see what  difference learning this tough lesson made in my next game).

Also, there were some mission cards with additional bonus points that I thought counted towards victory points.  This confusion kinda sealed my fate, but at least I got to have the chariots line up against a significant amount of cavalry.  My other 2 games will be against dwarves, so no cav there :-(

Anyway, you can see that we would start dancing around each other, especially with the horses.  I had the war drum, so I figured I could eventually set up a better charge, despite the fence in the way.

The big chariot bases can be a pain to get through terrain, as I already knew.  This meant that I had to do my forward advance in smaller chunks.  The war priest had cast his fury, waiting for bow shots from the archers, as well as throwing spears.

The archers fired everything at the King's chariot.  This would be a recurring theme for the weekend.  All the good players were obsessed with shooting at the chariots.  Thank goodness for me!  Many of the shots either missed or plinked off the chariot.  I never did make any fate roll, though.  

I made my move to the left to see if I could get the Royal Guard in range for a charge, or hit the cavalry with chariots, thus gaining the charge bonus.

I had the priest's infantry escort hop the fence to draw some of the horses their way.  My hope was to hit the horses that stayed behind.

Well, I did manage to get off that charge, and you can see the results... lots of skulls!  Sadly, this would be the high water mark for me, as you will note the blue priority marker in the next image.

That blue priority marker would spend much more time on the good side, and that would make things very rough for the Easterlings and the King.  I tried to spend some might, but the 50/50 rolls didn't go very well either.  This would allow the Royal guard to get involved, and that's bad!

My cavalry and chariots really did do a number on the Rohan riders, despite the equal fight skills.  The banner helped a bit.  You will see dwindling numbers of the Rohan Riders as the game moves along...

At this point, the confusion over the bonus mission would do me in.  I thought I needed to get more than one figure within 6" of the Rohan board edge to claim that 5 point bonus.  Since I assumed (incorrectly) that it counted towards victory points, I thought I could give up an objective or two and still be OK.  Rohan's special mission was to have his general cause more casualties than me.  I was already ahead on that, so I really thought I was sitting pretty!

Well, as we now know, I was definitely not.  Neither were these chaps, who must have liked the shiny rock.

Some more standard Rohan infantry join the fight with my cav and chariots, which pinned me in due to repeated loss of priority.  I do manage to keep killing cavalry, but not enough to get a break point in range...

Since the archers were either shooting at chariots or moving toward the objective, I moved out a bunch of my Black Dragon infantry to contest the center objective.  I figured that they could survive long enough to tie things up over there.  

This is where my misunderstanding of "contesting" hurt.  I thought that I only needed to get a guy or two next to each one to 'contest'.  That's great for 40k, not so much for LOTR.  This meant that I was not only going to be outnumbered at almost all the objectives, but I was sending out individuals when I should have just kept them in bigger groups to win objectives.

The fights continue over here, but I still can't get to the infantry...

The fights in the center don't go horribly for me, considering that I was outnumbered and facing the Rohan General!  Let's just say that I shielded with just about every guy every turn, including the captain.  The idea was to get 4 attacks back, even if I was badly outnumbered.  My defense 7 and fate point really helped here!

I kill off what is left of the Riders here, and even get into the infantry.  It would be to little, too late, since the game was about to end.

The same thing here around the center objective.  Given what I was facing (even cavalry charges!) my troops did quite a job to stick around.  However, Rohan would have more figures around the objective than me, spelling my doom.

So, A frustrating loss in this first match.  I would draw that same bonus mission card in the next 4 games, so at least I would not repeat that mistake again! :-)  Ironically, my opponents would also have that same duel of champions card.

By the way, my opponent here is a very talented chef, who made some fantastic eats that would keep me going for the rest of the day.  My compliments to the chef.

Next up, my Knights of the Blood Rose face off against Uruk-kai!

Stay tuned...