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...

Some results! Bilbo's Birthday Bash

OK!  Bilbo's Bash is over, and it is time to begin the review.  The short answer is freakin' amazing!

When you sign up for this tournament, you are in for something special.  Everybody walks away with something, leaving no one empty handed.  The swag had the nifty custom dice, the priority medallion, and the dice bag/patch.

Everyone also received a box of figures, whether you won an award or not.

Did I mention food?  Yes, lunch was provided on both days.  Yea!  It is the first tournament where I did not attempt to starve myself to death.  That makes for a much more pleasant experience. :-)

On the topic of pleasant experiences, this truly was just such an event for me.  Pound for pound, the painting efforts for this tournament were tremendous.  Lots of talent and care on display.  It was an honor to take part.  The players were of the variety that you would love to play against all the time.

Given the amount of effort that is put into this tournament by Brent, Chris et all, it makes sense that the participants would also try to make it a great environment.  Normally my favorite part of a tournament is when it is over!  This time around, I was a little bummed when it was over.

As you can see, I was fortunate enough to win the Best Apperance award.  There were lots of really fantastic armies there.  All the efforts on the display board proved to be well worth it!

The trophies were beautiful, and there were some extra jars of paint as well. :-)

In addition, they had a separate painting contest.  How cool is that?  Once more, I was fortunate to win Best Painted Single with Radaghast the Brown...

Also, I managed to take home a trophy for Best Painted Cavalry with my converted Saurumon figure

These pictures don't show all the additional work that went in to the tournament, such as the individually themed gaming tables, which was very fun, and impressive!

I can't emphasize enough just how great this event was.  Everyone there was very fun to be with, and it was a great time.  I will start posting pictures of the games later tonight!

The Battle of Fortress Falls: Minis on the display board!

Well, there were definitely many times where I did not think I would ever see this.  A week before the tournament, I had given up hope of ever getting this done.  Instead, I was going to paint up a few magnetized boards like my Grey Knight army board from Adepticon.

I don't know if it was insanity or pure spite that drove me to get this board done.  From our recent experience making the terrain board for the Dragon Shoppe, I thought that the 'terrain' part of the board could be done very rapidly.  It was all the buildings on top that would be the problem.

My original vision was a large set of structures that would be interlocked together, with towers and platforms, water cascading through it all, etc.  That part had to be abandoned, which was a bummer.  I also had to give up writing out the story and fluff behind the armies, which I never do.

I was determined to at least have some kind of structures on the board, so I went with the ruins, as I mentioned in a previous post.  As it turns out, everyone else (who was not me!), had no idea about any of this inner turmoil, or the original plan. :-)  They just saw a neat landscape with waterfalls!

So, in the end, it was well worth all the extreme stress.  Getting to see both armies interacting on this piece was very gratifying.  Knowing that we can also use it for our games is even cooler!

Also, the magnetic primer really did help.  While the flock and grass did cut down on the magnetic effect in some places, it seemed to offer just enough hold to keep minis from flying off the board!

I was surprised at how much room there was for all the minis.  I could easily have gotten many more on here.  My thought process was to make the outcroppings large enough for a mini or two here and there.  Man, there's gonna be a lot of climb rolls on this baby!

Here's Delilah preparing to call Nature's Wrath on some chariots...

The King is trying to figure out just how he's gonna get across that river...

Gwaihir defends his nesting grounds...

Later today I will get into the tournament itself!  Stay tuned.

Water world: Creating the falls!

The tournament has now come and gone.  Yes, I know that you are wanting some info on the tournament results, but that is going to have to wait for now...

You have heard over and over how time was running very low for the end of this project.  At this point, we were going to have to be leaving the house in about 5 hours.  I had not packed anything, not slept, and not even started the waterfalls!  Can't have a Fortress Falls without it.

So, out came the Woodland Scenics water effects.  It is a lot like Elmer's glue, but a slightly different set of ingredients.  I wanted churning water, so I took a relatively stiff flat brush to spread out the effects into the river bed.  If there was more time, I would have done a few layers, but there would only be time for one.

I started to get desperate, so I took the top off the bottle and started squeezing out huge chunks of it.  That really worked well!

The real fun part of all this was going to be the falls themselves.  To get this:

You need this.  It is a plastic sheet with all of the water effect spread out with a flat brush.  Once the effects dry, it forms a clear textured 'sheet' that looks like falling water!  Be careful though, as it remains sticky.  While this is great for getting it attached to the rocks, it also means that it will stick to itself like crazy!

So, you take some of your wet water effects and brush that on to where you want to attach your sheet.  Once the sheet is applied, you brush on some more effects to hide that seam, and make it have more of a nice 'edge' where it goes over the rocks

I worked out from the top center section, expanding outward and down to the river bed

Where it reached the river be, I went crazy with very heavily textured, churning water!

Here it is right after I completed that task.  I turned on an industrial strength fan to dry it faster, but that only worked partially well.  In fact, it was still drying today!

Here is a sneak preview of the finished board!  The water looks a bit different here, doesn't it?  I will have to go back over my river bed to do some more applications.  I will also have to mix in some white paint with 'hardcoat or some kind of gloss varnish to make the foamy, frothy, effect.

Flock me! The clock's tickin' ...

It is now day two of the tournament, and we are about to head out the door.  Before that, I wanted to do a post about the flocking of the display board.

By the time I got to this stage I was becoming painfully aware of the passage of time.  I still had an additional stage left after this, and this would have to dry for at least a little while before I could get to it.  So, out came the wood glue and the flock!

You can see that I have my two types of flock.  A fine mix and a coarse.  First, I applied the wood glue to all the cracks and crevices.

The fine mix and some static grass are applied over that glue.

The same technique is used on the island watchtower.  Using the flock in this way saved my the time of painting and weathering all those cracks.  I will still go back and refine all these areas later!

For now, however, this will have to do!

You can see that I advanced upwards from one level to the next, just as I did with the sand and gravel.

Here we have piles of flock everywhere!

Getting the extra stuff off the board is a very messy process, and one that could be a bit hazardous for your lungs if you are not careful.  The fine flock, in particular, is nasty.

I had some newspapers spread out on the floor.  The board was tilted on its side, and I tapped and shook the board so as much stuff as possible came off.  You can see this very dramatically on the tile areas...

Well, this meant one more stage remained.  Water!  Stay tuned...