Battle at the Fords of Isen

Back in the 'Burgh for some old time gaming with my buds. We chose to do a LotR scenario on the battle of the Fords of Isen using GW's Strategy Battle Game, or whatever they are calling it this time to get people to purchase it again. Regardless, it is a great game and well suited to multi-player scenarios. This one was 'from the book'. Since, in the author's story, Theodred, son of Theoden, died at the battle, our scenario was won by the Rohirrim by keeping him alive. What a different story it would have been!

Rohan got 8 each archers, javelin men and sword and weapon guys with reinforcements of 10 or 12 riders, and the heroes Theodred and a foot hero, can't remember his name. He may have been a GW construct, or someone Tolkein named once.

Evil got a shit ton of uruk hai, including 8 archers and about a half dozen hyena riders and 8 sacrificial Dunlandings. They also had Lurtz and a Dunlanding hero with a big ass sword.

Older, but still so goddam handsome!

Terrain was simple, though we added a few trees. One of which ended up with about 200 arrows in it, but that story comes later.

Mondo and I were Good. We split the starting forces equally, each getting 4 bows, 4 javelins and 4 sword and board schleppers. I had the command of Theodred, who instantly hid behind his men. We weren't sure if archers could see him over the other guys as he was mounted but ruled they could not. so he stayed safe behind his human shield.

(Sorry, pictures are shit because I forgot my camera and had to use my phone.)

Mondo's guys. Note that they are uncharacteristically all facing the correct way.

The bad guys face us. I admit I was more than a little scared. Set for 12 turns, I fully expected to play about 2 before we were destroyed. I was eyeing Mondo's board games to see what we would play next!

I set up the forward guys to act as a speed bump. By rule, models cannot pass by any other model by less than an inch. So, I set up 7/8 of an inch apart in an effort to slow down the Evil horde and pray for the reinforcements.

Great GW models. It's not their fault Peter Jackson turned wolves into hyenas.

Great fucking beard.

So the proverbial shit hits the fan. As is their wont, the orcs swarm across the Isen. 

While the rest of the battle may appear to be rather static and boring, it was quite the opposite. While it may have been physically static, the rules are such that there is constant tension, even in a battle line like this one pictured. With Priority (who goes first) being a roll off each turn and with Heroes who have special Might Points to change die rolls and other abilities to circumvent who moves and attacks first, it is quite fun and tense.

Three things of note here: first, in the lower right, my two remaining archers hunker down behind a tree. Note that there are four orc archers across the river. My two killed twice their number while the orcs put arrow after arrow after arrow into the tree. It was comical (for us, not so much for them.)

Second, the very end of our line on the right were stalwart to the highest degree! They should have died so many times but simply refused to do so and killed twice their number. (Translation: their dice sucked all day and ours didn't.)

Lastly, having failed 6 times to roll for our reinforcements, and with our line wavering Theodred charges Lurtz on the left side before the latter can single handedly turn our flank. Lurtz is bad news and no mistake. Luckily, he had taken an arrow wound and was down to two wounds when Theodred charged home. Some lucky rolling and the use of a Might point and Lurtz was taken out by our hero.

Finally, our reinforcements arrive and things look bad for Evil.

That's kind of the way it is with this game: it's really close and then it all goes to shit for one side or the other. That's not a gripe; it's just that when it goes south, it goes south in a big hurry. Once you hit 50% casualties, every model has to take  a Courage test to stick around. Well, you can imagine the Courage level of orcs, in this case.

We did realize that Good had also hit their 50% mark but with better Courage and even better rolls, many of them stuck around and all of a sudden there were about 2 or 3 Evil models left. We mercifully called it.

Even the Dunlandings got into the fight, but it was too little, too late. 3 of my original 4 guys in the original speed bump are still there!

Great game, great time an great food prepared by our hosts: Mondo and Jenn. It was great to see everyone and Gabriel even chose to stay rather than go to his scheduled D&D game! That's says something;

It's a very good game: easy to learn but has a surprising amount of nuances that are difficult to master.