Harad Battle Company

My son is now 8 year old, can you believe it?!

As such he can play now though we have to limit our opportunities given the general busy lives we lead.

He's also not super patient and very scared of losing guys in battle so we've adjusted how we play slightly.

I no longer take notes or many pictures and his heroes can't die (they can be injured and if they roll the death roll we just play the rescue mission rather than have them actually die).

Anyway, I did take a couple pictures still.

The first mission was out of White Dwarf and involved my Harad battle company taking on five Mirkwood Rangers. Oh... my... goodness! That stupid knife fighter rule, coupled with their excellent archery meant that this was a really close game. This picture shows the elf who single handedly ended up killing 6 of my Haradrim!!!

The next mission was my Harad company against my son's dwarves and a cave troll!
Like on the very excellent OSBGL channel, which I super highly recommend: OSBGL Battle Company vs Troll we added some goblins to the mix to make it more of a challenge.

I charged right in, expecting lots of spear support to help carry the battle my way. I took out five goblins! Unfortunately, the cave troll just kept rolling at least one six in the fight to roll off and took out five of my Haradrim - including my leader!

I'll take a better shot at some stage, but my son is currently reading The Fellowship of the Ring and has read The Hobbit, so we made him a battle company of Dwarf Rangers coloured in the ways that they're told in the book - quite bright colours some of them! 

Anyway, he stood back and used throwing axes, dwarven longbows and one hobbit stone every turn and eventually he took down the troll that way! He was so very, very excited, it was really awesome, we had high-fives and he ran screaming out to tell my wife every time he scored a wound on the troll - very cute!

Post game he expanded his company further and I upgraded two leaders to ride - one on horse, one on raptor =) Balin was a casualty hit by a troll-thrown stone, but he fully recovered. My leader took an arm wound and two of my archers will be out for the next game!

Here the two companies are...

It's such a great, fun, quick game when you're not recording every move!

You may also spot some of the scenery I've put together, a couple of hills with rocky faces and a board with some ruined tiles on it to sit the osgiliath ruins on (they're not glued down, so can still be used elsewhere). Also some rough terrain templates with room for trees or rocks on them.

Anyway, that's it for now!

Serpent Rider - Haradrim on Raptor

Random post!

I've been doing a lot of scenery and miniature painting, but with time being so tight I haven't (obviously) been posting.

One conversion I just did was on a box of Haradrim Raiders that I got (I know, I know) last Christmas - still, better late than never!

You may recall the blue dragon I painted to match my Harad colour scheme? Well, I figured that the leader of that band of Haradrim would similarly need to have something reptilian to set him apart from the others. I toyed with banners, helmets and the like but when I was cleaning up an old box of miniatures I found some sort of elf sorceress or something riding a raptor that I'd obviously got from eBay or something just because it looked cool.

Well, a hack and slash later and my Serpent Rider is more like a Raptor Rider!

Here's the front view.

And he's leading 6 more raiders through the dangerous lava fields.

I also painted up a trio of Watchers of Karna. 

I've just purchased another 6 riders and another 3 watchers so that I'll be all set for some fun battle company action when they're painted up!

Size comparisons

Here are the relative sizes of minis I have, with the Reaper Bones D&D female ranger for comparison to the GW ones. 

Scenery quick update

Hi all, over my birthday period I've been super busy, but also obtained quite a lot of scenery.

Lots of it was trees etc. that I've put on mdf bases and the like, but now I have quite a nice board to play on!

We've been playing a lot of games too, but not recording them as the time pressure to do that was just getting too much!

Anyway, I have just a couple minutes so I thought I'd pop a pic of our latest game. My battle company of (now 21) hobbits trying to get 7 of tehm off the map while my brother's 9 Rohirrim tried to stop me.

Ended up super, super close, down to a single win of priority for me that allowed me to get 7 hobbits off the board for a narrow win!

Hobbit Battle Company or Shire Battle Company

I'm not sure if it's technically a Hobbit Battle Company or a Shire Battle Company, but here's my initial squad!

Meet Rose's Ragers!

Raging Rose leads Farmer Maddock and Andwise (Andy) along with their mates.
Cooper (Fatty), Robson (Rob), Marmadoc (M.C. Hammer), Flambard (Fred), Wilcom (Jolly) and Wiseman are on the next row back.
The archers are Tolman (Tom), Doderic (Dick) and Halfred (Harry).

They may be small in stature but they're big in... stomach? 

More hobbit archers (plus friends)

A Hobbit Battle Company can have up to 25 members, so with 1/3 of them being able to be archers I needed some more! I'll max out the archers simply because they're less useless than the others! The hobbits use a short bow, which is way better than most of their (pretty pathetic) melee skills!

One of my heroes is the one with the yellow sash (he won it by getting first place in the archery competition).

One of the problems with collecting hobbits is that there aren't many models to choose from. There are only 4 militia models, 4 archer models and 4 shirrif models. Obviously I've also used some of the variants of the main characters too (especially Frodo and Sam). In an effort to minimise obvious repetition I've tried to paint them all different colours. I guess when I put them all together we'll see how successful I was.

And speaking of which, here's Frodo on a pony. I have the others, but not having painted horses before I put them off for ages! Also, in the new rules, ponies are almost pointless. You don't get any cavalry bonus with them, so they're really just a way of moving more quickly. Also they look kinda cool I guess =)

And since you can hire local guides or elven friends I picked up a few. They're a different brand as we really were desperate for some female representation and there's precious little of that available. I wanted some of the cool Mirkwood ones, but I can only find them for sale in large quantities and don't have the cash for that! They're an ever so slightly larger scale, so I have them on flat bases instead of the normal raised ones and I think that'll smooth things out a bit. I guess, also, they'll mostly only be next to hobbits so it doesn't really matter!

Hobbit characters

And, of course, there are a host of other characters that have to come with a Hobbit Battle Company so here are a horn blower, the Lobelia model who will actually be the leader of our battle company, Rose (Raging Rose), the Paladin Took model and the Fatty Bolger model, who we will be calling Cooper. Why Cooper? We'll get there in a second!

And then we have a couple of slightly sozzled hobbits and the old Bilbo model, who we're calling Wiseman (his weapon is a big heavy book).

Because the world may be a dangerous place, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't stop and enjoy some fine drink!

Cooper is well known for making barrels, and, well, he fills them up with the good stuff! The Frodo model that was holding the ring ready to drop it into Mount Doom is now bumping tankards with his good mate Jolly Wilcom. The Sam model who used to look exhausted is now a very disheveled hobbit with a large (mostly empty) skin of XXX drink tucked under his arm.

So I think that's most of the hobbits I've painted so far. I've got a few more nearly finished, but I have enough for the start of my Battle Company and hope to have the first game on Saturday! Maybe tomorrow or Friday I'll take a pic of Rose's Ragers ready to go!