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The Power of the Rings: Day 1

day1

Hello and welcome to the blog post for Day 1 of the Rings of power event!
Today I will be partaking in 4, 700 point games of the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game at Worcester Wargames. This is a one day tournament with day 2 tomorrow! Over the course of the day this particular post will be updated with all my games, how they went and pictures a plenty hopefully!


The Army list for today

So as mentioned in my previous post about preparation, I’m taking my trusty Minas Tirith force out for a spin again, which is based on the retaking of Osgiliath, with Boromir, Captain of the White Tower leading the army – he is truly a forced to be reckoned with. His banner is, PHENOMENAL and he has a massive 6 might points to be able to, hopefully, take control of the battle field.

Hurin and Ingold help bolster the army by themselves having 3 might each, meaning thatt in 700 points I have a Mighty – hehe – 12 points of dice altering and heroic action goodness, excluding the 2 from the siege captain of course!

Then to round the list off nicely, a smattering pf citadel guard and Warriors of Minas Tirith and a casual Trebuchet chilling out to really put the toll on heroes and mounted armies – I hope.


Im going on an adventure!

And thats it! I’ve set off this morning at the ripe ol time of 6.40am to ensure I can get to the venue on time!

Driving down to park at the accommodation I’ve got tonight as I’m attending both day. I’m incredibly excited, have my coffee, bacon butty and an energy drink for the the drive ahead of me and some motivational music while I drive down the motorway!

Don’t worry, this photo was taken as I was parked up!


Game 1 – Retrieval vs Jamie’s Mordor

Game 1 sees me take on Jamies Mordor army led by the Dark Marshal while also boasting combat prowess with Goroth and Shagrat. A fair amount of strength 5 attacks with axes all over. hopefully my trebuchet will hold fast and take out what it can!

the missions is retrieval which would normally be terrifying for an all foot army like myself, however Jamie does only gave 3 cavalry models so I hope to dismount them as quickly as possible!

The game has concluded and I can confirm, it was a mighty 6-2 loss for myself. The trebuchet did a mighty 3 deaths over 4 / 5 shooting phases. Hurin got black darted off the board in turn 4 and Boromir managed to make a might charge into the dark marshal from the most heroic of combats. Unfortunately I only scored points for killing the Dark Marhsal, but Jamies huge strength 5 advantage really took a toll on my army, moving my objective and breaking me while remaining unbroken.

Some photos from the game are below and if you want a look at Jamie’s instagram you can do so HERE.


Game 2 – Domination vs David’s Isengard

Game 2 say a 5 objective mission in Domination, unfortunately this is another loss for me at a might 7 – 3. Again the trebuchet did absolutely NOTHING. Well it killed 3 models. and couldn’t roll a 3 to kill a troll. It was a wonderful game of movements whiffing bows and whiffing.

Ultimately Boromir waded his way through what felt like 49 wargs as David passed nearly EVERY courage test to keep his wargs around. Both armies broke but unfortunately, his weight of numbers through a spanner in the works!


Game 3 – Assassination vs Zak’s Men of the West

Assassination is a scenario where both players nominate a target and an assassin – you get victory points based on who kills what.

ZaK’s army was lead by Aragorn, followed by Eomer and Legolas which was pretty terrifying. My logic so far was: ‘I’ve already list 2 games, let’s just have some fun in a bloodbath! As such, we deployed horrendously close to each other and well… the game was done in 30 minutes! Eomer absolutely smacked Hurin into the ground, we both used Heroic strike and I got a 9, whereas Zak ended up with a mighty 10 for fight value, killing Hurin in one turn with the aid of a spear support (there goes my Assassin!). Aragorn slapped back and fourth against Boromir for a couple of turns, winning all roll offs but taking a couple extra turns to take him down.

There isn’t really a lot else to say but that Zak was a gent and a scholar and allowed the trebuchet to actually shoot something other than terrain this game (he offered up a warrior of Rohan for the taking) and was nothing but kind when it came to moving models into their best positions.

This, obviously resulted in another loss for team Ben so thats 0-3 so far!

You can find more of Zak’s work right over on his Instagram here.


Game 4 – Heirlooms of ages past vs Ben’s Angmar

This is possibly one of the worst scenarios for my army. Its a malestrom mission which means that my army and warbands can appear from any point on the board. Now the reason this is bad is because nearly 1/3rd of my points are kept in the trebuchet. And the way the immobile trebuchet works is it has to deploy on the battlefield before the warbands show up. So I took a guess, put it near one of the potential scoring points (in this mission there are 6 objectives and only 1 of them is the scoring relic). Low and behold, a crew member walks on, find the relic and is now stuck there as they can’t wander from the seige engine. yay.

In what could only be described as pure luck of stupidity my whole army then arrived on the OTHER side of the battlefield while Ben’s arrived, half near the relic, and the other halves scattered. Four turns of Heroic Marching up the battlefield later and FINALLY I was in a place to fight, however, Ben had already reclaimed the relic from the cold, dead, and mildly twitching corpse of the crew member and then proceeded to hide away from the fight.

There was a ferocious flurry of compel and paralyses coming out of Ben’s army which simply caused havoc to my positioning. Eventually I whittled him down to breaking and shortly the game was over. Unfortunately for me though, Ben still had hold of the relic. 6 Victory Points. He also had wounded my leader. 1 Victory point. Now on 7, it was very hard for me to get that score. I scored breaking but not being broken. 2 Victory points, and having a banner left, 1 victory point.

My final game ended a mighty 7 – 4 to the other Ben which means I actually end day 1 with 0 wins and the lowest VPs. We’ll see from the results but I think that means I’m going home with a very stylised spoon but we will see in the results!


Results!

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Well. This wasn’t unexpected. I lost 4 games. Had 4 great games and managed to come DEAD LAST. But on the plug side, I did win a VERY fancy spoon.

To top today off though, and most importantly, I managed to snag Favourite Player which comes with a free ticket to another Worchester Wargames event!

Cracking day 1 – but I’ve got some work to do for Day 2 to try and redeem my wanted 50% win rate of games!

Come back tomorrow to see how I get on.


Keep your eyes keen and look forward to updates throughout the day!

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