More Mayhem in Middle Earth

I was keen to get in another go at Lord of the Rings Battle Strategy game, and I was keen to try out a points based army in the style of the 'Legends of Middle Earth' book, I'd picked up (I understand GW have superseded this book with another set for everyone to purchase, which you need to buy to enter an 'official' tournament, but as a historic gamer rather than an die-hard Games Workshop junky, I'm quite happy to ignore GW's marketing stratagems and play with older rules.) Ben wanted to get out his dwarves again and wanted to try a really big 1,000 point game. Of my various options Moria Goblins looked the easiest to get to 1.000 points and most appropriate for taking on Dwarves. Even so over 100 Goblins only came to 500 points, so I took a Red Dragon (albeit a Ral Partha not official GW model) and a Troll to get to the points total. Ben augmented his dwarves with Saruman the White and an Eagle. We rolled up an 'Ill-met by Moonlight' scenario, and so we had two forces stumbling into each other at night in a boggy area.

I took the first pic 3 or 4 moves in as my goblins surged forwards and started to get to grips with the Dwarves. My dragon caught Ben's Eagle and managed to wound him, but he managed to escape.

My Troll and Goblin leader rushed the Dwarven King and tried to kill him but his bodyguard held us off.

Saruman the White fired a couple of Sorcerous Blasts across the marshy ground.

My goblin archers eventually managed to swamp his Crossbowmen who had been badly outshooting them, and my dragon managed to escape from being held up by dwarves charging him one at a time, tasty snacks but for quite so many points he should be killing something more valuable.

Meanwhile both my Troll and Goblin captain's had gone down fighting without scratching the Dwarf King.

On my left my warg-riders came to grief being shot down before they could get anywhere, with Ben's eagle picking off a couple. Elsewhere, apart from the Dwarven archers, my goblins were starting to suffer the attrition of fighting a much better armoured opponent, and numbers were being whittled down without making much of a dent in the Dwarvish line. My dragon gave Saruman and some unfortunate dwarves standing next to him a bit of a fright with a fiery blast and may have finished him in the next turn, but we had unfortunately run out of time.

With so many figures on the table we were still a long way off the 'break point' of 50% casualties in either army. Personally next time I'd go for a smaller points value. In my view, however, I could see the Dwarves heading for victory. Ben had used the restricted front of the marsh well. This meant I couldn't outflank him to 'swamp' his figures in the way that had proved effective in the previous game and forcing the goblins just to attack in waves, which were getting hacked down without doing much to the dwarves. Good game, though.