War of Wrath at Firestorm

This weekend was a bit of strange one for me. The missus was away and work had given me the time off (shocking) the stars had aligned perfectly and I was able to pack up my army and go play some Lord of the Rings!

Big thanks to Matt for organising this event. It was small, but a great opportunity to get out of the house, play some games and meet new people. Now on to the pictures! First up the family group shot of my forces. The Corsairs of Umbar led by The Fleetmaster. This army had almost know armour, but a lot of throwing knives. I was hoping to just blade storm my way through anything that got too close and have the dual weapon wielding Reavers deal with the rest.

That was the plan, let's see how it played out....

Game 1 against Ian, a lovely chap until he put these on the table;

Well, they say "Go big or go home" guess Ian took it literally. The mission was one that seemed to play to both our strengths and at that time of the morning it was nice and simple. KILL EVERYTHING!!!!!

The Trolls started off in the middle of the board hoping to use the ruins as cover against the archers on the far flank. My plan was to pin them in place with the large mob of Corsairs and then have the Fleetmaster take the trolls out one by one using smoke bombs to distract the trolls enough to hurt them.

Captain Barry stepped up to stop the archers from getting mauled by the Troll.

Whilst the Fleetmaster and his underlings went to work. In the end it was a close victory to the Corsairs with three of the Trolls dead, but at a heavy price from the Corsairs.

Game 2 was against Dave and his Orc Hunters army led Azog. Mission was to capture the three objectives in the center of the bored and escape. As the orcs were mostly mounted on wargs, I knew this was going to be difficult. Although the Corsairs did their job and carved up the orc rabble sent before them, it was not enough to stop the orcs escaping with all three objectives giving the orcs a solid victory in short order.

Game 3 was against Rob and his Gondor army led by Faramir (fan favourite). This time there were five objectives on the bored that had to be controlled, but to spice things up, casualties were brought back on in the following turn so there was a never ending stream of re-enforcement.

 I felt I had a strong centre field set up and was ready to take on the Gondor heavy infantry head on, unfortunately for the Corsairs, cavalry happened...

Between the Gondorian heavy armour and the cavalry's mobility, I was over run and fighting on the defensive before too long. I tried to changes tactics towards the end and send re-enforcements against the least defended objectives and leave the centre of the field to a last stand. In the end it was too little too late. The Gondorian reserves were arriving as quick as I could kill them off. In the end Rob took a solid win.

Game 4 against (another) Dave and (another) Gondor army. This time led by Madril. This time the objective was to hold the middle of the board as long as possible or until the enemy force was broken. I had a simple plan that should have worked. The archers hold the right flank and whittle down the enemy elites and anyone sitting on the objective, whilst the Corsair mob holds the center in place long enough for the Fleetmaster and his retinue to out flank the Gondor forces. See, simple. Unfortunately Gondor soldiers don't like the idea of dying and the Fleetmaster's flanking force just stalled on the Gondor shield wall. As the Corsair numbers began to drop, I realised that I couldn't grab the center of the field in time. The game ended with a white wash in Gondor's favour.

End of the day and fun was had by all. A big thank you to everyone who attended and to my opponents for the games. I ended up joint forth and joint most sproting with Ian in both accounts so not a bad run. I'm hoping Matt will run a few more one day events like this in the future so I can get some more of my LOTR miniatures painted.

On an unrelated note, here's the link to the anthology project I'm working on with Deadstar Publishing. If you have a short story or fancy getting involved with drawing some comics, give it a look HERE. We are taking submissions now.