Tea & Hobbits: A Hobby Blog

Last month I attended my first MESBG event of the new edition, and only my second MESBG event in total. The event was a GBHL80 "A Wizard is never late but is slightly early for April" (the pun here being that it was on the last weekend of March and held in a town called Earley). For the uninitiated, GBHL (Great British Hobbit League) events are organised into different tiers by how many league points they can award - 80, 90, or 100 - with 100s being the highly competitive tournaments where the top players test their mettle, 80s being fluffier local events usually with some themey special rules, and 90s sitting somewhere inbetween.  Tournament Overview This event was a 600 point 1-day tournament with 4 games to be played from the standard array of 6 scenarios from the main rule book. The list building quirk was that if you brought both a wizard and a Baggins you could choose a scenario that must be played on the day! I could have built a Wizard + Baggins list by taking Ganda...

My Thorin's company   I eluded to the 12 years of stop-start hobbying in the blog introduction, and this is the subject of today's post. Last week (April, 2025), I finally finished the Thorin's Company which I'm embarassed to say I started back in 2013! This post will be the story of how we got here and why it took so long. Ancient history As a teenager I was into Warhammer - both the fantasy and 40k varieties - and played both with friends, and down at the local GW store's "battle bunker" (what happeneed to those?). But then life moved on, I went to university, and the wargames stayed at home, forgotten about. In the early 2010s, I felt like scratching that itch again. I listened to some wargaming podcasts and heard that Lord of the Rings SBG might be games workshop's most compelling game. I've always loved the Lord of the Rings, so this was interesting. Then the Hobbit films were released and with them a refresh of SBG, and I thought maybe now wa...

Welcome to Tea & Hobbits, a place for me to share progress on my hobbit-based hobbying, likely over a mug of tea. The tea is Yorkshire, of course, and the hobbits in question are those from Games Workshop's Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game (SBG), which was The Hobbit SBG when I first attemped to get into it approximately 12 years ago. I say attempted, because my enthusiasm waned, my progress came in fits and spurts, and only last year did I finally put my heart into really trying to get in to this excellent game. So this will be the first forays of a new(ish) player learning the ropes of SBG and sharing some hobby updates and progress along the way. Thanks for joining me on this adventure!   Bilbo starts his adventure (credit: New Line Cinema)