Event Report: A Wizard is Never Late...
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 Gandalf and Bilbo in my Thorin's company, but I instead decided to take the opportunity to use some new miniatures I've been working on recently and ran a Rangers of Mirkwood list.
If you were being highly competitive about it, I think you probably take Legolas, Tauriel, and then as many rangers as you can get into the list. However, I wanted to do something a little different and add in some of the Thorin's company Dwarfs. The general idea I'd been having was that you could use some of the more fighty Dwarfs to maybe make up for the lack of combat strength of the elves. In the end I opted for a very hero-heavy list: the three beefiest dwarfs, Legolas, Tauriel, and 7 rangers split between them.
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| Legolas questions the dwarves' presence in the elven realm, but when external forces threaten, an alliance of convenience is formed... |
As it turned out, there was a good distrubution of lists at the event, with two each of Battle of Five Armies, Fangorn, Thorin's Company, The Eagles, Lurtz's Scouts, and Battle of Fornost, and then a variety of other factions taken only once. A far cry from the worries of everyone taking the same "meta" lists that might be seen at more competitive events.
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| By my count, I think there were more Thorins than Gwaihirs. |
Game 1: Hold Ground vs Thorin's Company
The first game was against Ian Wainwright's Thorin's Company - but this was like no Thorin's Company that I have ever imagined before! The army consisted of a grand total of 4 models:
- Thorin
- Gandalf
- Radagast on sleigh
- Gwaihir
Hold Ground uses maelstrom deployment, meaning you roll to see where each warband enters the board - this is not ideal when each of my Dwarves is a seperate warband! The main way to score points is by holding the objective in the centre of the board at the game end. Given his low model count I thought I might have a chance here to hold the objective, though I'd need to beware of Gwaihir and Radgast's dominance (4 and 3, respectively) tipping the numbers in his favour.
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| Thorin, where have your dwarven allies gotten to? |
Deployment wasn't overly kind to me, and while I got Legolas and Thorin together on one side of the board, I had to spend might on Tauriel to get her with them, and Gloin and Dwalin were left at opposite corners of the table - they would have a long way to traverse with their short legs if they wanted to get into the action.
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| Rough overview of the deployment (R = mirkwood ranger). Dwalin and Gloin have a long way to walk to meet up with the rest of the army. |
My plan was to slowly move forwards with my archers and chip wounds off him as I go, while Dwalin and Gloin made a beeline for the objective. Unfortuntely, this didn't go especially to plan, as his army had a clever gimmick I hadn't accounted for. He was using Gandalf's blinding light to keep Radagast safe from my shooting, and marching with Thorin to help Gandalf to keep up with Radagast's speedy sleigh. Any shooting that did occasionally get past the blinding light could then be healed up with Radagast's renew spell. This was some clever synergy, and it rather nullified what I was hoping to achieve!
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| Practiced hunters - the rangers line up to shoot down the oncoming eagle and rabbits! |
Gwaihir flew over to flank me, so I used my Thorin to hold him off from getting into my low defence elves. Gwaihir promptly gave up on this and headed over to take on Legolas, but the Prince of Mirkwood also held firm, and with Gloin and Dwalin making their way towards the middle objective, Gwaihir flew away to deal with those two instead.
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| Gwaihir tries to take on Thorin, but the dwarf proved his match with a heroic strike. |
Meanwhile, Radagast recklessly charged into the elf rangers, bringing down a couple with impact hits before running into Legolas. Transfix almost swung the fighting in Radagast's favour, but eventually with the help of Tauriel, the elves brought Radagast down from his sleigh.
From here it was a race towards the middle objective. Ian's Thorin got there before my Thorin, and with the help of Gwaihir managed to take out my Dwalin and Gloin - this was a major blow to my chances. Tauriel and Legolas were held up trying to deal with pesky wizards, and by the end-of-round timer, I was no-where near the objective.
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| End state of the game - Gwaihir, Thorin and Gandalf hold the objective. |
Totaling up the scores, Ian had more models on the objective, had wounded my general and broken me and it went down as an 8-0 victory to him. As I look back now, we've made a mistake and we should have both received 2 points for the opponent not having banners, so it should have been 10-2, but nevermind, a solid win for the four model Thorin's company!
Ultimately, I wasted too much time moving 3" and trying to shoot into blinding light - instead I should perhaps have booked it to the objective and then tried to overwhelm his heroes by trapping them with my superior numbers. Regardless, it was a great game against a really friendly player who made sure that losing was still a fun experience for me!
Game 2: Domination vs Assault on Ravenhill
My second game was against Aaron Wright's Assault on Ravenhill, which consisted of Thorin (Th), Dwalin (D), Fili (F), Kili (K), Legolas (L) and Tauriel (Ta) - many of the same faces as in my list, but with the dwarves in their more heavily armoured forms. The scenario was domination, where there is a middle objective and then four more objectives around the board.
This felt like the most competitive game I played at the event, and the one where I was most out of my depth. Aaron set up his D8 dwarfs on the middle objective with the two elves sitting behind. My bows were going to need 6's by 4's to get through his armoured frontline, while legolas could easily pick off my unarmoured elves from the back line. This became immediately evident on turn 1 when my opponent called a heroic shoot and promptly killed 3 of my rangers with Legolas. From this point things weren't going to get much better for me. I chipped a wound off Fili while losing more elves, did some repositioning, and tried to get my dwarves into a position where they might be able to take some favourable fights. It didn't really work though, and it soon became clear that I couldn't win and my job here was just to secure as many points from the game as I could.
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| Roughly speaking, this is what happened. I retreated and repositioned while he slowly advanced forward, and by the end I had the objectives (purple/grey circles) in his starting zone and he had the objectives in mine, while also holding the middle. |
In the end it finished 12-6 to my opponent, a loss, but at least some points on the board! Finishing the morning with two losses wasn't a great start to the day, but hopefully some lunch and a look at the army showings for best painted would help me reset for a stronger showing in the afternoon.
Army showcase: best painted
A brief interlude over lunch allowed people to look around the armies on show and vote for their favourite. I'm really pleased with how my rangers have come out, so secretly I was hoping to maybe have a shot at best army here.
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| Struggling to get everyone in focus at once... |
There was some strong competition though, and I was up against a load of really nicely painted armies. I didn't get pictures of all of them, but here's a decent selection:
I voted for Alek Makucewicz's Reclamation of Osgiliath, the picture doesn't really do it justice, but the the painting looks very crisp and the faces are really expressive. Alek came out the winner by apparently quite a large margin - well deserved!
Game 3: Fog of War vs Wolves of Isengard
The third game was against Jimmy Fletcher, a new player, and this was the first event he'd attended. He brought the Wolves of Isengard, a highly mobile list full of warg riders with throwing spears. The scenario was Fog of war, where you pick an enemy hero to try to kill, one of your own heroes to protect, and a terrain piece on the opposite side of the board to capture.
Fog of war was a scenario that I'd be hoping would come up at this
event - I thought my high number of heroes would make it easy to choose a
good one to protect (Tauriel if I didn't think the opponent could get
to me, Thorin for his high defence if my opponent had a fast lineup), I
thought I could kill heroes quite well, and my shooting would be good
for opponents trying to reach a terrain piece on my side of the board.
The board was fairly full of terrain to block line of sight for my shooting, but also with some corridors that he would need to advance down. I chose Thorin as my protect, and I had to pick one of his two captains as my kill target (as I couldn't pick his leader, Sharku). Unfortunately the buildings in the middle of the board straddled the centre-line, so my terrain piece had to be a building on the far side of the board that I didn't have much hope of getting to. I lined up in three groups, Legolas on the left flank, the dwarves on the right flank, and Tauriel in the middle. Conveniently my kill target was facing down the dwarves.
Predictably, the wolves rushed towards me, and it was just a question of how many I could kill with shooting before they got into my lines. The shooting went well, and I was able to thin the enemy lines before they reached me, as well as dismounting some riders to slow down the advance.
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| The wargs begin their terrifying rush forwards, under heavy arrow fire. |
Early on in the game I had an interesting choice to make - Legolas put some shots into Captain #1 (not my kill target), and with the expenditure of 2 might could convert the shots into enough wounds to kill him outright. I knew this would net me no victory points for killing him, as it wasn't my kill target... but if I didn't, then Jimmy could be pretty certain that the other captain was my target, and alter his game accordingly... it's also possible this captain was his protect choice. So I spent the 2 might to kill him, despite him not being my kill target - was this the right choice? Let me know in the comments.
Regardless, the wargs continued to rush towards me, and my kill-target captain moved his warband up to attack the isolated dwarves. This proved unwise though, as despite being heavily outnumbered, the dwarves carved through the wargs and eventually Thorin heroic combatted through to the captain and killed him outright - important points on the board for me, and with both captains down I also knew that I had deinied Jimmy points by killing the hero he was trying to protect.
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| Thorin and his lads make quick work of the warg riders. |
The wargs did reach my elf line, but it was too little, too late. With the rangers' knife fighters and knife mastery rules I was able to shield in 1v1 situations, and gain extra dice when outnumbered - coupled with my higher fight value, I was winning many more combats than seemed fair. My elf line held out while Legolas and Tauriel fought back strongly. When all was said and done, I'd achieved a 10-2 victory, and I could go into game 4 no-longer in contention for the wooden spoon!
Overall this was a fun game, and my opponent was very chipper throughout despite losing - hopefully he'll keep attending tournaments and I'll meet him again some time!
Game 4: To the Death! vs Men of the West
The final game of the day was against Sam Forrest's Men of the West, which gave a nice opportunity to play against a more traditional rank-and-file type of army. He'd brought Aragorn, King Elessar on an Armoured Horse and Legolas on foot, each with some warriors of minas tirith, warriors of rohan with throwing spears and some warriors of rohan with bows.
The scenario was To the Death! which is a fairly standard 'line-up and kill each other' scenario. In this case, while Sam had some bows, I had the shooting advantage at long distance with my elven cloaks, but the advantage should flip when he brought his throwing spears in to range. The terrain worked out quite well for me, and I was able to position inbetween some buildings with an open line of sight to his forces - it was clear that he would need to march down the middle of the board towards me.
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| I don't exactly remember where his different bowmen (B) were, nor exactly where all the terrain was, but deployment came out something like this. The point is that there was a shooting gallery for me without much chance of him approaching from the flank. L = enemy legolas. |
As expected, I won the early shooting engagements as he marched forward to meet me - I killed a decent number of his bowmen and took a few troops from his shield wall. I fell back a bit to hide from his Legolas, while Aragorn hid behind a building to stay clear of my bow fire. We then hit a bit of a stalemate when the rohan throwing spears came in to range, where we kept shooting at each other, with neither of us wanting to make the jump forwards to engage in combat. This ended up not going very well for me, and I lost a considerable number of rangers, while he maintained decent numbers of troops.
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| The majority of my rangers are down, but can my heroes save the day? |
Meanwhile, Aragorn jumped a hedge and tried to slip around the side to flank me. I countered this with my dwarves, and winning the roll-off for our heroic moves allowed me to get all three of my dwarves into combat with Aragorn - a potentially sticky situation for the King Elessar to find himself in! I won the combat with a heroic strike on Thorin, and then burned some might on Gloin and Dwalin to put three wounds on Aragorn. This could be big, the game was very tight, and wounding his leader would be important victory points - we watched with anticipation as Sam rolled all three fate dice together...
... tripple 6s! We erupted with cheers for Aragorn, fate was with him today!
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| Thorin's company chase down King Elessar himself. |
Following that near-miss, Aragorn beat a hasty retreat and reformed with the rest of his army. The lines finally clashed and my heroes used their resources to bravely fight through the Minas Tirith shield wall. Conscious of the time we'd taken to get to here, it was now or never to score points, so I used all of Legolas' remaining might to secure two kills and break my opponent.
When all was said and done we ended up with a 5-5 draw having both broken each other and both getting the banner points, no heroes were killed, and no wounds were put on either leader. I think if we played on past the end-of-round timer, my opponent would eventually have won when my heroes ran out of resources, but a draw was a fitting end to a fun and tactical game, and a good way to finish the event.
Event Conclusion
With the end of the final round, the podium was announced - there were some groans and playful booing when 3rd and 2nd place turned out to both be Eagles lists, and the winner was a Battle of Five Armies also featuring Gwaihir (David Spratt's nice looking army can be found in the pictures above). There was a special prize for the highest placed player with a wizard+baggins list, but hillariously only one person actually built such a list, and also won the wooden spoon for their efforts. Perhaps next year when we have more scenarios in the matched play guide and more lists in the Armies of Middle Earth book, there might be more uptake on this list building silliness!
Overall I had a really fun time, and enjoyed playing my list. The dwarves proved to be a bit of a handful that other armies could struggle to deal with, and trying to use all of my heroes' resources well led to some interesting tactical decisions. I'm glad I didn't just go with a full lineup of Mirkwood Rangers for this event as I think it could have been a bit oppressive and not very fun to play either with or against - this hybrid approach led to some fun games.
We've recently had a new baby at home, so this write-up has taken a long time to finish off, with much difficulty finding time in-between nappies and feeding times! I do have some more events lined up for when things are a bit more settled at home, so I hope to bring more tournament reports in the future as I continue to dip my toes into the GBHL. Until next time, thanks for reading!
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