Well ive got over 1000 points each of stuff for

Rivendell
Lothlorien
Rohan
Gondor
Mirkwood
The Shire
Moria
Isengard
Mordor

(plus just starting on a Dwarf Army)

so toying with the idea of going for it. Id have plenty to go at, but with mixed reviews id think of sticking with SBG, but it gets too unwieldly when using 30+ models, in a show of hands how many would just say yes???

I would say both games have their advantages.

I currently favor SBG because it requires less painting than WotR (I don't like painting).

WotR is much better than Warhammer IMHO but it is much less supported. You lose a lot of the cringe-worthy competitiveness of Warhammer by allowing everyone to measure at all times. THAT is the most important rule that makes WotR kick warhammer's a$$.

The second reason why I find WotR interesting is that the movement phase using the 8-infantry or 2-cavalry trays is MUCH easier and less painful than warhammer fantasy. No wheeling or reforms or annoying things like that!

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If you want your wargame to "respect the Tolkien books", then please limit yourself to playing specific scenarios with pre-written rules. Helm's Deep, Pelennor Fields, Osgiliath, The Ents march to war, etc.

Yes, the game becomes more about list building and synergy when you actually pull yourself out of the books/movies and begin playing a game. This is why I play with magic, because it affects my troops and the enemy's. This is why I use might, because I can modify the metagame/randomness of the dice by having access to it.

I like my LoME scenario varieties (for SBG) that means that you must make an "all comers list"; as much as WotR has 3 deployment and 3 scenario types. IMHO it's better like that than if you had simply "kill the opponent". If the only goal was combat efficiency, nobody would play troops with shoddy defense/offensive capabilities unless they purposefully wanted to play underdogs.
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I'm having a lot of fun with SBG right now; a skirmish game is a fresh change of pace from warhammer/wotr. You can have one guy that is "part of a unit" simply go away and mind his own business in order to mess with the opponent's plan. I also like the "real line of sight" aspect it brings to the table. Battles are more tactical because your positioning is important. Kinda like playing Age of Empires...

Problem is, guys stay alive a lot longer. In WotR, I have never played past turn 4 (1500 pts or less) because everything just dies and you accomplish your objectives! It is true as they say: buckets o' dice, tons of deaths!

Well ive ordered a copy today, so will give it a go, my mate who plays it at his local club says its like Warhammer meets Warmaster, so after playing both those sytems i will give it a try

Tell us what you think about it!

War of the Ring is brilliant. It appears there's a lot of haters on this site, which is unfortunate, so let me explain myself before you all get up in my face.

Here is why it is brilliant: BUY A BOOK, GET A COMPLETE GAME

So for those of you players who have models, buy the book and you've got a complete game using all the same models you've already got. I'd say that's pretty sweet, whether you want to bitch about some finaggaly rules or not. Yes, it will ding your pocket book if you want to field a larger army... but you decided to get into this hobby, that shouldn't surprise you.

The rest of my reasons for thinking it is brilliant are varied. I play SBG and have since the beginning. I love it, play it all the time and my brother and I have written an SBG LIGHT rule set that plays well with larger armies. The one thing that I could never get over in SBG was the time it took for a game to be played once you get over 750 pts. It was rediculous. WOTR fixes that. For those of you who are knocking WOTR because it doesn't feel 'Themed' enough, go read the book again. Finally GW decided to design a game that feels as EPIC as the movies. There is nothing more epic than looking at a table with hundreds of miniatures in formation (with the ability to move armies really quickly in their trays). The other thing that always irked me was that the SBG magic system never played well in a large game...because Gandalf would oddly run out of magic 'juice.' THUS the WOTR mastery system makes me FEEL like I'm an incredibly powerful wizard and I can kick some serious ass... (as opposed to failing my magic roll 3 times and never being able to cast my sorcerous blast)... Yes, I agree that there are a number of errors in the rule book (one of which blows my mind: movement is simplified from Warhammer Fantasy, but contained no rules for turning about face... so there was a ton of confusion about turning around.. AND, if you're fielding a TRUE Gondor force without magic, it can be unbalanced playing against an army with alot of magic....I don't know how they missed simple things like that). But, besides that, all the GW staff I talk to say this is the best game GW has put out. Which is a testament to the game system when 40k and fantasy players are getting into it!! LOTR was the underdog at our local game shops until WOTR came out.

I do agree however that the support for this game is awful. It is a classic GW move though, what with the economy killing them this past year. They seem to experience some 'shell to core shunt' where they suddenly drop anything that they think loses them money in order to sustain they're bread and butter junk. Don't get me wrong, 40k is fun.. But I get tired of 40k players dominating the tables because GW wants to pour out support for its flagship system. Granted, its easy to keep people buying into a made up universe when you have the freedom to create new characters and new races all the time, without dealing with a license. There's only so many characters in the Lord of the Rings world.. and so many Aragorns that you can pump out without it getting stale...GW sees this as limiting the number of sales, so I think they will always treat LOTR as the underdog, therefore the players will too.

All this to say, if your an SBG player, there's only the investment in the book to get into a system that is supremely fun and epic to play. Work out some house rules for the fiddly bits in the rulebook, and deal with GW treating this game like an unfortunate expense. All in all, its been worth every minute of painting, its a blast to play and I recommend it to any player of miniature war games.

I wont get up in your face about it.

I would agree there seem to be a lot of "haters" to it out there, which is sad to me, but that is because Id like it to do well because I like it.

So far out of the 2 folks I have introduced it to, both are building armies and 1 said it was the most fun in a game he has had since he can remember.

So for me and my social circle it has been lots of fun.

expense? Get into any GW game and there is plenty of expense so I find that argument funny at best that a GW game player would ever complain about the expense of a GW game.

just my 2 cents and I hope it does well and will gladly buy any new expansions on it and give them a try, which I cant say for any other GW game.

I like it...to an extent.

There are things I disagree with. We do not see lots of massive sorcery battling going on in the books. Gandalf casts spells, sometimes, but only sometimes. Saruman only casts an actual spell at Gandalf once or twice.

So rules about wizards and such blasting away don't fit, and belong to another sort of fantasy gaming.

I don't like the buckets of dice much (I wrote a hack to use less dice a while ago) and there are some elements of how the rules are written which confuse people.

But it is a full game in a book, and the Lord of the Rings novels are full of massive battles, which is the sort of thing this game does.

So...get it and check it out.

There's been a lot of hate for WotR on one of my local club boards,Adeptus Windy City, as of late, mainly with respect to next year's WotR ard boyz.

What are ard boyz?

Well i got my copy today, went to GW Burton upon Trent to be showed how to play it, and to the amazement of the store guy i beat his 6 cavalry with 8 archers, after they had charged me, and rolling a 6 when charging, i think you could have heard a pin drop, im new to both games after collecting most of the BGIME packs and buying bits and bobs, i tried to teach myself the game but got a bit stuck, so with GWs help i had my first game, i think they are both good, id favour War of the Ring if i only had a couple of hours, but if i wanted to play a good day long game id go for the Skirmish game and do a series of linked scenarios, overall very enjoyable.

For me, it's not an either/or. I play both games, and just switch to suit my whim and time constraints.

I've enjoyed the handful of games that I have played so far, although I do wish that GW would issue a FAQ for some of the more easily-resolved gameplay questions.

@smaul: 'Ard Boyz tournaments are GW-sanctioned events that focus purely on gameplay. Players are expected to bring their most ruthless lists and pit the best against the best. They are neither penalized nor rewarded for any painting/converting/etc. in their army.

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Respectfully,
Jonathan

Do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly

Battle Companies

Thanks for the quick reply.

My opinion is that WotR is possibly the best large scale wargame GW has ever produced. It brought me into the fold of LotR after my initial stint with the license.

I hated how long it took for a combat to resolve with the pushback Devlan Mud. I know the SBG has changed since the original FotR came out, but the SBG rules fit better with other areas such as the Legends of the old west/high seas, probably due to the mordheim campaign system.

After skeptically reading through the WotR rules, it dawned on me that GW could actually write good rules. Even with the typos, ambiguities, etc its still the best rule system they have written to date. Depending on your point of view, that is either really good for WotR or very bad for the other games GW makes.

Of course, and as others have noted, it does have its ambiguities. But this is nothing that players cant resolve prior to the game. Seriously.

I do find heroes to be quite mighty, overwhelmingly so on occasion. But again if both players go into the game with a predetermined notion of what to expect, the enjoyment is multiplied merely by simple communication.

"Hey Bob, I was wanting to try out this really gnarly combo, do you mind if I give it a whirl in todays game?"

"Sure, I can bring some nasty things myself, so this should be fun."

Or

"Hey Bob, I wanted to bring just a single named hero and maybe a couple captains, do you think you can match me?"

"Sure thing, I will leave Dain/Gimli/Saruman/khazad guard combo back at the mountain today."

Its pretty simple. More so than many give the game or themselves credit for. I am just as annoyed as any other person who has spent an inordinate amount of money to play this game to have rules discrepancies linger about unresolved officially, but I don't need GW to hold my hand and tell me its all going to be better in order for me to enjoy an otherwise very well made game.

I currently own three armies for the game, and am happy that I do. I will never play WHFB now that WotR has been released because of how utterly broken the fantasy armies are and how dismally boring the WHFB rules portrays itself.

In summary, the WotR rules are indeed good. The only real problem you may face is a lack of a deep player pool to draw from.

I completely agree with Hellfury. (As I have on Warseer in a similar thread. ) The kicker is his last sentence. Find a dependable gaming buddy or three to commit to it for a half year or so.

It's refreshing to play compared to WFB. Sadly my game group is mostly WFB tourney players who are just too deeply invested - mentally, not just financially - to its rules and mindset. They pride themselves in their abilities with estimating distances, calculating odds, and engineering hyper optimized lists. Aside from a few recent 40K cross-overs, very few of them play other systems. A couple of us play FoW and At-43, but very seldom these days.

I'm working on getting my 4 armies painted to have on hand as an alternative on to the regular 2250 pitch battle scene on Thursday game nights. Who knows, maybe some will catch the bug. I'm a big Tolkein fan and I love this game system. It's what I really wanted when I got into WFB 8 years ago.

What i like is the value for money aspect, to buy a box of minis (current price £16.55) you can add 3 companies of infantry or cavalry and add a sizeable chunk to an army, with stuff like Warhammer, you can buy a box set of troops and add only 150 points, which with armies like Empire or Imp Guard can be heavy on the pocket, my most recent army of Dwarfs is at 1550 points, yet has only cost me about £70 ok i got Balin off ebay and use my Gimli from the fellowship, but for the same in an Empire army it would be nearly double that. Im seriosly slipping down the slope of Wotr, im nearly always scouring the rule book to look at new armies, or companies. Plus with collecting the BGIME books i just love adding scenery to theme my games, plus ive just finished knocking up some of the trebuchet and catapult models in number 60 of the series and they look great, plus at 100 points just for the cost of some balsa, ( well i made mine from the tail section of rockets fired on bonfire night as its stronger) its very cost effective.

i like the fact that individual moddles are movable in sbg this means much more tactical planning is involvedin every fight. the place ment of moddles through out the game is what winns or loses the game.

_________________
In the beginning there was the great music of illuvitar AKA Led Zeppelin

Hi All,

Would I recomend this system: Yes.

As poor as the official GW support is, the game is still the best that GW has produced in years. Blood Bowl and Epic might be marginally better but they suffer the same lack of support.

I don't know how many of you ever played warmaster (I never did) but the game has the same game play feel, but with larger models. Which is propably why large games require large tables.

The key to this games success for me, is that I've found group of players that like the fuff and want to have fun. It's not a pick up game system, you can't drop into a store play someone, at least I'd not recomend it. There are a large number of miss-interpretable rules, and huge scope for powerful combos. However a few "house rules" and the system becomes great. We've not written a formal list of these and don't rigidly adhere or enforce them but they are effectively in force because they create a more enjoyable game for both players. ~One Epic Hero per side (we play ~1000 points) and fielding formations/heros which match the fluff. i.e. No Boromir and Elendil in the same force etc.

Find that group and you'll never regret the purchase. The downside is that tournaments are going to b a nightmare until the rules are tightened. Which means that the first tourny organisers are going to have to tighten up the system, to avoid the "paint to win" (your selection is more important than your skill) that most systems suffer from, but would be particularly bad in this system. So if you are slow painting tournament player the system is probably not for you.

I think the GW staff who produced the rules did a great job. They have walked a very tight line on making the characters too powerful/too feeble and I think have done a remarkable job making the game feel like the movie. SBG never caught my imagination, I wanted to play Helms Deep!

However, they (the GW staff) were not lawyers or infallable (and saddly still lacking support). If you take the rules as writen and then play to the spirit of those rules you'll enjoy every game. At least I am. . .

Cheers Scott

What would you say the spirit of the rules is?

I find myself going the min/maxer way and using Ringwraiths' spellcasting and special abilities as well as heroic actions to win games. My actual troops have little to do with it, it's more about how I manage my movement phase and combine magic and "out of turn heroic actions" with said phase.

For instance: three companies of crossbowmen containing the betrayer. They fire against a War Mûmak and take it down in two rounds.

Transfer wounds from the Haradrim unit to an isengard troll thanks to Khamûl's "ward save equivalent".

Make my formation have 10"/20" movement with a single spell. Then avoid a charge from the opponent when I was clearly about to be charged during his own movement phase.

Am I playing to the spirit of the rules?

Hi Suladans Chosen,

Rather than answer your question directly I'll ask you a couple and you should get the answer to yours...

1/ Are you opponents enjoying playing you? Do they groan, mention beards etc when they look at your army list?

2/ What's the ratio of your Epic heros to troops. If more than 20% is made up of Epic Heros then you are probably on the wrong side of spirit of the rules in my opinion. There are exceptions like using Elrond in 1000 points list, but a Balrog is over the top at 1000 points.

However, once the game starts all your tactics are there to be used to the full.

PS this is just my and my little group of players take. And it is really just additional composition rules to balance out the games. But we've found it makes for a better game for both. More tactically challenging when the game is played rather than during force selection. Which makes selecting and painting an army much more relaxed and based on the miniatures you like and want to paint...

Cheers Scott