Well we are back from the weekend tournament, and to put a long story short....we got SLAMMED.
The boys and I knew we were in trouble when we turned up and were the only team to not have a full painted army. This meant we had to try and win through battle and sports alone.....which we didn’t do too badly at. In the end we can 4th.
Our first game was against the Victorian team that had come up. We knew they would be a hard match-up, so we decided to grudge them off the go so we could submarine if need be. I played off against their Team captain who was using Gondor. Aragorn is an insane combat beast who I really underestimated. The free might point per turn is worth every single point, especially if he is still mounted on his horse. In the end It was a minor victory to him, but it was enough to push through their team out in front. We all lost our games in the first round....
My second game was against elves.....with Galadriel and Celebron leading the way. Again, I seriously underestimated Celebron. That guy is a machine....the fact that he can Immobilise you and then charge is crazy good. Another good trick with him was to immobilise a model and then charge other ones while using the fixed one as a flank protector. It was the strangest of all my games because after an hour and a half we had each only killed six models......so it ended in a draw. Spirecrack and TommyH won their games though.
My third game was probably the best game of The Hobbit I have ever played. It was against Andrew with his Mordor army. He had a troll chieftain which scared the hell out of me.....but by some pure strike of continous luck, I managed to hold him up with 30 point Eowyn (Heroic Strike......Heroic Strike....). I knew to win the game I needed to focus on killing off his regular orcs, which, in the end, won me the game. I eventually broke his army and his low courage did the rest of the work for me. The first thing to run was the Troll chieftain! Andrew was a great sport though and took it all on the chin with a laugh.
My last game was against Andrea and his crew of local players. These guys were our best hope of beating the Victorian team, so we were a bit disappointed when we drew them knowing we would have to play hard out! There was some small joke talk about all three of us just throwing the games to boost them into first place, but obviously we would never do that. Andrea had an army of 47 dwarves! With a minimum of Defence 6! Hilariously, I killed 31 of them before the game ended, and only lost 9 in return. Still though, the mission was Reconnoitre and he won by sneaking off 13 models before the game finished.
Overall, I think we did pretty well for a team that didn’t have any paint score. It was a great day, and it has reminded us all about how good a system The Hobbit really is.