Battle Report: Rager's Raiders v. Defenders of Osgiliath

Dear Reader,

With this month being devoted to my new Uruk Tracker force, I took the opportunity on Sunday night to get together with Donatello to playtest my boys.  Per an insane last week of work, it has unfortunately taken over five days to get this post up, and for that I apologize to our loyal viewership.  My hope was to get it up on Monday, but life has a way of thwarting seemingly simple plans like posting on a blog, :P

But I digress. :)  As we talked about which force he'd like to use, I mentioned in passing a Gondor force that I had been dabbling with, and it caught his eye.  So in this battle report, I'll be using my Rager's Raiders list, and Don will be testing my new Defenders of Osgiliath list.  You can find the breakdown for each team below:

Cavalry

Being the sole regular user of cavalry in our group here at TMAT (at least so far... hoping... hoping!), I felt like writing a post about the tactics I employ for the use of cavalry in the LOTR SBG.

Alright... ok... I hear ya... "Cavalry? Why on earth would I want to spend, like, ten extra points - the price of a good warrior (or two bad ones) -  for a mount?". Good question... Most don't... But they miss out on a lot.

Cavalry have always been a huge fascination of mine... *cough... well... If I'm completely honest... my fascination with cavalry starts with the armored cavalry divisions of WWII and transfers to the modern Air Cavalry divisions in today's military that get to use cool things like the AH-64 Apache... So, I like cavalry as soon as you get the horse out of the picture... (mostly joking)

Post-Tournament Review: Why I Uruk the way I Uruk...

As a wrap-up to the more-or-less recently completed TMAT GT 2013, I wanted to talk a little bit about all three games my Uruks played and use the games to illustrate a few trades I was interested in testing - and how happy I am after the tournament. As I'm pressed for time due to grad school exams coming up, no pics this time - sorry, but I'll link to lots of posts that have plenty of pictures for your enjoyment.

To get things started, let's review the army list:

April Project: Uruk-Hai Month with a Twist!

Dear Reader,

So, I want to begin this post by mentioning a fact that has likely heretofore not been known in the blogosphere:

I was the first person at TMAT to run Isengard, and the first to field a Fallen Realms army!

Okay, glad that's settled, :)  Yes, I am returning to one of the first armies I ever made: The Isengard Raiders!  This is a unique brand of Isengard, and since all of the other players in our gaming community use the heavier, more expensive Fighting Uruk-Hai, the scout side of the list is rarely seen.  In the first TMAT GT I fielded them with a number of Mordor Orcs (primarily for spear support), and in the recent TMAT GT, Tiberius fielded a few of them as Marauders.  In this post, I want to highlight why I love the trackers so much, as well as why I'm building the list the way I do.  I will also give you all a sneak peak at some of the other models I'm painting - some of which have never been seen on this blog, and which will likely be my project for the very merry month of May.

Experiment in Soft Lists in LOTR SBG

Dear Reader,

Greetings from the Forge!  After a few weeks of heavy travel for work and moving friends into new houses, I'm finally finding time to give you all an update on the projects we have been working on here at the How.  In this post, and somewhat as a reflection on the TMAT GT Tournament, I want to highlight some of the ways that you can use "soft lists" instead of "hard lists" in an LOTR tournament, and what you can expect from running such a list.  Before moving into that discussion, though (which will be centered around the army list I took), a few definitions should be laid out.

For those unfamiliar with the terms, a "soft list" usually refers to a list that will be weaker in combat, and usually receives a handicap in randomly drawn battles, or will face units with a similar score under a comp system in order to compensate for this.  A "hard list" usually refers to a list that runs very powerful units, and usually aims toward a very set strategy - you will rarely see a surprise in the tactics and choices of a general with a hard list.  These are painting in very broad strokes, and there are a number of tournaments that don't even use the Swedish Comp System or other system to determine the hardness or softness of a list (especially in the 40k gaming community).