2023 Hobby Bingo: Tiberius's Board

Good morning gamers,

Well, 2023 has been a year - and it's been full of hobby fun! With Fantasy Fellowships, the Minas Tirith board, several tournaments, and lots and lots and LOTS of Morannon Orcs, there's been a lot to keep me busy during my off nights. I haven't officially done the hobby bingo challenge before, though I've always looked at the boards and thought, "I should do that." Well, this year, I said, "Darn it, we're gonna do it this year" - and I am proud to say that it turned out pretty well. Let's have a look!

Photo Credit: Warhammer Community

Row #1: Lots of New Models (and some movies and a tournament)

Our first square in the first row requires us to start a new army, and for me this year, that was easy: Corsairs of Umbar! Throwing weapons are my thing and these guys have them everywhere. I also had these models sitting around for a while, so I don't have all the guys I painted shown here because . . . well, I need a guy for another bingo box:

Box two is easy - watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yes, I watch the extended cuts every year at least once, usually while I'm working on batch painting something or working on a terrain project. It took me longer than usual to watch them this year, since I had to catch up on a bunch of Star Wars shows, but I finished watching the extended editions of The Fellowship of the Ring on June 28th, The Two Towers on August 14th, and The Return of the King on September 9th.

Box three was checked off on June 24th when I attended our annual Grand Tournament - I got last place with a Quest of the Ringbearer Angmar army (you can read about my process of picking that list here and some thoughts on the scoring system - and a brief overview of my games - here).

Box 4 requires scenic bases for one of my armies and I decided to showcase my basing style for my Erebor Dwarves, as shown on Ori. The bases were done by painting white through a dryer sheet, then washing in black, then spot-highlighting in black, and then making piles of gold and emeralds from green glitter, PVA glue, and gold paint:

Finally, I needed to finish a Good army of at least 600 points. Because of the way Hobby Bingo works, I wanted to have a list that "just" reached 600pts (because I need elements of this project to cover multiple boxes, and you can't double-count a model) and since I spent quite a bit of time this year converting up Grim Hammers, Warriors of Erebor, and Thorin's Company heads into a War of the Ring era Erebor Reclaimed list, I figured I'd grab over 600 points from them. You can see here Thorin III Stonehelm, Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, Nori, Dori, Gloin, and 7 converted Iron Hills Dwarves with shields and spears:

MESBG Christmas Lists, List #11: The Kingdom of Moria . . . and Friends?

Good morning gamers,

Tiberius: Merry Christmas to all! I hope you've been enjoying this series - it's always great when content creators from across the international community contribute to a project like this (and I feel very blessed that anyone out there who generates good content wants to even be involved with our work here)! Today's "Christmas list" comes to you from . . . me! I've hinted at this list several times this year and it has got to be one of the most FUN lists I've ever played - and it's a throw-back to the way I originally built my Kingdom of Moria lists for MESBG (which was actually the "Erebor" list in the LOTR SBG days). So stroll with me down memory lane as we look at the most awesome Dwarf list I ever made (while most of the posts in this series have been short . . . this article will only be short compared to some of my other work . . . and maybe Rythbyrt's article)!

Oh, and I'm going to cheat and provide multiple lists, but they nest together, okay?

The Evolution of a Crazy Impossible Alliance

It's no secret - I'm a huge fan of the Kingdom of Moria: the heroes are excellent (Balin, King's Champions, and Dwarf Kings are/can be all budget F6/D8+ combat heroes - and two of them give you Heroic March, which is always nice to have as an option), the warriors are excellent (their core troops are 9pts each with 1 piece of gear, while their elite units get stronger and more expensive), and as a whole, they're incredibly forgiving as a faction. You can also splurge on two plastic boxes of core troops (two boxes of Dwarf Warriors, two boxes of Dwarf Rangers, or a box of each like I did), the Balin/Floi pack, and a King's Champion pack (with an optional Dwarf King pack, if you can find it), and you can get started with the army quickly and easily.

No matter how competitive you want to be, this is a great starting foundation for MESBG - good, resilient heroes and solid, resilient troops. What more could you want . . . besides cavalry . . . and spears . . . and maybe some magic . . . yeah, there's some to be desired in this list, but hey, you gotta give something, right?

Like most new players to the game, I stuck to pure lists for a while - I mean, I was slowly collecting models and we were playing at low points levels, so allying just wasn't on my mind at the time. I allied Gandalf into some Wood Elf lists (before getting Galadriel), and I allied Legolas into everything (including Dwarf lists), but I eventually got around to looking at the profile for Radagast the Brown . . . and boy did I have a crazy idea. 

You see, back in the day, you were able to do "volley fire" with 10+ bows of the same type, so if you had 10 Dwarf Warriors with Dwarf bows, you could shoot at targets that were within 18" normally and at models that were 18-36" away from you by hitting on a 6. The trick was, only one model in your army needed to be able to see the target . . . and Radagast could (and still can) "see" everyone thanks to the Master of Birds special rule. 

Fantasy Fellowships: Campaign Recap

Good morning gamers,

Well, my Quest of the Ringbearer adventure is over - at least for this year (we're already in talks about when we'll do next season). The Fellowship I took was big on theme and performed pretty well, but I thought it might be nice to recap its greatest strengths and its worst struggles (and since we're doing Christmas lists right now, here's the list):

• Old Bilbo Baggins with Sting and the Mithril coat as Frodo
• Farmer Maggot as Sam (with Grip, Fang, and Wolf)
• Bofur the Dwarf as Merry
• Bifur the Dwarf as Pippin 
• Gandalf the Grey as himself
• Nori the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor as Aragorn
• Dwalin the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor as Legolas
• Gloin the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor as Gimli
• Dori the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor as Boromir

725 points, 3 thrown stones hitting on a 3+, 4 D6+ models, no fast models, 19+ Might

Strength #1: Lots of F4+ 2A+ models with D5-8

Running Thorin's Company models in my Merry/Pippin slots made most of my army F4 or more with 2+ Attacks - and when you're facing Goblins, Wargs, and Uruk-Hai, that pays dividends. When we lost fights, we had D3 on a few models (Maggot and his dogs), D5 on a few models (Bilbo, Bifur, Bofur, and Gandalf), but D8 on the others (Dwalin, Gloin, Nori, and Dori). This usually meant that the damage suffered wasn't going to be much, but there were several missions (Balin's Tomb and Escape from Dwarrowdelf in particular) where we lost duels due to whiffing our rolls and good rolling on the other side that we could have lost the game if we'd suffered one more wound! Defense 8 pays dividends - and it's super hard to get unless you're spamming Dwarves. Still, in most of the scenarios, I wasn't that worried - D8 is very forgiving against a single foe.

Weakness #1: No March and mostly 5" Movement 

Our lack of speed was an issue throughout - especially in the Escape from Dwarrowdelf scenario, which went on far longer (and was much closer) than Centaur or Gorgoroth's attempts. Lack of speed meant we needed to rely more on our high Defense, which proved to be problematic in that scenario especially, where there are Goblins taking pot-shots at you and they only have to get lucky once to see your 2-Wound-1-Fate heroes teeter on the brink of death. It also provided problematic in the Amon Hen scenario, where Nori had to defend Bilbo for a while on his own while Dwalin and Gloin tromped towards them. 

MESBG Christmas List #10: Erebor Reclaimed

Good morning gamers,

Tiberius: Our Christmas list today is provided to you by my son, Gorgoroth. While preparing for our 1000-point siege THRO tournament, Gorgoroth tried MANY different lists, ranging from the Return of the King Legendary Legion (that list was scary) to an Azog's Legion spam list (featuring the big man himself, of course). After testing a lot of things, Gorgoroth decided that he wanted elite units (at least F4) and resilient units (preferably D8). So naturally, as I was converting up Warriors of Erebor to be Iron Hills Dwarves to support War of the Ring era Dain, my son was like, "Hey, those guys can be D8, right?" And I was like, " . . . yeah . . ." And he was like, "Well, can I try them out?" And I was like ". . . yeah . . ." And he basically never looked back. So . . . here's Gorgoroth to tell you all about his new favorite army.

Gorgoroth: First off, I'd like to point out that Dain (old) is an awesome dude and I love him. He has great hitting and staying power as far as I'm concerned, plus, he looks supercool. But he isn't the only guy I need to talk to you about. I also like Gloin the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor. Now, comparing him to Dwalin (champion version), he is not too much worse and costs a lot less, so I run him a lot more than Mr. Dwalin and he still kills everything. 

And now I have Bifur. He is used for heroic moves and for his 12 model capacity. Now everyone knows three heroes is not an army so I saw this and took 40 dudes in the army for numbers. and they killed everything (did you notice I love the Ctrl-B button?). Anyway, I had like 200 points left so I went "Huh this would look so darn awesome if only I had some speed . . . I took the armies of the hobbit book . . . page 30 . . . Huh! Goat Riders! So I took 6 riders (with war spears, obviously) plus a captain 'cause turns out they can totally have goats (which, in my book is labeled as awesomeness). So then I found myself at 1000 points and I said "yeah, let's do this!" And we did it!!!!!!

Here's my list:

• Dain Ironfoot, King Under the Mountain [AL]
• 8 Iron Hills Dwarves
• 9 Iron Hills Dwarves with spears
• Gloin the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor
• 5 Iron Hills Dwarves
• 6 Iron Hills Dwarves with spears
• Iron Hills Captain on war goat
• 4 Iron Hills Dwarves
• 6 Iron Hills Goat Riders
• Bifur the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor
• 6 Iron Hills Dwarves
• 6 Iron Hills Dwarves with spears

1000 points, 54 models, 1 thrown stone hitting on a 3+, 54 D6+ models, no fast models but 2 Might for Heroic March, 10 Might

Tiberius: I'm not sure that much else needs to be said - it was awesome. At THRO 2023, Gorgoroth's list was one of two undefeated lists, narrowly beating my Balrog list as the attacker in the burn-the-village scenario and keeping Dronak's spider spam list from burning a bunch of buildings as well (though he would have been good defending the walls too, since he would have just dropped his mounted contingent). Dwarves hurt and they're hard to kill - especially when there are fifty of them. We'll be back soon - until next time, happy hobbying!

MESBG Christmas Lists, List #9: The Serpent Horde . . . and Friends?

Good morning gamers,

Tiberius: I hope you have some time on your hands, because today's Christmas list is LONG! Yep, it's our resident Armies of MESBG writer Rythbyrt and he has a write up on one of the weirdest lists I've ever faced. Take it away, mate!

Rythbryt: If you’ve been following the blog for any amount of time, you know that two things are true anytime there’s a tournament: (1) I take forever to write my lists, and (2) I like a lot of threats in my armies (aka, lots of heroes or hero-like models). So when Tiberius sent around the info for TMAT’s annual Grand Tournament this past Spring, I went into the bunker for a number of weeks. And after thinking about Rangers, Castellans, and Khazad-Dum dwarves, here's what emerged from the mire!

Suladan [Army Leader]

• 4 Haradrim Warriors with spears
• 5 Haradrim Warriors with bows and spears
• 5 Watchers of Karna with Twin Blades

Mouth of Sauron

• 9 Black Numenoreans

Mahud King on war camel with shield and war spear

• 3 Mahud Raiders with war spears
• 5 Half Trolls

623/623, 34 models (breaks at 18 casualties, quartered at 8 remaining/26 casualties)

This is but a taste of our full grandeur!

Photo credit: Me!

I'd never played a list quite like this before, but I've used most of the pieces at various times in "friendly" games, so I mostly knew how they were likely to perform. The list tries to strike a balance between "tough to engage" and "hard-hitting"... and I think it mostly succeeded. :-P