Had four of us for Third Sat Game Day yesterday here in Mike's Nerd Cave, and this month was Mark's pick of Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game. This was our second run at MESBG with Keith and I captaining the Forces of Evil with my Mordor Army vs Tuck and Mark running Mark's Forces of Good with Faramir and Boromir running some Gondorians with rangers and soldiers at the Witch King and a couple of Nazgul.
It was Keith and Tuck's first exposure to MESBG and the fresh sets of eyes gave us some new perspectives on game play. One was that I appreciated the melee combat mechanic a bit more this time with duel/to hit/to wound rolls. Fast, streamlined, and quick resolution. The duel roll now seems more cinematic to me when combined the to hit/to wound rolls. I also liked the missile fire mechanics better as the In The Way rolls was much more my liking than other systems common use of cover to modify the die roll. Although my first exposure to that was when my Mordor Siege Bow took an early shot across the table and inadvertently (ahem) hit and killed two of our orcs that were In The Way and drew the first blood of the match.
Keith found the Priority phase rolls (otherwise known as an Initiative roll) to be a bit unbalanced - especially when we lost priority to Tuck and Mark for most of the turns of the game and eventually likely played a pretty good role (pun intended) in the outcome of Evil losing to Good. Bad rolls really cost us the game...but that could be said of any game. A point of talk could be making the side that has priority decide whether to take the priority or force the other side to take it - we've seen that in other games. Sometimes it's better to move and attack first, other times it's not.
Mark showed us the value of banners and getting rerolls for the on duel rolls,especially when I discovered that if I killed a banner bearer the model next to the fallen soldier could simply pick the banner up if they had been in base contact.
Last we wondered how things would have played differently without the river creating choke points at the two fords and the bridge. Maybe with regular ground things may have broken to smaller skirmishes about the battlefield. (the bridge saw little use as I easily picked off Gondorians as they attempted to cross the bridge given the Siege Bow had a clear shot to the elevated position at the top, sometimes taking the hapless soldiers three at a time.)
Things stayed pretty balanced but eventually the poor dice rolls of Evil combined with the heavy armor and shields of the Gondorians became too much for Ringwraiths and their orcs as one Nazgul finally fell to Tuck and the orcs began to drop like orcs tend to do. As an after discussion Keith and Tuck pressed the point of many more orcs and less powerful evil heroes would have been better - and perhaps they were right.
But my Mordor Troll did get to both Hurl one Gondorian and Rend the another into multiple pieces. So, it wasn't all bad...
