The Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit. Well, more or less. The actual terrain layout based on the book has the Goblin Hordes storming up a valley with the Elves, Men & Dwarves on either side of them. I chose instead to make it more of a face-off, rather than giving the forces of good an inbuilt advantage by being up hill. In an equal points game I have no way of costing this advantage.

The figures are from my GW „Battle of the Five Armies“ boxed set and are based on the book, not the film. The bases mostly have 40mm frontages, which is great, but some needed sabots or taping together to get the frontages right. Also the figures are 10mm, and don’t follow the WRG figures per base conventions, so some of the units have identification tags on the back. The armies are about 200 points (see below for lists), which means the playing area is 48″ x 24″. I haven’t put the Running River down the middle of the table as it seems to have little effect in the book. The ruined town of Dale sits in the right corner, otherwise I put down some gentle hills and fields to comply with the DBA terrain rules (perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered).

As is often the case with refights, the army lists as written don’t let you pick the armies as described, so I had to bodge together elements from several lists to get what I thought looked right. I was also restricted by the troop types in the box (no skirmishers) but I think the armies I have fit the Tolkien description as close as any.

The forces of good came out like this:

I had an issue with who to make overall CinC and went with Bard the Bowman, although it could just as easily been Thanduril. Or Gandalf. However Dwarves don’t take orders from Elves (and vice versa) so that didn’t work. Gandalf might have been a better idea. 

The bad guys are more of an issue as there two armies and Goblins and Wargs. Rather than have all Goblin and all Warg armies I split them up into Mountain and Plain Goblins:

The players for the evening were Phil & Steve with the Goblins and Chris K and Tim with the Good Guys.

The Good Guys  – Elves, Men & Dwarves (EMD for short) defended and lined up first. Tim got the Elves at his end, Chris the Dwarves on the right and they discussed the Men each turn. The Goblins had Phil at the far end and Steve near the camera.

They were recoiled (the Eagles, not the Wargs) so the Goblin hordes stormed forwards. Except for the Warg Rider Scouts, who were sent on an outflanking move.

After all, it is Phil.

The Dwarves ploughed into the front of the Wargs, whilst the Eagles harassed the rear. 

Most of the Wargs were killed.

At the other end of the line the Elven Warbows forced a recoil on some of the Goblin warbands.

Next Dain and the Eagles attacked some of the Goblin Warbands. It all got a bit messy, with some Goblins breaking through to attack Gandalf. Or Merlin, as Chris kept calling him.

The Goblins attacked all along the line. The line is punctuated by their Heroes and Mage. These are intended to create pushbacks and so cause overlaps. At the top of the picture Beorn the Bear Man turned out to be a damp squib and fell before the Goblin onslaught.

The Goblins fighting the Dwarves/Eagles combo wasn’t going well for them, as Steve’s contingent headed towards their break point of 9 elements.

The dwarves tried to finish off the last Warg unit, but were surprised by a recoil result.

The Goblins smashed through the Army of Men, and the Elves were taking a hammering too, as the Warg Rider Scouts fell upon the flank. Both were soon at the break point of 4 elements lost for their parts of the army.

All hope rested with the Dwarves. Pretty much.

Question was, could they get there before it was all over for the EMD. Phil now wheeled his reserve round to cover any counter attack.

We’d been playing for about two hours, and stopped for a tea/coffee break. They players thought they’d had enough by then, so we sat and had a chat. TBH the Goblins were on top and it looked like a slow grind to an inevitable win for them.

Thoughts? The „Battle Frenzy“ rule for the Goblins is a nice touch, and creates more wild swings of fortune. The „Lethal“ rule made little difference, as did the „Heavy Armour“. We had one serious magic attack from Gandalf, with the old HOTT style firebolt, which did a kill an element, but no one tried the Ritual stuff. The heroes performed well, but Beorn was a disappointment. The Eagles worked well enough.

Phil was of the view that the multi-command structure worked okay, but wasn’t as good as that in DBM. I have no idea if this is true or not, never having played DBM, but this did work better than DBA3. Which is no big deal for me, as I have little interest in large size DBA battles.

I handed the rules back to Phil. I probably need to play more, different armies to stretch the system in order to make a really fair assessment. However I probably won’t. There’s been nothing in the earlier test games nor this one that has made me go „Wow! I must play that again!!!“ so I’ll be spending my time on something else.

We will play them again, as a group, as Chris wants to get a load of 28mm fantasy on the table he’s assembled from free gifts from other members of the group. I’ll be happy to play, but I won’t be buying my own copy of the rules, and I won’t be running anymore games with them myself.