Why You Should Play Lord of The Rings

With all the recent grumblings surrounding game balance issues with both 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, I thought it useful to perhaps share a nice alternative gaming idea with You. The Hobbit - formerly known as the Lord of The Rings Strategy Battle Game - is a nice, and relatively inexpensive entry point into Games Workshops games systems, and is at this point also probably one of the more balanced games left. Here's a few points to think about if you haven't gave it much thought before...

1) Low entry cost
Lord of The Rings happens to be the cheapest and arguably best value for money game that GW still carries now that they canned their specialist games sets. Typically, you can pick up 1 box of whatever soldiers you wish to play, plus their related rulebook and 1 hero for right around just under $100. (keep in mind that each rulebook has more than one armies rules contained inside. (for example, the Kingdoms of Men book has rules for 5 armies in it, which is great for only costing $28 US) And with the points levels of games being easy to play at around 250, usually this amount of units are more than enough to get you started having fun.

2) Simplicity
The Hobbit/LoTR game is by far the easiest game system to learn that Games Workshop still produces. Rules have a "easy to learn, difficult to master" approach, meaning that even a relatively new player can still go toe to toe with an experienced player, despite not grasping some of the more subtle nuances of the game. I remember when I started, i had a lot of success with my army, till I went up against an Elf player, who understood more of the subtle things, such as interrupting the other players move to try and counter me before I could roll over his units. Stuff like this is a learning experience, but not a bad one. Much like chess, as soon as you experience this, you often learn quickly from it.

3) Balance 
There used to be a few cheesy things you could pull off in games of LoTR before the reformed the rulebooks and army structuring, but with the way the game is now, its pretty hard to cheese out any list under 750 points, and that's considered a big game. Players have to take 1 captain/leader per every 12 models they have in an army and  can only have up to 1 third of their army equipped with bows. Because of this, games are typically very close to the very end and are a lot of fun. Captains are basically what adds the extra strategy, being able to make heroic actions, or cast spells to affect the game. because both players move all their units before any shooting, you are also not waiting around for quite a while to do anything, and it give the game more of a "real time" flow in my opinion.

So there you have it, its just something to think about. :) Personally I have a lot of fun playing the games, and they are often much shorter then 40k or fantasy games, meaning its often possible to play many in a few hours rather than just the one. I definitely recommend giving it a try if you never have as I think you may be surprised by how fun it can be. Its definitely much friendlier on the wallet too :)