Category: 25mm Wargaming

Quest Round 2

Tony F reports on the further adventures of Frodo and the rest of the Hobbits as he and Phil, along with guests Jon and Andy, play through the Quest of the Ringbearer. You can read his report of the first two scenarios here.

Scenario 3 – Buckleberry Ferry
“Two steps on the water”

Scenario three saw the Hobbits attempting to cross the Brandywine at the Buckleberry Ferry. They had to race three ringwraiths to the ferry to cross the river. The game went encouragingly well for the Good side initially, with one wraith despatched in short order (we were discovering that at this point in the Quest they were, if not feeble, then certainly not as frightening as we expected in combat, even to hobbits).

But then our game took a rather odd twist. In a move probably not foreseen by the scenario writer, Andy had one of the ringwraiths jump on the ferry before the hobbits reached it and take it to the other bank, leaving them stranded. The four hobbits managed to gang up and take down the remaining wraith on their side of the river, but we were left with a bit of a standoff. The hobbits were on the wrong side of the river, with the vital ferry on the other bank guarded by the single remaining ringwraith. Their only option would be to swim, but the swimming rules and the hobbits’ fear of water meant doing that would probably allow the wraith to pick them off one at a time as they emerged. So in the end we called it a draw, as neither side could see a way ahead.

The hobbits find themselves on the wrong side of the Brandywine facing a lone ringwraith – but with no way across apart from swimming…

Scenario 4 – The Old Forest
“See those trees, bend in the wind, I feel they’ve got a lot more sense than me”

The final scenario of our first session was a bit unusual, with the hobbits trying to cross the Old Forest in the face of – er – nothing. Just trees. Instead of orcs or wraiths, the trees of the Old Forest came alive and tried to hem them in and trap them – the trees couldn’t kill the hobbits, merely capture them.

Our game ended quite quickly, with all four hobbits rapidly overwhelmed, and hoping desperately for rescue. In hindsight, the scenario setup wasn’t particularly specific about how many trees should be placed on table, and we we may have overdone it, leaving the hobbits little chance of getting to safety – Jon and I barely made it halfway across the table.

So this one went evil’s way, leaving the score at

Good 2-1 Evil

The Quest will resume at the club’s Christmas meeting, where we hope to get through another 3-4 scenarios.

Return to Tatooine

The good weather appears to have slowed down member’s painting and modelling activities, so instead of a WIP Wednesday post, here’s Tony’s account of the Society’s game at Broadside.

At the recent Broadside show in Gillingham, the club resurrected an old game from many years ago – its first outing was way back in 1997. Originally named with the simple but descriptive title of ‘Tatooine Droid Hunt’, it was rebadged as ‘Utini!’ for this outing, which is a Jawa exclamation of shock or surprise.

The game centres around a Jawa sandcrawler during the opening scenes of Star Wars:A New Hope. Imperial stormtroopers are hunting for C3P0 and R2D2 amongst the droid waifs and strays which have been collected by the sandcrawler crew. Back in the day we didn’t take any photos of the game in action (it was before the days of camera phones) so this was a good chance to fill a gap in the club’s historical record.

The sandcrawler was scratchbuilt by Phil, the stormtroopers and Jawas are long-OOP figures from West End Games painted by Tony F and the droids are from the Galoob micro-machines range. Phil is going to write-up the sandcrawler build in more detail for the website, but for now here’s a gallery of photos from Broadside taken by Andy.