Feeling trapped and depressed lately, yet look what falls into my lap to help:
My workmate and friend Steve has an SPI game from 1977 called “SAURON, The Battle for the Ring.” It is a tabletop wargame, smallish, just one battle.
It is from the “Games of MIDDLE EARTH” series – I need to do some research to find others, is there a Pellenor Fields, or Helm’s Deep?
I’d love to do wargaming of Silmarillion battles like the battle of unnumbered tears, or 2nd age battles in Cardolan, etc.
This looks like fun, and is cheering me up a bit. So yay for that.
Hooray for cheery Craig!
Sauron: yes. It was sold as part of a boxed set, which contained a) Sauron, as above, b) “Gondor”, which was based on the Battle of Pelennor Fields – very similar game, and c) the megajoobie, “War of the Ring”, which was two or three players, essentially a cross between a tabletop wargame covering all of Midde Earth, a card game based on LotR, and an RPG. It was great to play, but it had a few flaws: games tended to end up with stacks of those weeny card counters (as in Sauron) 50 or 60 deep balanced on one hex square as the armies got together, and it was virtually impossible to stop someone dumping the ring into Mount Doom – minmax tactics said that you should get the entire fellowship plus Rohanite characters plus Gondorite characters plus Elf characters in the same hex and do a suicide dash to Mount Doom, which was so hard for the poor Nazgul to stop the Fellowsupertanker steamroller. But given a decent amount of house rules, it was fun, if longwinded.
The original SPI ‘War of the Ring’. And the later Avalon Hill/TSR ‘War of the Ring’ that doesn’t include the 2 sub-games. To me, the Seige of Minas Tirith was very interesting – morale rules for the Witch-king (tossing heads over the walls with catapults), or fire-spreading (fire instead of heads)…seige towers…don’t get Oliphaunts too close to cavalry, they hate each other and go CRAZY…
All sorts of fun.
I think I own all the board games based upon Tolkien. I don’t play most of them – they’re not very GOOD necessarily, and most of my friends just go, “Alex, you’re a GEEK and you SCARE US.”
🙂
DAMNIT! When am I getting my ass to Portland?!
Don’t you mean, longweended?
Well, y’know, even when you get to Portland, I think your ass will still be in San Francisco.
“I left my ass, in San Francisco…“
Jeeze. That explains the sidewalks. I thought it was just the dogs and less fortunate homeless, but I guess people have just been leaving all sorts of body parts in that town.
Now I have this image of lonely asses wandering around the tenderloin. No structure in their lives, no education to speak of, no real goals… They’re just looking to score that next hit of Charmin. You can just see them twitching up against the walls, letting loose with all sorts of non-verbal obscenity…
I really need to get out more.