Middle Earth Angmar Battle

Mark and I took the opportunity to match up some of our Middle Earth armies to try out the latest version of my adaptation of Soldiers of God for Middle Earth battles.

The forces of Angmar encounter a mixed force of Elves and Dwarves, somewhere around the Barrow Downs. My battleplan was for the Dwarves in the centre battle to lead the main assault whilst the smaller Dwarf battle on the right would advance in support and the Elves in the left battle would hang back and use their bows to disrupt the enemy in front of them. Mark chose exactly the same battleplan but in reverse, so we were actually a mirror image of each other.

 The forces of Angmar deploy.

The left flank, facing the elves.

The main attack force in the centre.

Fast moving wargs and riders on the rightt flank.

The Elf/Dwarf alliance.

Elves on the right flank.

The bulk of the dwarf axemen in the centre.

Dwarf archers and spearmen face off against the wargs.

As the centre battles advanced towards each other, the warg battle charge forward. The warg riders attack the dwarf archers, to prevent them giving missile support to the axemen next to them. These two units would remain locked in indecisive combat for the rest of the game.

The unit of wargs charge the dwarf spears, not a good move as they take heavy casualties.

The centres grind together.
On the other flank the two big units of snaga orcs advanced at first, bringing them into bow range of the elves, then paused, not getting the activation cards they needed to close the gap for there own weapons to reach.
This continued for a couple of turns, allowing the elves to inflict quite heavy damage on the orcs who were unable to reply.

The elite dwarven huscarls face a mass of poor quality snaga, who are "encouraged" by the presence of a unit of trolls behind them.

The wargs on the far flank are routed by the spears. Unfortunately the spears are too far away to affect the fighting in the centre.

The snaga take casualties but hold on, undoubtedly due the the presence of the Witch King himself. The fighting in the centre was a battle of attrition, several times a unit was on the point of breaking and both players had to cash in activation cards to keep their units in play.

 Finally the snaga broke, but the huscarls had taken casualties and were now attacked by both the trolls and Witch King's bodyguard of large uruks.

 On the Angmar left flank the snaga units finally managed to close the range and inflicted casualties on the elves, but too late and both units routed under the weight of the elven arrow storm.

The final move. With both one of the dwarven axe units and the Witch King's bodyguard almost simultaneously routing, the nazgul decides to charge the huscarls himself to try and break the deadlock. The nazgul disappears under a mass of hacking axes and is killed (or rather dispersed and his spirit flies back to Angmar).

The Angmar army morale dropped to zero, so it was a close fought victory for the Dwarf/Elf alliance.

It was a great game and a lot of fun, with several nail-biting moments. I had tweaked the snaga, previously even large units had been just speed bumps, this time they were more of a nuisance to dispose of. We both suffered with not getting movement activation cards early on when we needed them. Once the centre battles clashed they demanded all out attention and we were constandly using any spare cards to rally units (we could discard an activation card to remove a point of disorder from a unit), so the flanks were ignored.
We are both looking forward to the next game and planning an all-day big battle for sometime next year.

Other games being played.

A 28mm WW2 game with Chain of Command.

Another WW2 game, this time in 15mm.

And a Wars of the Roses game, using a variant of Sharp Practice.