The GREAT BATTLE of our time

And we decided to keep on playing six hours more… because play is not a luxury, but a necessity…

ROUND 5

Turn 5 was Elly’s turn… as I finally won the priority roll and also won the order in which we were going to make our respective heroic movements. The first thing I decided to do was to move forward my beloved oliphaunt… with CATASTROPHIC RESULTS for the light army… with just one forward move, I managed to crush three Minas Tirith knights, their captain, the wood elf captain and of course all of their steeds!

It was a happy moment, and wouldn’t be the last!

But at the same moment, across the board, my Nazgûl was having strong problems trying to get rid of the most annoying rangers you’ve ever suffered. They still resisted the combined attack of the fellbeast and the Castellan, resisting magic and hits… although one gondor ranger and one Dúnadan had been defeated, the rest still were able to stop my advance, forcing the goblins to find a path towards the centre to avoid a complete halt of the escalade.

Meanwhile, the clash at the center began. The front of Khazad-dûm guards with the king stomped the uruk-hai, resulting in some loses on both sides. The other group of dwarves, guided by their captain, confronted the easterling warriors, that had left their ladders lying on the ground and charged with the intention to offer a solid shield to pin down the dwarves. Then the wargs made a quick encirclement maneuver, performing an effective hammer and anvil tactic.

The shooting phase had been relatively ineffective in previous turns, and although some close combat had happened, the provisional casualty count was very favorable to me by the end of turn 5.

Only 8 soldiers and one kataphract were lost, while the light army had lost 4 captains (2 on horse) and 23 warriors!!

ROUND 6

On turn six, Elly didn’t have the same luck and was forced again to stop. A group of courageous men and some guards of the fund encore charged her with strong determination, while the remains of the Minas Tirith knights, accompanied by some elves fled to the right flank to try to stop the Kataphracts and the barrrow-wights, that were menacing to outflank the group and penetrate the defences.

On the other flank, I finally decided to move along with the Nâzgul, avoiding a stranded fight against the rangers, that anyway, now, didn’t represent any problem. The goblins had found a new way to reach the center, steering out of trouble. A small group of them, following a goblin captain, left their ladder and,  leaving the main group, attacked the rangers. Toghether with the castellan there would surely be enough fighters to keep the rangers engaged. So I moved the fellbeast straight to the second line of elven Galadhrim archers. I thought they would be a softer target for his black dart… but the luck was not with my black rider, and the magic failed again.

The siege tower on the center still was halted, the dwarves had become a real stopper, as they were not easy to defeat… although the vision of the fearsome shade close to the uruks granted them lots of victories, lowering the Khazad guards ability to fight, their tremendous armor kept them alive, and they still bugged the way to the walls. The dwarves on the other side began to fall quickly, caught between the wargs and the easterlings, but still was not enough clear space for the tower to advance.

Some of the wargs, having not enough room to reach the dwarves, followed the chariot of the khandish king full ahead, forming a line that penetrated quickly the zone between the barricades, menacing the elves lined at the front gate. I wanted to extend the fight to the rearguard of archers.

Then I realized that although the dwarves were completely surrounded, finish them was not going to be an easy mission, so I made a hard decision. While the siege tower waited for the way to be clean, the trolls abandoned it and ran forward, searching for stubborn sons of Durin to slain, while the orcs that were inside the war machine were now commanded to go down and push it forward when possible.

At the beginning of the seventh turn the center of the battle was completely bogged, the tower was stranded due to that damned dwarves so hard to kill, and it seemed like there was not going to be an easy task. While the dwarves suffered loses, still standing their ground, the men of the feuds and the elves simply looked everything from the safety of their barricades.

The only exception was that my Nâzgul had reached the galadhrim, but that pointy-eared archers shoot the fellbeast down!   Now my left flank consisted in goblins and a castellan, and had lost the penetration and the menace that represented a nazgûl on fellbeast on the rearguard… so the elven archers took aim at the most threatening monster on sight… the mordor troll that had just left the tower behind! And then that old friends of my cousin, the dices, gifted him with three hits… and those three hits became… THREE SIXES… and so, three wounds that killed instantly my troll!!

BUT…

Sometimes luck changes sides…

As Gandalf said: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

And then I decided to shoot TWICE with my catapult over their high elves archers… CRUSHING FOUR OF THEM!!!

On the right flank, things got troublesome for the forces of light. Behind the village houses, there were only a couple of Minas Tirith knights and a reduced group of elves and an elf captain,  resisting the group of kataphracts and the two barrow-wights… the spectres paralyzed the captain and one knight with terror! Although the poor guys were not able to hurt anyone, they still resisted without a harm!

Near from there, Elly did another ghastly carnage!!

Moving forward, heading for the fortified walls, our Mûmak killed six soldiers, including three elves, two feud men and one Guard of the Fundin Corp.

But in the next light side movement phase, a big group of elves with elven-made swords, supported with some wood elves with spear, charged Elly! A lot of damage was dealt to the poor oliphaunt, but she endured the pain and didn’t fail the stampede test!!!

As poor Elly had resisted enough, the first warrior od the dark army could reach the wall!!

It was a victorious moment, Elly had finally get to the end zone, and the first fighters on board were ready to attack!

The first warrior to disembark from the impressive oliphaunt was the Mahud chieftain, fiercely attacking the walls. With the support of a haradrim warrior with a spear, the mahud gained a foothold among the enemies!

On the center, the first dark units reached the barricades of stone, and began to harass the defending soldiers there.  The fight against the dwarves was drawing to a close, and durin’s sons mission was to sacrifice their lives to buy time for the rest of the allies… of course it was a mission accomplished… still on the center a couple of dwarves resisted against all odds, completely surrounded by enemies.

The round began with the light side winning the priority roll. During the movement phase, the Calembel guardians attacked in every flank.

The remnants of the elves on the barricades charged the trolls to prevent them to advance to the walls… they did their job, but with heavy loses due to the brutes hammers. Meanwhile the group of dwarves had been wiped out…

…all of them? No! It was still ONE dwarf captain around, and it survived for the rest of the round. In response to such tenacity, the siege tower finally decided to veer off course to evade the ongoing combat… even the last of that sons of Dúrin would pester to the end…

On the left flank, there was another character as weary as the day is long. The LAST dúnadan still was trying to slow down the march of my troops… as if they weren’t already slow enough…

On the right flank, the skirmish resulted in total annihilation of the kataphracts, and the barrow-wights proved to be no match against the knights and the elves, althought their extremely high armor allowed them to hold off their enemies for a bit longer.

The soldiers that were on the fortress at last began to suffer serious casualties, because I used the majority of my ranged weapons there. There were closer targets, but all of them were engaged in combat with my own soldiers, and I got a super-power that consists in obtaining rolls of six whenever there is any possibility to hurt myself. My enemies also had good successes using bows, because the hobbits from the tower killed one of my spearmen… the one that was supporting the Mahud chieftain on the walls!

And then It happened…

The pointed-eared cowards attacked again poor Elly… and finally, after supporting more hits that she could stand, the wonder of the South, the greatest of Mûmaks, the Oliphaunt of my dreams… WAS KILLED!!!

The result was extremely annoying… NOT A SINGLE WARRIOR over the oliphaunt survived the falling damage!! ALL haradrim were dead in the accident, they dropped like flies… including the Haradrim chieftain that still was on the upper part of the Mûmak castle. The sole survivor of the collapsing Mûmak was the Mahud beastmaster, that just went down the beast the round before… he couldn’t believe his luck… althought being completely alone on top of a wall, with your back to the void, surrounded by enemies, was not a very pleasant expectation…

The rules suggest that you use some difficult terrain to represent the body of the mûmakil if it becomes a casualty, so we used a beautiful green hill that reminded me of a wonderful tomb of a giant king…

And then another milestone occurred. The light side had finally killed enough soldiers to trigger the reinforcements. The dark side had reached the limit of 50 miniatures killed, and althought the light side had severe loses (almost 80 enemies defeated!!!) my cousin had been able to slow my assault. And the rohirrim had to join the fray…

Melian was a great archer. He was even among his own people, famous for their feats with the bow across Middle-earth.

But when Melian saw the enormous stone burst the brains of her friend Estel and a couple more of his mates, he thought that none of them were going to get out of there alive. There they were, on top of the walls, so happy, all the men of Gondor. “Let’s help them” said Estel a week ago.

Look where you are now, man. Well, elf.

So when the second stone whistled through the sky at full speed against them, Melian was the only one who moved his right foot slightly back… imperceptibly to human eyes… but not to the eyes of his companions. Like a spring, they all decided that they would be safer behind the wall. What followed was a succession of wailing, shouting, and unmartial howling, asking those inside the wall to open the door, for Varda, or for Yavanna, or whoever, but please open the door.

The Gondorian Gentlemen, althought lacking the style of their edain ancestors, are polite enough to let them in.

But the companions did not have enough just sitting inside the fortress, sharing some Lembas and having a rest… they had to get up the walls, to keep fighting. And so Melian followed him.

“Death is just another path, one that we all must take.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.

As we said in the last entry, the time had come for the reinforcements to arrive, it was finally going to happen. Therefore, knowing that the battle was going to get complicated, we decided to meet soon on a Sunday for a last, longer session, in which we could end the battle. So we got together soon, around 11 in the morning. We kept on playing until noon, when my wife called us for a wonderful seafood paella that she cooked. After finishing the red wine and the coffee (and lengthening the after-dinner like lazy hobbits) we resumed the game… we didn’t know it was going to last until 10 pm…

TURNS 10 and 11

But first things first. The Rohirrim were entering the battle and all I could do was seeing how they came from EVERYWHERE accompanied by that irritating dwarf rangers… yes DWARF and RANGERS… (my two favourite knightmares toghether on each single mini…)

On the right flank, the last barrow-wight was slain, completely surrounded by elves and the remains of gondorian cavalry. Anyway it was completely impossible to survive the attack that came across the border of the table: the rohirrim cavalry appeared, and with a swift move across the small settlement, they tried to reach the easterling and Khand archers from behind!!

On the left flank the goblins,  that had finally killed the last human ranger, found a bothersome replacement in the form of rohirrim and dwarf rangers. Again the slow pace of their advance toward the walls slowed, it seems that, for now, they were not going anywhere.

Meanwhile, in the center of the battle, the Mordor army had lost momentum. The elves and the Arnor warriors had made a counterattack, destroying the remnants of the cavalry and advancing to meet the trolls again. Despite the efforts, the uruk-hai army, which had finally slit the throat of the last dwarf captain, was steadily advancing, followed by the siege tower and the orcs, so it was only a matter of time to kill all light side soldiers outside the walls…

Regarding the shooting phases, the most important highlight was that the light side lost most of its archers on the main tower, and even some soldiers from the left tower had been wiped by the catapult, including some dwarf rangers and the elven archers that hid behind the walls (see Out of turn sequence: The fate of Melian.)

Problem with dark side reinforcements was their speed. Or perhaps the problem was the table size. Or perhaps it was they appeared too late…

The fact is that most of them were not going to fight, so my chances of victory, despite having massacred the enemy, were slim.

The dunlendings and the rest of the orcs were simply going to be completely useless… they were not going to get to the fortress before the orcs were going to be slain…

Despite it, my wargs, being very fast, managed to get close to the light side army in no time. The rohirrim army didn’t notice anything until it was too late! In a few rounds my wolves caught up with the Rohan riders from behind, and with another magnificent maneuver that will be remembered for a long time, the nasty strawheads were trapped between my uruks and the direwolves!

On the left flank, things simply got worse for the elves that tried to defend the barricades. With the goblins coming through the stone wall, the uruks coming from behind and some easterlings harrassing them between lines, they were defeated to the last man… (well, elf).

Although the rangers and Rohan soldiers killed many goblins, the sheer number of those ugly creatures kept them busy. The overwhelmed dwarves could do nothing to stop a small group of Moria orcs from reaching the center zone… the only remains of the light side army there were some Arnor men, that tried to resist without any comprehensive formation. Maneuvering between friends and foes, they placed a ladder against the walls!

The turn began with a small victory for the dark army… the escalade finally had arrived to the fortified walls of the city!!!!

Well… the remains of the escalade…

Because only TWO of the ladders arrived to the objective.

On the right flank, some uruk-hai made the ascension to the battlements, after going across the fallen body of the mûmak. The problem with that band was that in previous turns they had been decimated by elven archers, and they only began with one ladder and 8 uruks… so the force (that now consisted in 4 uruk-hai) was not, in theory, enough to conquer the right side of the fortress. The original plan was to bring them after the initial attack of the haradrim over the mûmak, but that attack had terribly failed, so when the 4 uruks arrived, none of my haradrim soldiers were over the walls, and so it became obvious I couldn’t take the wall with them…

Or perhaps… was it possible?

Let’s not forget two of them were Captains…

On next turns, even some of the rohirrim warriors (a captain and his Rohan guards escort) walked pass the uruks! Perhaps it was simply a matter of my cousin not considering 4 soldiers something to  take care of…

It was not a matter of ignoring four uruks… the Rohan guards had another mission, they were going straight to counter-attack the left flank, where some goblins had been able to get near the wall and the siege tower was about to reach the fortress!!

Luckily, I had some trolls to place between them and their prey…

On the left flank, the goblin escalade had been wiped out, but the fantasy football match (see previous entry: TURNS 12 and 13.) had allowed one ladder to reach the walls. On that side of the battle, things were getting better for me and my dark minions, because the siege tower was finally getting there!!