It's a funny thing, some of the guys at Games Workshop think that Lord of the Rings and War of the Ring are 'My Games,' because those are the games that I tend to be involved with the most. They're really not, I'm in to 40k every bit as much, perhaps not Fantasy so much but there you are. But it's actually far more to do with convenient timing that I find myself at Games Workshop on Monday nights more often than not, and even though there aren't very many of us, I can usually get a game in at some point...
In this case I ended up using a small 500pt force of Harad soldiers lead by The Betrayer against 500pts of Gondor, lead by Aragorn. My opponent was an enthusiastic but inexperienced young man and the scenario was Sieze the Prize, with Battle for the Pass deployment. I don't know so much about the 'pass,' I'd actually managed to set up the battlefield to resemble a small town, and most of the coins that we used for objectives ended up around there.
The opponent siezed a couple of coins early on and had he held on to them he might have won the game. However, while it is important to keep sight of your objective, staying alive is just as important. Having a few objectives isn't going to help you if you get yourself killed the moment you take them, which once the arrows started flying is what happened here.
In games this small, your characters really need to earn their money and The Betrayer really did that for me tonight. 2 things won the battle for me - the ringwraith's aptitude for magic meaning that I could cast the Sunder Spirit/Visions of Woe combo on the Knights of Dol Amaroth, and the effect of the Betrayer making my already formidable archers even more deadly as they get to re-roll all their misses for having poisoned weapons, rather than just the dice that land on 1. Against cavalry, this is lethal, because it makes it very easy to force a fall-back move which in turn forces the opponent to drop the objective, and even units of infantry need to watch where they step. If I'd have thought about it, I might have followed up my magic combo by moving the Betrayer into my cavalry unit, casting Terrifying Aura (presumably the effect on the target's courage is cumilative?) and charging the knights, but the archers did the job just as well. In the same respect, my opponent more or less cost himself the game by putting Aragorn in with the Knights; formidable opponent though this undoubtedly makes, if I manage to shoot them to pieces - which I did - then the very expensive character is lost along with them.
In the end, it was quite an easy victory for me, though with War of the Ring draws are few and far between; I haven't managed one yet and there doesn't appear to be much middle ground between victory and defeat. Hopefully my opponent learned something from the game too!
I don't envy the lives of the doomed villagers who's homes were taken by the Haradrim. Who knows what horrors they'll be subject to, particularly with the presence of the Ringwraith, who will have his own reasons for wanting that village secure...
