Monday, April 23, 2012

Playtests for "Gathering the Troops" and "Treasure Quest"

This weekend my son and I had the opportunity to play through two of the scenarios I wrote for LOTR SBG. They both went pretty smoothly. Although he's only eight, my son has really learned the rules and strategies of this game...He's become a formidable opponent! We managed to finish both of these scenarios within one hour each...

Rules for these scenarios can be found here: http://barts-toys.blogspot.com/p/scenarios-for-lord-of-rings-sbg.html


Gathering the Troops-My son always prefers to play the bad guys, so he started out with two Uruk hai. I took the part of Good, and started with three Rangers. The idea behind this scenario is to try to find friendly troops during the night, and sometimes you stumble over enemy troops instead. With a few lucky rolls, I managed to find more of my troops than he did...and eventually wiped out his Uruk hai.

Notes for Gathering the Troops:

I thought this game was pretty cool because it was very unpredictable. One side or the other may be quickly overwhelmed, or it may wind up being a tough, slow fight. We found it was smart to keep several of your troops together, in case they unexpectedly ran into a mass of enemy troops. The other cool part was that you tend to wind up with a lot of small skirmishes all over the board, rather than having mass battles in one location. Overall, I thought this game represented disorganized night fighting pretty well.




Treasure Quest-Again, my son took on the Evil side (should I be worried here?) in the form of 24 Orcs and an Orc Captain. I started off on the other end of the board with 20 Rangers. Ultimately, treasure rolls decided the game. The game ended when all the treasure had been captured. Both sides found almost equal amounts of treasure (Rangers 6, Orcs 5), but my treasure value rolls were consistently higher. Final score- Rangers: 1600 gold, Orcs: 1100 gold.

Notes for Treasure Quest:

Again, it was often about the luck of the treasure value rolls. The Ranger's bows and long distance striking capability helped even out the troops by the time they reached each other for close fighting. The best strategy for this scenario seemed to be to spread the troops out in order to reach as many treasure piles as possible. I did see that it was very important to get the treasure piles evenly dispersed and fairly equidistant from both starting lines to give both sides a fair chance. The ones in the middle were the most fun because we had to fight over them.


We really enjoyed the shorter scenarios. Generally, it's difficult for us to play through an entire game due to time constraints and attention span...but both of these took less than one hour each and we were able to get through the whole game.

Hope you enjoy them! Sorry there were no pictures....


Bart

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