Lord Of The Rings SBG gaming using Sabretooth Hex Figures
I've had a small collection of Sabretooth Hex Combat Figures for Lord of The Rings from the late nineties. I had decided to start a Strategy Battles Club at the school where I work and came across Lord of The Rings Strategy Battles. The rules are a great way of fighting small scale skirmish games and are easy to pick up whilst allowing lots of depth and strategy as players become more confident.
In particular, the Battle Companies expansion is a great way of building a strong narrative campaign and the students can develop a sense of emotional investment in their forces. This is much better than just lining up two armies and slugging it out. Because Battle Companies only have 12-16 figures, we are able to set up a game and play to a resolution in about an hour, which is perfect for an after school gaming club.
I then spent months scouring e-bay to buy enough figures to be able to offer the various options in the Battle Companies book. Rohan, Isengard, Mordor, Easterlings, High Elves, Goblins, Gondor, Arnor and Wargs.
The photo above shows a group of Goblins attacking a warrior of Arnor. Games Workshop have done their normal clever marketing ploy of insisting that figures represent the equipment of the warrior on the battlefield and this does sometimes cause issues with shields and banners etc. However it is possible to field a force which is an accurate representation of your company in the lists.
The Sabretooth Hex figures have dials on them that represent action points and symbols that relate to the figures special powers. I'm not using any of these for LOTR SBG, however, I placed coloured stickers on the base with numbers on to help differentiate which is which, this is especially useful to highlight any Leaders, Sergeants and warriors with special equipment.
In the above, an Uruk Hai archer snaps a shot off at a Rohan warrior whilst another Rohan warrior throws his spear at the Uruk Hai Captain. You can see the small stickers - yellow and blue for Sergeant. Yes that is Lurtz acting as a Sergeant - I have lots of them!
I'm not using the hex based system that Sabretooth figures were designed for. The figures are larger than GW which are about 28mm. These are about 38mm and I did consider altering the ranges in the rules to reflect the larger figures, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is and it works well.
An important tactical aspect of LOTR SBG is placement of figures when charging. As the Sabretooth figures are on hexagonal bases, squaring up figures as they charge into combat is easy but can lead to trap situations where a figure faces six other opponents. There's also the 1" control zone to consider. At the moment I've been playing it as 1" , however, I think it's better to play width of a base in oder to be able to move past an enemy and engage another figure. In the picture above you can see that the Goblins are not able to trap the Arnor warrior as he can back away if he loses the duel roll. It is still possible to trap an enemy with three figures.
So far we've seen Easterlings ambushed by Lothlorien Elves, Arnor fighting off a pack of Goblins that had been chasing them down for some time and Rohan and Dol Goldur clashing as they searched for survivors after a battle amongst the ruins of a city. There are lots of scenarios in the various LOTR SBG expansion books which can be used to keep things fresh and create strategic and tactical challenges.
I started with two sessions in which I let them get to grips with moving figures and shooting, followed by combat and use of Might points. For those who are in education, I created a Google Classroom for the club in which I posted links to Youtube video tutorials on how to play the game and some good battle reps to watch.
It's proving to be great fun and the students have taken to it with real enthusiasm. The school is desperate for extra curricular activities and this is different and holds great appeal. The school is having two activity days at the end of the Summer term and I'm running a mornings gaming when we should be able to fit in about three games. I'll post some photos on the main blog after that takes place. I'm also going to write some posts about how to run gaming clubs in school - something I've been doing for many years now. It's a great way of bringing new players to the hobby!
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