Quote Originally Posted by 7eat51 View Post
How do you like this game? I have toyed around about it, but I don't know anyone who has played it.
I enjoy GW's Strategy Battle Game (SBG) version very much. It did a great job, IMO, capturing the flavor of the stories and films. With the Hobbit release they did a minor overhaul of the rules and though I have a few minor gripes about the changes I find most of them reasonable. I still have to get a lot more table time with the changes though to really be sure.

They also release a large-scale-battle version called War of the Ring a couple years back. It is fun in its own way but deviates too much from the feeling of Middle Earth for me to be totally hooked. Our group played it for a while and will probably play it again on occasion but it just doesn't nail Tolkien's work as closely as SBG.

GW being who they are though, we get some over-the-top creations and a little bit of stat-creep (not nearly as bad as many of their other games from my understanding). But the nail in the coffin for me lately has been the massive price increases. I'm used to a little increase per year but at this point plastic rank-and-file troops are costing more than 2x what they were perhaps 3 years ago, and Hero troops are even worse. I can reasonably see $20 or so for an SOG ship which also includes the double sided Ship Log, base, card, etc. Especially in a game where you may only have a couple models on the table at a time. But $20+ for a single 28mm figure, unpainted, is not attractive. Add in the fact that you need probably 3-5 of them in a typical army, and another $60 - $90 for the cheapest foot soldier models and they lost me as a customer. Thankfully I have a couple hundred models in backlog to be painted in addition to my forces already complete. There is also usually a good second hand market out there as people sell off collections when they shift hobbies.

If you already have some armies collected, or you catch some good deals on ebay, or you happen to be one of the lucky ones that can absorb the costs without much burden, then I would recommend the game for anyone with an interest in Tolkien's worlds and the film adaptations. But for 'struggling hobbiests' I would have to caution you on the potential investment.