When you consider that a typical Matched Play game has a limit of 800 points, you can see what a heavy hitter he is. The Greatest Calamity of Our Age can be fielded as his own force and weighs in at 700 points. MESBG is a game where your army can be anything from the disposable hordes of Goblin-Town to Smaug. It opens a huge range of tactical possibilities when your army only consists of a few heroes, without bogging things down as their warbands increase in size.Ī couple of decades of refinement have resulted in a game that is just as good for balanced, competitive play as it is for replicating scenes from the movies or delving into your own takes on the world of Middle-Earth. As well as having the better stats and special abilities that you’d expect, heroes gain pools of points called Might, Will and Fate, which they can use to activate special Heroic Actions, cast spells and even defy death. When playing the points-based, Matched Play rules, your army is organised into a number of warbands consisting of a hero and the regular warriors they lead. Heroes are your named characters - the likes of Frodo, Aragorn and Gandalf - as well as generic leader types called things like “Orc Captain”. This last point is especially important, as heroes are at the core of what makes the game so scalable - and so darn good.
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As it went through various iterations, it added pretty much every character from all six Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, plus a whole bunch that were either taken from the books (good news for Tom Bombadil fans), or added by GW to flesh out the factions that were a little light on named heroes.Ī couple of decades of refinement have resulted in a game that is just as good for balanced, competitive play as it is for replicating scenes from the movies. Right from the original version of the game, then known as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - A Strategy Battle Game, it was designed to make the Fellowship’s desperate escape from goblins in Moria just as compelling as the Last Alliance clashing with the armies of Sauron. One of MESBG’s standout features is how well it scales. The Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game started out as a tie-in for Peter Jackson's first Lord of the Rings movie, and has been updated with characters from across the entire trilogy - plus the Hobbit films - since. A combination of Tolkien’s world being a big draw in and of itself and a lot of players being introduced to the game by the Battle Games in Middle-Earth magazine, which included miniatures and ran from 2002 to 2006, has resulted in MESBG having its own ecosystem with an active tournament scene that may surprise a lot of Warhammer players.
It certainly doesn’t have the same presence as its Warhammer titles, and has evolved a community that has a lot less overlap with the wider GW player base than you might expect.
They’re supposed to resemble the characters from the movies (which they do with varying levels of success), not genetically-enhanced superhuman space warriors.Īs the only licensed game produced by GW, it’s quite easy to overlook MESBG. Even the minis are smaller, being roughly 25 to 28mm scale, as opposed to Warhammer’s usual 30 to 32mm. Compared to the big, overblown maximalism of GW’s own settings, MESBG is a restrained, unassuming thing.
Two armies - ideally one Good, one Evil - fight it out to achieve a variety of objectives over a number of turns. If I asked you to picture what a Lord of the Rings miniatures game based specifically on the Peter Jackson movies would look like, MESBG is almost exactly what you’d expect. Or MESBG, if you want an unpronounceable acronym. Perhaps ironically, the game I’d hold up as GW’s best right now isn’t a Warhammer game at all, but the clumsily-titled Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game. However, I’d argue that, in its current state, it’s possibly GW’s worst offering, thanks to convoluted bespoke special rules for the various factions and units this overcomplexity results in huge amounts of mental overhead during a game and has proven to be a balancing nightmare in the competitive scene. The most popular is undoubtedly Warhammer 40,000. The question of which of Games Workshop’s many tabletop miniatures games is the best is certainly a contentious one.
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