Lord of the Rings Championships

Alright,

as many know, I am the guy here in Phoenix always organizing Lord of the Rings events & have now run two Gathering in the Deserts and am always trying to get people to play LotR. Well once I heard that the LotR championships would be on friday, I knew I had to play since this was my chance to get to play in an awesome event. So after talking to a few folks at this years GitD, I decided to do a themed Uruk-hai scout force following Ugluk after they capture the hobbits. Well just because I like messing with people I taunted Brent Sinclair into taking his Rohan force to see if he could do what the Rohan boys did in the second movie, wipe out the Uruk-hai. Well below is the mighty Uruk-hai lead by Ugluk on there display board which made the flight from Phoenix.



Now a good friend John Long http://azwargamer.blogspot.com/ came along with me to help with running a few Demos. Now John brought a White Hand Uruk-hai list to try out and here is his board & army.

Now before the event I took a few pictures of some of the other armies, this one is from Jeremy Williams, he did an all Dunland force going with a Viking theme. I gave him crap over how his Viking ship was flying out of the water, must have been a speed boat and how he had a budget ring wraith on board. Didn't ring wraiths hate water??? Hmm I don't know Jeremy!

Here are a few other armies I took pictures of, sorry did not get names or get along to see all of the other armies.

Anyway, with not having time for photos, the first round was announced with the tables. Now since my friend Dean Vuckovich was helping to run the event, I asked if I could get Brent & his Rohan army on the first round. Yeah I will admit it, I used my pull as an organizer to get to Brent! Here is the man, the myth & legend himself, Brent Sinclair setting up his troops. Notice the look of fear on his face? I could see he was worried to face me (that's sarcasm folks!)

Well the first scenario was called "This was the Great Watch Tower of Amon Sul" which was basically a 10 turn game to capture the center hill. Here is my mighty force ready to take on the Rohan boys!

Well I would like to go into great length how the mighty Uruk - hai smashed the proud Rohan warriors, but unfortunately I can't. It seemed that the Dice gods had other plans for me this whole weekend and I suffered a Major Defeat to Brent & his Rohan Warriors. Here are a few shots of Brent's Riders.

Now you will notice in this picture that there is one lone Uruk-hai left on the hill, it was Ugluk and he lasted the whole game. He never took anyone's head, but he was the last one standing at the end.

Oh and since Brent was not able to kill the mighty Ugluk, he was denied 3 bonus points because of it. So I like to think that Ugluk bellowed a mighty roar and slipped off into the night to fight again. Sorry Brent, but you didn't need the extra points anyway since everyone else was killed!

So after round one I was sitting with a major defeat under my belt. Game two was called "He is not Going to Last" and I thought "That must be me that will not last! Well my next opponent was Corey Sapp playing an Easterling force. Nice thing he did not have a Ring Wraith with this army.

This game used our casualty models and we had to rescue them and bring them back off our table edge. Basically Corey was new to LotR and had not played many games, so while we played I helped him out and just had a laid back game. In the end we finished as a Draw, but he had more points in models at the end and got 3 bonus points. This was a great game & I can see Corey being a solid player in the very near future.

Game three say me looking at a major Defeat & a Draw, not too bad but I wanted better. So game three was called "Your Love of the Halfling's Leaf" which was were you had to capture two objective counters in order to win. Each counter started in your Deployment zone in the corner of the board. My Opponent was Abram Krogh playing a Mordor army, now I was not too afraid until I saw his Mordor Troll! Here is Abram setting up,

and here is my deployment behind the hill.

Now the game was pretty straight forward except for my dice rolling! In one memorable fight I had two Uruk-hai scouts on a lone Orc. I roll two 1's and Abram rolls a 1 as well, great I thought, I win by Fight, I then roll two dice to wound and proceed to roll another set of 1's!!!! That's how my dice rolled all weekend long! Needless to say I was frustrated because I was doing everything right, but the dice would not roll over 3's it seemed the whole weekend. So in the end it came down to a Minor Defeat since I broke and could not get his objective, but at least he did not get mine either.

So game 4 saw me sitting pretty far down on points and I was now was in for a tough fight. As I approached the table I would be playing on I meet Josh Balke playing a Gimli list. Now I knew this list since it was a list I have run, Gimli, To Dwarfs with Two Handed Weapons, 10 Dwarfs with Axe & Shield & 1o Dwarven bowmen. Now I did not look forward to this since my Uruk-hai had been slaughtered by Keith up in Colorado only weeks before. So when I read the scenario "That Still Only Counts as One" which was a Modified Contest of Champions scenario.

This scenario had a twist to it though, you had to split your force in half and the rest came on depending on dice rolls after turn two. So I set out to try to stay away from Gimli as much as possible. Luckily for me I was able ot pick off lone dwarves that came in scattered and was able to rake up 5 kills with Ugluk, but Gimli was able to match every kill. It was during the last ten minutes that I decide to act like a Uruk - hai and Run! I was able to just stay out of reach of Gimli for the last ten minutes and the game ended in a draw. I almost picked up 3 bonus points but was not able to kill Gimli or two other dwarfs, that's all poor Josh had but he kept making his Courage tests. Unfortunately I did not take pictures of our game.

So all in all I ended with 1 Major Loss, 1 Minor Loss and 2 draws. All in all I had four great opponents and would gladly play them all again. It's something when you can do as bad as me and still have a great time. So all in all here is my scores and general placing which was 22nd out of 34 players.

Overall Score 101.00, Battle Score 32, Painting 32, Sportsmanship 25, Composition 12.00

Once again this was a great event and here are the winners:

Best Overall - Brent Sinclair, Best General - Hal Stewart, Best Army - Sean Rameriz, Best Sportsman - Josh Leong.

I highly encourage folks to go to Adepticon and play in this great event run by Jamie Welling, he does an outstanding job and has grown this event to be the largest in the United States even surpassing GW's LotR Events.

Next up WAB...

TK