What is going on????

So,

As many of you know, I have a certain fondness for the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle game by Games Workshop. In fact I enjoy the game so much, I wrote a little pirate game based on the rules. I also run a Lord of the Rings tournament called Gathering in the Desert and it is going into it's 5th year.

But today I need to do a little ranting for a minute. It seems that Games Workshop has no clue what it is doing with the Lord of the Rings game. Let me explain, for years while the movies where out we (the LotR community) had support from Games Workshop with them releasing Source books. We also had articles in White Dwarf (which many WHFB and 40K players hated!) Times were good for Lord of the Rings players.

But recently GW has been doing some strange things with their 3rd Core Game (Yes GW thinks of LotR as a Core Game!). I started noticing that it was getting harder to get Source books. In fact many were taken off the GW web site. As someone who runs tournaments for the game, this made it hard to get new players into the game. But there was a bright spot, GW released a PDF of the special rules and stats for entries that were found in the source books.

The bad thing was that they did not include points cost, but we still had Legions of Middle Earth. But now, LoME is out of production! So where do players get the point cost? What the heck are they thinking??And how the heck do I as a tournament organizer, recruit new players? It seems that Games Workshop is letting LotR die a slow painful death.

So where does this leave us (LotR Players)? Well there is always hope that with the new Hobbit movies there may be a re-do of the game. I am hopeful that the new movies will be an new resurgence in the game. Although I am worried that GW's track record of late with rules may see some drastic changes to the game that I love. Only time will tell, but for now, I will be left scratching my head and wondering what the heck GW is doing with this game!

Sorry rant over...

TK

Heavy Gear Blitz! Say What???

So,

What the heck is this you may ask, well I asked this of myself as I was walking out of my local store this weekend. Well, I have had my eye on this game for a long time, in fact about a year ago my buddy Mike G brought this over to my place to give it a spin, and I liked the game.

You see, way back when, I played a little game called Battletech (or Battle robots for those old enough to remember that!) I loved Battletech, I collected a ton of Mechs and had just about every source book and novelsthat FASA put out. The only problem was that my game group never really got involved with it. So the only time I got to play was in local Battletech tourneys. Soon I had shelved the game and moved onto something else.

Well when Mike G brought over Heavy Gear a year ago, I thought why not try it out. I fell in love with the game and was ready to jump into it with both feet. But life has a funny way of changing ones priorities. So alas I did not get into Heavy Gear.

Then this past weekend, while at my local shop, I kept eyeing the starter sets. So I decided what the hell, I have the money I better jump into this now. So I took the plunge and brought home the Northern Army starter box as well as a set of counters for the game.

So what did I get, well I am glad you asked, inside the box you will find two rulebooks, Locked and Loaded and the Field manual. You also get a set of dice and a tape measure. Also there are 4 Jaguar gears, 4 Hunter Gears and 2 Grizzly Gears as well as 2 drones and optional weapons.


The nice thing is that there seems to be a ton of support from the company (Dream Pod 9) . The other thing is that the scale of the game is 1/144th or N scale, so there is a ton of terrain out there (Model Railroad stuff!).

So stay tuned while I suit up into a Heavy Gear and give the game a whirl and building and painting some Gears.

TK