My partner Jenny and I recently started playing a series of small(-ish) battles so I could teach her the rules of the game (and re-familiarise myself with them myself after a hiatus of 10-15 years - I cannot believe how long it has been since the original game came out!)

Unfortunately most of my miniatures are as-yet unpainted as I left them based and undercoated and only recently unearthed them during a house move. I am working on that!

I am also working on a series of modular terrain boards that will incorporate a lot of the old plastic GW terrain and the huge fortress (I have the equivalent of three Warhammer Fortresses plus some extra walls awaiting construction, which at some point I would like to build into a rough approximation of Helm's Deep only much larger...

Anyway, the first game involved only basic Infantry troops and a Cave Troll.





As it happened she completely blindsided me with some amazingly good tactics and a very bold battle plan (I thought girls were not supposed to be good at this sort of stuff!? Joke!) and I was hard pressed for a few turns as her manoeuvring made half of my men redundant and have to spend the first four or five turns slogging across the battlefield to get into a better position...




At length my brave lads managed to bring down the Troll through weight of numbers and a series of rather unlucky dice rolls on Jenny's part and the game was mine.



So I took it in the end, thanks to some horrifically lucky dice rolling and some strategically placed defences... but it was very touch and go there and we both had a really good time.

The following day we played with cavalry too, she had Easterlings and Haradrim backed up by Haradrim Raiders against my Men of Minas Tirith and Riders of Rohan and she absolutely nailed me. Did not get any photos of that game.

All in all we are both really getting into the hobby again. We have played a few more games which I will describe in more detail later, but each time with some new rules and features (Heroes in the third, Mumak in the fourth). We did not really play to points values or a specific scenario, more just throwing random groups of miniatures at each other to get a grasp of how to play and what could do what.