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Middle Earth SBG – Muster the Rohirrim!

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It has certainly been nice to have a week off work and while the week has not gone the way I would have planned it, I did enjoy doing a bit of gaming and painting. I continued work on Eomer for my LOTR display project and I’m really happy with how he is looking. I’m also thrilled to have made so much progress this week without necessarily pouring hours into painting to achieve it. I think that is the upside to working on smaller minis like this. They take way less time to complete and it seems like this project is going to fit within my patience level for display painting much better than the last couple of Warhammer projects.

As you can see, the front of him is more done than not! Unfortunately, there is a lot of work to be done on the back so it will probably take a little over a week to finish. I was a bit worried that the scale mail and/or the chainmail would give me some trouble as they’re both tiny but thankfully, everything came together and while the colors are brighter than in the movie, I think I’ve got a scheme here that is still very much true to the Peter Jackson films. I’m excited to get the rest of the mini done and then to see what I can do with the display base. This project is shaping up really well and is likely going to be the best display piece I’ve done for LOTR certainly.

On the gaming side of things, I got a chance to play Hellboy: The Board Game over last week and I’m happy to say that I had a good time with it. I’ll probably write a review of the game one day because I enjoy doing that sort of thing but I can share a few thoughts after my initial game.

The case (or scenario) that I played was pretty obviously a tutorial for the game but I didn’t feel like it dampened the fun. Hellboy is a Dungeon Crawler board game and I would say it is basically a light miniatures wargame since you’re either fighting, healing, or trying to get clues. As a result, it wasn’t too hard to figure out how to play though I did make rules mistakes and there are some things in the game that aren’t intuitive. You kind of have to fumble through them until they make sense and even then I had a few questions about the enemy characters and if I was controlling them properly or not.

All of the characters play differently and were fairly enjoyable to use. While I played an Easy level difficulty case, one of my characters did get knocked out in the boss fight so it wasn’t a total cakewalk. I’ll be curious to say how other cases play as the board was really small for this one and I wouldn’t mind if the game has a bit more complexity and obstacles to throw at you in the “real” cases either. I would also say the game is a little light on lore/mood setting, especially compared to a game like Mansions of Madness, which does that very well. On the upside, I think that this game is pretty replayable and that was a big issue with Mansions of Madness for me and why I eventually got rid of it. I think the most impressive thing about Hellboy: The Board Game is that the bosses “behave” or attack you based on a deck of cards. So you don’t know don’t know exactly what will happen each turn. I know some other board games use this mechanic and its something I really enjoyed.

Surprisingly, I nearly didn’t have enough frog miniatures painted so I’m much more motivated now to finish those and some other little marker pieces that were used in the game too. I don’t own any of Mantic’s scenery which is compatible with this game but I think that would be a nice upgrade too when I get around to it. The more you can bring a game to life, the more immersive and fun it can be to play or that’s my thinking anyway.

41 thoughts on “Middle Earth SBG – Muster the Rohirrim!”

    1. Thank you for the kind words, mate! I tend to enjoy painting minis as close to their “real world” equivalents as I can so I’m glad you think the color scheme is matching the movies. It was definitely nice to put the frogs through their paces this week as well.

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  2. Eomer is looking great! I do find it interesting how you describe painting one side, then the other rather than all of the (say) scale armour on the model before moving to a different element.
    Good to hear that the Hellboy game plays well. Keep it up in these posts and you might be able to convince me to crack the shrinkwrap and paint something from it! 😀

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    1. Thank you, mate! I’m not sure what the standard practice is but it doesn’t really bother me to bounce around to different color schemes as I paint a display piece. I do try to do a couple of the same parts at a time (like I may do all of the NMM metal parts at once, if I can) but I tend to find that if I try to do too many different sections of the mini at once, I make mistakes like forgetting a layer and it isn’t easy to go back and fix those. Hence the slower and more compartmentalized process.

      As far as Hellboy goes, I don’t have a ton of experience playing Dungeon Crawlers so I’d be curious to see what you think of the game when you get around to it. I’m not sure that Hellboy is especially innovative and probably cribs a lot of ideas and mechanics from Warhammer Quest since it has the same designer for Silver Tower anyway. I don’t own any of those games so its new to me anyway!

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    1. Thank you for the kind words as always, John! The original Hellboy movie is a classic and I’m glad to hear it held up for you. I should really give it a re-watch myself one of these days!

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  7. Outstanding work on Eomer, love the way you’ve done that armour. Like Azazel I’m interested that you seem to do everything on one side of the model then turn it round rather than working on say, all the cloth or all the skin. I think I would struggle to make everything match up. Obviously the results speak for themselves, so whatever your reasons he looks excellent! Looks like you had fun with Hellboy too, always nice to see a game being played with such well painted models and I couldn’t agree more with your final sentence.

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    1. Thank you for the kind words, mate! I sometimes hear people say that they struggle to remember how they painted particular things and for me, that is almost never a problem, thankfully. I guess I’ve painted long enough that I can generally guess at what I did or with GW paints, its not too hard to ID what colors someone used to paint something. While there are some paint colors I rarely use from GW, for the most part, I can usually guess what they used to paint something, which is good because the information they share on paints is rarely accurate to the finished models by the ‘eavy Metal team.

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  8. Eomer is looking excellent so far Jeff, and an impressive amount done this week. Nice to see your Hellboy models having an outing, and couldn’t agree more about scenery bringing a game to life.

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    1. Thank you, Dave! Having a week off certainly offers some perks. Though I’ll be paying for it on Monday, I reckon! I’ll certainly have to see if I can’t improve my scenery options for Hellboy as things are a bit too flat for my tastes currently.

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  10. Eomer is looking pretty amazing already. The face is just great! I haven’t played Hellboy, but read most of the comics that Mignola drew and watched all three movies. I’m guessing Descent or Gloomhaven was the first to have random boss/monster tactics in a dungeon crawler. Out of the two, I only played Gloomhaven once so I can’t completely say. I’ve played the D&D dungeon crawler boardgames, and if memory serves all the monsters react the same.

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    1. Thank you, sir! I’m a fan of the Hellboy movies and comics as well and I would say the game captures the feel of the source material fairly well. I can believe that Descent and Gloomhaven likely are among the first games to have boss/monster tactics. I’ve heard that Kingdom Death: Monster does a lot with that sort of the thing too. One of these days, I’d like to check it out but I have too many games to play as it is and Kingdom Death is an expensive one to boot!

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  11. Eomer’s face is most impressive. Skin tones are great and I like his eyes. The armour is also well done with good contrast and definition. I would second, that painting towards a goal, may it be a contest deadline or a boardgame session really helps with motivation.

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    1. Thanks, mate! I think the eyes could be even better but the rest of the mini is turning out well so I can’t complain too much. I enjoy painting for gaming purposes but when you have a ton to do, you sometimes need an extra bit of motivation to get some tedious or repetitive tasks done.

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  13. Really nice job on the facial hair! Going to have and wait to see if you do the helmet or maybe the shield for his left hand?

    Looking at the sprue for this figure, congrats on just putting it together!

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    1. Thank you! I can go ahead and spoil that I’ve committed to doing the shield. I think the helmet in hand is great for a display piece but there are some details on it, like the gold crest on the helmet which looked too hard to paint NMM to me so that is why I elected to go with the shield.

      For what its worth, I’ve had better luck putting Eomer together than I did with Theoden. Neither are as easy as they should be though, to be honest! Assembling GW plastics definitely is an art form in and of itself nowadays.

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    1. That is very kind of you to say, mate! Watch the first Hellboy movie, if you can. It is a great movie and I bet you’ll really enjoy it. The second one is good too but it is very much a Guillermo Del Toro movie which is not to everyone’s taste.

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  15. Glad HellBoy has finally made it to the table and even better that you actually liked the game. It’d be pretty disappointing to paint all those game pieces and then not like the actual game.

    Eomer is coming along exceptionally well. Looks like you had a good week. 😀

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    1. That is the truth! I hope that I will like it as I play it more but I have some painting to do before I’m ready to play again.

      Thanks for the kind words on Eomer as well and not working isn’t too bad as it turns out! 🙂

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  16. Mate, I think Eomer looks incredible so far. The reds work really well, as does the slightly rusty chainmail, and his skin and hair are really well done. Nice work!

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    1. Thank you, mate! I’m really glad you’re liking Eomer. I’m having a lot of fun painting him and look forward to finishing him up relatively soon!

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  18. That is a fantastic job! I’ve just recently stumbled across your site and was wondering how you have gone about doing the MESBG narrative scenarios as a solo player?

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    1. Thank you for your kind words and for stopping by! Your question is a good one and there is a lot I can say but I’ll try to be concise. There is definitely a substantial commitment in terms of time and resources to play MESBG solo so I want to acknowledge that upfront. Many narrative scenarios require a lot of minis and terrain to play so you have to be willing to put in the hobby time to get everything on the table first. If you already have a collection of minis and/or terrain, that will help with this though. I’m a slower painter and I tend to obsess over the details and so I found the fairly heavy hobby lift required to play each scenario to be the hardest and that’s ultimately why I moved on to other games. Having said that, if you can crank minis and terrain out to a tabletop standard in short order, then you can definitely make it work. Other people I know who play the game solo do just that.

      As far as playing the game goes, what I did is mentally is I tried to play each side as close as I thought they would act in the books/movies. For the good side, which usually has heroes in it, they fight bravely, aren’t afraid to commit to challenges by the enemy, and generally try to play smart. Many of the Evil factions in the game have more models but fewer heroic actions so they try to leverage their numbers to overwhelm the good side. This isn’t always the case of course, but happens in quite a few narrative scenarios. By trying to maintain the theme of each side for a given scenario, while still using tactics that I think fit them well too, I generally found that the games were pretty fun and satisfying. Its more about telling a good story then it is about one side beating the other or having better tactics.

      Having said that, many scenarios are imbalanced in that the Good or Evil side has an advantage and tend to win more often than the other in some scenarios. This usually fits the narrative of the books/movies but not always and is something I wanted to mention before you try playing solo because it is the type of thing that bothers some people. To put it as simply as I can, the narrative scenarios are not points matches and so you can’t expect them to be perfectly balanced like those usually are.

      I hope this info helps and I’m happy to explain more or try to answer any other questions you have. There are several other online friends that I’ve made who got a lot more MESBG games played than I managed and if you go to One.Ring.co.uk and check out the Battle Reports, you can find how other people got on with specific scenarios, which can help you narrow down which ones you want to play as well.

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      1. I appreciate this response! I do have the means of playing solo with a nice assortment of minis/terrains, but was trying to figure out how to implement enemy movement/ai etc. Your comment really helps and I’ll also check out that link.

        Thanks again!

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      2. You’re very welcome! It sounds like you should be able to hit the ground running which is great. One Ring is a fantastic place for inspiration as well so I hope it helps. I hope you enjoy playing solo when you get around to it! 🙂

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      3. Thanks! Hopefully here soon. Funnily enough just by searching solo on one ring I ran into your posts there as well haha. But I’m definitely getting a good feeling for what I want from my solo games!

        Definitely going to continue going through your other posts.

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      4. I’m not surprised to hear it! When I was more active on One Ring, I used to get quite a few page views from the forums. You’ve probably already came across their threads but DaveT and Voyager360 both play MESBG solo and completed large scale campaigns, which is more than I managed so I’d definitely point you towards those threads as well. I think I’m better at the hobbying and painting part than I am at actually getting games in, unfortunately for me! 🙂

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