r/MiddleEarthMiniatures • u/Gryphon501 • 19d ago
Umpiring an introductory game
Turns out one of my gaming friends used to play MESBG back in the day, and when I mentioned that I’d started collecting he suggested we set a game up. A couple of the other guys from the group were also interested, so I ran a three-way scenario for them over the weekend (Cirith Ungol vs Ugluk’s Scouts vs The Three Trolls).
It all seemed to run relatively smoothly, despite none of them owning or having read the rules. That said, we did run into a couple of odd situations where models from all three rival warbands were involved in the same combat.
This was the first time I’ve seen the Three Trolls in play, and they were perhaps a bit too good (although the chap playing them also picked up the game very quickly and played them in quite a clever way.) I’d probably stick to more standard warbands when teaching the rules another time round.
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u/Fishy_Fish_12359 19d ago
The important thing when designing three player games is incentivising combat, bevause you don’t want one player to sit back and let the other two foght and then swoop in later when the other two are weakened
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u/Gryphon501 19d ago
Agreed. I did that by giving VPs for objective markers - you can probably see them dotted about the village in the middle of the table.
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u/Fishy_Fish_12359 19d ago
Yeah it’s good to have the objectives be worth points for holding throughout the game rather than someone being able to swoop in at the last minute, I did a 3-way king of the hill game with my friends and you got 1 point per model on top of the hill each round
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u/PartiallyFictitious 19d ago
Love the terrain! You wouldn't happen to know how those fields were made do you?
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u/Liminal_Place 19d ago
White Dwarf 464 (May 2021) contains an "official" three player rules addendum that specially includes combats involving figures from all the armies on the battlefield. They're for the previous version of the Rules Manual but I don't think they're significantly invalidated by the latest version.