Flies and Spiders

On Friday, Arthur and I hosted a Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, the Flies and Spiders scenario from chapter 8 of the Hobbit.  The scenario provided by GW is inspired by the Peter Jackson film, where a group of elves from the Woodland Realm led by Legolas and Tauriel come along to rescue the dwarves.  We decided we weren't interested in any of that nonsense, so for our game, we simply had the dwarves resist wave after wave of Mirkwood spiders.  Victory for the dwarves simply depended on surviving 12 turns.  Any dead spiders were replaced at the start of the next turn.

Photos were from my phone - they are what they are!

Here is the initial set up.  Dwarves are in a clearing in the woods, shown by the brown felt.

13 dwarves and one hobbit!  For the scenario, we divided Thorin's company between four players.  We tried to keep them in family groups as much as possible.  Arthur took Thorin and his nephews Fili and Kili.  Kevin had Bifur, Bofur and Bombur.  We had two other players, Lorenzo and his mate, who took Ori, Dori and Nori, Oin and Gloin, Balin and Dwalin, and Bilbo.

Here are the spiders, played by me.  I only used 10 of the big ones, the smaller ones were just there for show.

Here is how the game started.  As this was a new game for most of the participants, I kept it simple to start with, and simply had the spiders attack from all sides at once.  As the dwarves were generally much better fighters than the spiders, this gave the players a chance to figure out the rules mechanics before taking any real damage.

Most models had two wounds, so we made good use of my red cross wound markers to track damage.

In addition to their venomous bite attack, the spiders could also shoot webs.  We used the 'victims' from the spider set to mark any dwarf that got webbed.  Any dwarf that was trapped in a web could free himself by rolling a 6 at the end of the turn.  We made a house rule mid-game that another figure could cut a victim free of webs by spending one full turn next to the trapped figure, and take no other action that turn.

After spending most of the game in a repetitive fight-die-fight again mode, as each spider ended up fighting 2 or more dwarves and getting crunched each time, I switched things up for the last couple of turns.  The spiders took advantage of being much faster than the dwarves to gang up on Thorin, Fili and Kili.  They managed to kill Fili, then piled on and killed Thorin as well.  So at the end, the dwarves won the game as they outlasted the spiders, but at the cost of their leader, Thorin.  Will they rally around Kili as the last survivor of the line of Thrain?

Or maybe seek the help of the Elvenking, and see if his elves have the skill, or even the desire, to resuscitate Thorin.