The Battle of Five Armies by Larry Smith A LORE Product, Division of JMJ Enterprises

The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy by Tolkien has become one of the most interesting areas for wargamers to enter. There is a whole range of miniature figures available and more on the way. This is an effort to take a battle from The Hobbit, and convert it to a boxed game. This game can best be described in one word, Frustrating!

Let me explain. In the first place there is a great interest in Tolkien. His books sell almost as fast as they are printed. It is therefore an area where a great many people could enjoy trying their hand at recreating one of the battles. The "Battle of Five Armies" is one of the earlier battles, and is not too complicated with "heros". As such it should make a rather straight foreward, playable game.

To begin with, the graphics and playing pieces are at best, fair. The playing pieces are made from thin cardboard, and are very hard to handle. It is best to remount them on thicker pieces of cardboard. The map is rather plain, light tan, with thin blue lines for the river, and one blue hex for a pond. This can be improved through the use of a couple of magic markers.

The rules are the main area where the game really fails. They are very ambiguous. An example is morale check. The rules tell you when to roll for the entire army, but fail to describe how a stack fails this check. In addition, the rules state that "those that fail have a 50/50 chance of running off the board. It is left up to the players to decide how to resolve the 50/50 comparison, and whether running off the board means they continue for every turn to head for the board edge, or try to recover each turn until they do so."

Another ambiguity is hillsides. The rules state that there is a 50% chance to slide off of these. The rules further state "if the unit crosses a path hex on the way a 1 or 2 on a six sided die will stop it there." But since the rules also state that the units must also move toward the nearest clear land space, there is no apparent way of ever crossing a path when sliding.

The rules say to set up units on the "Southern" and "Eastern" arms of the mountain. There is no Southern army, it is the "Western" arm.

In some rules additions, published in Panzerfaust, for elves it is stated "Minus one on all combat rolls", but then in parenthesis he has (ic 9's become 10's). Which do you believe?

Some other items of consideration which have come up, and do not appear to be covered at all are:

(1) If an Orc (Goblin) is killed while riding a Warg, is the Warg also destroyed?

(2) May a unit be attacked more than once per turn, by stacks attacking from different hexes?

So, to boil all this down to a "nutshell", the game is frustrating, because it takes an extremely interesting subject, packages it, then makes the rules of play so ambiguous, and full of little indiscrepencies, that players tear out their hair in anguish trying to resolve all the little controversies. The solution, I believe is for the publishing of a complete new set of revised rules, not more corrections. The playing pieces should be made of thicker stock, and a bit more.color be added to the map. Impassible terrain should be marked clearly on the map.

This has the potential for being one of the "classic" games, if a little more attention is paid to detail in the rules.