Armies of The Hobbit

The companion book to Armies of The Lord of the Rings, this book is understandably a bit thinner.

Because while the movies where just as long, the sourcebook was only a fraction of Tolkien's masterwork after all.

Coming in at 160 pages (that's 80 less then it's companion tome), it does feature the same style and structure, filled with pages of gorgeous movie stills and miniature pictures.

The largest section of the book is once again for the army lists of course, as it features 20 lists for you to play, divided into 13 Good and 7 Evil lists.  Now mind you, two of those are one figure lists though.  Wanderers in The Wild allows you to take Thrain the Broken only, while the Desolator of The North features only our beloved (and magnificent model) Smaug.

Now, this book also features two of the strongest lists in the game, with on the one hand The Iron Hills dwarves of Dain (the chariot alone takes 4 pages of rules!!!) which are little tanks that can deal a lot of punishment, and on the other hand the Azog's Legion with it's very strong leaders and heroes in it.

The next part of the book are the narrative scenarios for the forces from this book, 11 in total to try your hand at, going from the coming of Smaug right up to the Battle of the Five Armies.

The final section is the alliance matrix of course, to check your possible alliances...

Now, there is one big downside to this tome, and it is not the fault of the rules or the book itself.  A lot of the The Hobbit material is produced now by Forge World (the Nine, the Iron Hills, Gundabad, ...), more so then mostly some minor heroes for the The Lord of the Rings book.  So expect to pay a premium price for some forces out there if you want to play them!

But another well made, gorgeous to look at army book!  Next, I'll be starting to type up the reviews of the new campaign companions for the game that have been released so far...