In the latest box set for the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game, Wulf leads the Hill Tribesmen to assault Edoras. But will the forces of Rohan be able to fight off the approaching horde during the War of the Rohirrim an the Battle of Edoras?

Today, the brand new launch box for the new edition of the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game is up for pre order, alongside the new edition Rules Manual and a host of awesome new models. In this full unboxing and review we’ll be checking out the contents of the box, seeing what you get and building and painting them all to see what they look like in the flesh. We’ll also be having a full deep dive into the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game Rules Manual to see just what has changed in the latest edition, if anything has affected army construction and offer some insight into people who are new to the game and are looking to get started.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us free early review copies in order to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not order your Middle-Earth goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed some videos covering the Battle of Edoras box, the Rules Manual and the Forge World resin releases alongside this box, which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So gather up your warbands and get ready for war as we head once more back to Middle-Earth… Starting with the Battle of Edoras box.

Just a warning, there may be (very minor) spoilers in here for the new War of the Rohirrim film – so if you want to enjoy the film with no prior knowledge then make sure to check this article out after you’ve watched it!

Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game – Lord of the Rings War of the Rohirrim: Battle of Edoras Unboxing

23 years ago, back during Games Day 2001 my jaw hit the floor as Games Workshop shared the news that they were making a Lord of the Rings miniatures game to be released alongside The Fellowship of the Ring. Fast forwards to Christmas that year and most people I knew had the Fellowship of the Ring boxed set, or the various miniatures sets on their xmas lists!

This was followed each year by sets based on each of the films, and this was repeated again with a brand new edition when the Hobbit films got released.

It’s now been 6 years since the last full edition of the game that accompanied the Battle of Pelanar Fields box, but with Lord of the Rings War of the Rohirrim in cinemas in just 2 weeks, it’s finally time for a brand new edition of the game.

Games Workshop have done some brilliant starter boxes over the years, and Battle of Edoras is the latest one. If you’ve not picked up any Games Workshop boxed sets before, or perhaps you last did when the Lord of the Rings films were in cinemas, then this is essentially a way of collecting two starter armies alongside some terrain and the core rule book for playing the game. Let’s take a closer look at what is inside.

The first thing that is going to jump out to most people are the awesome new miniatures in the set. I think it’s fair to say that some of the existing Middle-Earth kits are a little dated, and in particular the plastic infantry for each faction. These make up the bulk of your army and will be the models you’re painting the most of. During the previous edition of the game we got a lot of metal and resin models redone in plastic, but something that people have been crying out for are new plastic troops. After all, some of those kits are over 20 years old, and can often feel the reason that new players don’t want to jump onboard with the game.

The new plastic Rohan are miles ahead of the old ones from the Two Towers boxed set, while still keeping the same feel and aesthetics. These are not so much a re-imagining as more being able to properly do them justice with modern technology and sculpting. They are a little more fragile and tricky to build – so make sure you take your time with them, and there is somewhat of a balancing act here between single part and low detail or multi part and high detail, but I’m glad Games Workshop have decided to properly do them jutice!

On the other side of the box we have the Hill Tribesmen, who match the visual style of the existing Lord of the Rings Dunland range. These guys have quite a lot of customisation compared to the Rohan figures, with multiple different weapon and head options. This means that you’re going to have a nice varied horde without it looking like the same few guys duplicated.

The real stars of the show however are the new plastic heroes in the box. These are incredible with both mounted and on foot options for all four of the characters. While I don’t know much about the characters yet, having not seen the new film yet, all 4 of them look ace and I’m looking forward to learning more about them!

The box also has two Rohan House building sets in it. This is a really modular kit that was released some time ago but allows for a lot of different structures to be built from it. While you can use a single set to build a standard looking house, it really comes into it’s own when you combine multiple sets together in order to craft even bigger buildings – with a representation of Edoras being pretty easy to do if you have enough kits. The two that come in the box come with some fences and barrels too, giving you enough terrain to populate the mat that comes in the box. This playing surface is 3 foot squared and is designed as a tool to learn the game before progressing to full size battles (Don’t worry – battlefields for the game are still 4×4 or 6×4)

As a starter set, the box has all the other goodies you would expect to see, from dice (in two colours to make combats easy to work out), to a plastic range marker and a great quick reference guide that talks you through each phase of the game with all the relevant tables and stats that you need to access on the fly during your games.

Also in the box is a 46 page Battle of Edoras booklet that contains the scenarios, profiles and assemley instructions. One thing to note here is that this is very much framed as a “How to play Middle-Earth” starter booklet. There’s 4 scenarios here that slowly introduce different concepts and gradually increase the sizes of the armies until you are using everything that comes in the box.

This is amazing for new players, but people returning to the Strategy Battle Game may long for more than this. I have a feeling that we’ll see a full War of the Rohirrim supplement get released in the new year after the theatrical run of the film with more characters and scenarios from the movie itself.

The same goes for the profiles in this book too, while we do get the stats for every model in the box, we don’t get any points values here. You’ll need to pick up Armies of the Lord of the Rings if you want to have points to use these for matched play games. It’s also worth noting that the book just has the profiles of the stuff in the box, non of the models released alongside this box have any profiles in here.

All that said though, this is a decent introduction to the game and is a nice way of teaching someone new to the game how to play and explain the core concepts. The fact it introduces more rules as the scenarios continue means that someone won’t be overwhelmed in game 1 and they will naturally pick up the relevant rules as the games get bigger and more complex.

So what about if you want to take a further step into trying out the full game? Well the box also contains the brand new Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game Rules Manual which contains the full and updated rules for the new edition. Let’s take a look at that next!

Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game Rules Manual (2024 Edition) Review

Out of all Games Workshop’s games I think its safe to say that Middle-Earth hasn’t really had any massive sweeping changes to it’s rules over it’s lifetime. While we’ve slowly seem more rules introduced through the initial 3 editions with the original film releases, the editions that followed mostly tweaked and tidied things, rather than the massive changes we’ve seen in Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar.

This is still true for the latest edition of the game. Don’t worry, this is still the same Middle-Earth SBG that you know and love. Are there changes? Yeah, sure there are – but they are more amendments and refinements rather than mixing up how the game works or altering things to the point that the game no longer feels like it used to.

There’s a couple of bigger ones. Firstly, priority rolls have changed a little as now the winner of the roll of gets to pick if they want to go first or second. Going first or second has a massive impact in the ME:SBG in large part due to how the game operates. Unlike most other Games Workshop games, where one player will so their movement, shooting and fighting before moving to the other player to do theirs, in the Strategy Battle Game players will both do their movement one after the other before they both shoot then both fight.

This leads to some interesting scenarios where one player may be trying to close the distance to a target, but then the other player can simply move their models out of range or into cover again. Likewise being able to shoot or fight first has big impacts on the game. While there’s some control over this with Heroic Abilities that allow your heroes and some nearby troops to activate out of sequence, there is still a lot of power in being able to pick to go first or second based on what your plans are for that turn. I really like this change as it makes winning the priority roll-off a lot more meaningful and gives players lots of fresh options.

Another big change is in regards to shooting and “in the way” tests. In the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game, when a target is obscured by something (be it another model or some terrain) you have to make “in the way” tests to see if the arrow has struck something other than it’s intended target. Previously this would be a range of values based on how difficult they are to pass, so some light foliage might pass on a 3+, a wall a 4+ and some heavy fortifications a 5+. This has been simplified massively now to just require a 4+ to pass anything in the way. I don’t feel the different values added much to the game and just led to lots of checking the rulebook in unusual situations to check how easy it was for the arrow to pass, now it’s just a flat 4+ which will speed up gameplay without getting rid of the flavour of the system.

Special strikes are a thing of the past. Previously, certain weapons could make special strikes to represent the different type of attacks that could be done with that weapon – This has been removed which makes the game much quicker to resolve. Different weapon types still have different rules – so Two Handed weapons still give you a minus to your duel roll but +1 to your strike for example, all that has gone are the special strikes for things such as clubs and axes that tended to bog the game down a little.

Another thing that has gone are channeled versions of spells. Previously heroes could use a heroic channeling action in order to gain a stronger version of spells. This is now removed completely, with all spells just having the same basic version. Heroic Channeling still exists, though now in a different form – this time it allows you to count the channeling roll you have made as a 6. So for example if you had a spell with a cast value of 7 then you could spend two will to cast it and spend a point of might to Heroic channel to make sure that at least one of the two dice you roll is a 6, meaning you are guaranteed to get your spell off. Again I think this makes the game operate much quicker and gives you another interesting consideration with spell casting rather than just having access to a better version.

There’s a lot of new things too – the character profiles have been reworked with a lot of fight values shifting out over a bigger range to give more degrees of combat prowess across characters, and the statline itself has also been reworked. Fight has now been split into separate Fight and Shoot stats, and Courage is now a target number such as 3+ rather than having to do some mental gymnastics to compare your stat and roll against a value of 10.

There’s a new stat in the game too – Intelligence. We’ll see more examples of how this works fully once we have the army profiles (We’ve not seen any of the “Armies of” books at the time of writing this review) but there’s some good examples of what it does listed within the book. So for example a scenario might revolve around your warriors trying to find trinkets and items – in these scenarios they would have to pass an intelligence test before they are able to identify and pick them up. Another example is interacting with invisible models – you are now able to make an intelligence test when you are near an invisible number in order to spot them and be able to interact with them. This again feels very flavourful that someone wearing the One Ring might be able to sneak past a troll, but maybe not Gandalf.

The biggest change in the new edition is probably army construction however. While we’ve not yet seen them ourselves, the book states that armies now operate more like the Legendary Legions in previous Middle-Earth suppliments. So rather than a “Rohan” army list, you’d instead have a couple of different ones – one to represent them at Helm’s Deep, one to represent them at the Pellanor Fields and another to represent the forces seen in War of the Rohirrim. This ensures that the armies seen on the table are reflective of the lore and feel like the forces we see in the films and books. I’m more of a narrative gamer at heart, so perhaps this affects me less than others, but I always wanted to make sure that my armies represented a certain moment in the films, with heroes who would have been present at that time. I can’t help but feel that sometimes the extra freedom of a less tightly knit army list sometimes led to some eyebrow raising moments with characters and units that would not have interacted with each other during the films such as Boromir with his banner in Minas Tirith livery fighting alongside Gandalf the White.

One thing that people may not realise is that with this change to the army construction mechanics is that allies are now a thing of the past too – instead these will be represented within the army lists that had a mixed force at that point of time. So for example, the Helm’s Deep list we talked about earlier will most likely have the Three Hunters and Elves all available as options, but those choices would not be allowed in a Pellanor Fields army as they didn’t fight together in the films or books.

There’s lots of scope here for Games Workshop releasing more lists, and I full expect us to be able to represent any key scene or battle from the books and films as the edition continues. Again, I think this stops any silly interactions, and lore breaking moments in our armies, as I feel that Middle-Earth works at it’s best when you fully lean into the narrative and try and capture moments from the films and books.

The majority of the rest of the rules are the same as they were in previous editions – There’s a few things reworded or tweaked and some new special rules for example, but all of this is a way of tightening and futureproofing the rules alongside the reworked profiles (When we get our hands on the new “Armies of” books we’ll take a full deep dive into what has changed on them, but word on the grapevine is that every profile has changed in some way)

One thing that the book has done brilliantly is making things a lot clearer and easier to follow. In the previous book the rules for War beasts, chariots, monsters and siege engines were some of the messiest and harder to follow – they often needed you to play through them a couple of times to get your head around them, and much looking up rules even after then. In the new edition all these sections of the book have been expanded out with clearer explanations, diagrams and detail clear enough to follow without bogging things down. This is a very welcome change and makes learning the rules much easier to digest.

Forge World Characters

Before we dive into our final thoughts, I just thought we’d show off some of the new models that are getting released alongside the box.

First up we have Helm Hammerhand, Wraith of the Hornburg – who looks suitably epic! Jay is painting this one up for the site, and I’m looking forward to seeing him finished

Next up is Lord Thorne, who is a traitor Rohan general. Interestingly this allows you to take Rohan units within your army – I have a lot of the old metal Dunland warrior kits, and I reckon this would be a nice way of using them!

Finally we have Freca, Lord of the West-March who we see get punched by Helm Hammerhand in the trailer for War of the Rohirrim!

All three of these models are ace, and pretty reasonable at £19 each too.

Summary

So what do I think about the Battle of Edoras box and the brand new edition of the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game? The SBG has long been one of my favourite Games Workshop games, but I’ve found that the dated models sometimes lead to people turning their nose up at it.

Battle of Edoras however gives the Middle-Earth range a massive shot in the arm with some amazing new models that are up there with any recent Games Workshop releases. Not only are the models gorgeous, but the box is also great value with scenery included and the full hard back rulebook.

From a rules point of view this is very much the same game I grew up with 20+ years ago, but with the rough edges sanded off and lovingly crafted into something that is clearer, easier to follow and quicker to play without taking away anything of what makes the game special. You can tell that a lot of love has gone into the game and I have high hopes for the future of the game from here.

We’ve had a couple of quiet years for the SBG, and I suspect part of that is due to the change of ownership of Middle-Earth behind the scenes with the Embracer Group acquisition. I suspect some of the things we’ve seen such as units that do not exist in the films and books moving to legends is in part due to this, and I suspect that if there was any doubt to the continued success of the range that we would not have seen this new edition.

The future is very bright for all Lord of the Rings fans, and I really hope we see the kind of quarterly support that we see for other Specialist Games, with new kits every 3 or 4 months and books getting released each year to support those ranges.

If you’re new to the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game then this is a great time to get onboard too – We know Warner Bros have a plan to put out regular new films, and that in turn might lead to a new golden age for the SBG, with new core kits and updates to old ranges. It might be 20 years ago since we last had it, but I’ve got a feeling that we may well get another wave of Tolkien love that might lead to people outside the hobby picking up kits to just paint and enjoy – and that will be something that really pushes the Strategy Battle Game to a place it[‘s not been in for a long time.

The Lord of the Rings war of the Rohirrim Battle of Edoras box is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 14th December (The day after the film is in cinemas!)

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

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