Winning the 2024 award for the longest name for a miniatures game, we have The Lord of the Rings Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game – The War of the Rohirrim™ – Battle of Edoras™, Games Workshop’s latest version of a miniatures game set in a world of Hobbits, Ents and Trolls, and one of the few things they do that isn’t part of their Warhammer brand. GW has been making models for Tolkien’s world since the ’80s and writing rules for those models since 2001. The Lord of the Rings Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game – The War of the Rohirrim™ – Battle of Edoras™ (BoE for short) is the latest iteration of this game.

BoE is a big box, the sort of thing that turns up during the gifting season and makes a lasting impression; seriously, if you have a  young Lord of Rings nerd in your life and you get them this for Christmas, it’s going to be a thing they talk about for years. Inside the box, we get fifty-six plastic models, which you’ll have to assemble and paint. On the good guy side, we get Haleth and Háma, Princes of Rohan, both on foot and horseback and twenty-four Warriors of Rohan. We get 24 Hill Tribesmen and their leaders, High Lord Wulf and General Targ, on the opposing side. Both leaders come with or without horses, and all the general troops have access to a selection of weapons, including bows and pointy sticks.

These models assemble easily, though they are smaller than GW’s usual type.  If you’re used to snapping together big, chunky Space Marines, you may need to take a little more care here, but they are pretty robust and quite pretty. As you may have guessed, the set is inspired by The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim animated movie. This means that both sides are humans; no monsters or goblins and the like. They’re very finely detailed and fun to paint, but if you were after a box of Goblins, you might want to look elsewhere.

We also get some brilliant terrain: two houses with fences, barrels, etc. It’s a really nice kit in its own right, and you can see these flying off the shelves for a variety of modelling projects. We also get some good dice, a hinged range ruler and a glossy ‘poster’ for the game mat. It’s a miniatures game, so you probably have a better playing surface, but it’s nice.

This set comes with a big heavy rulebook, as well as a book full of Battle of Edoaras specific scenarios, a reference pamphlet and the usual ‘how to put the models together’ guide.  The Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game has been consistently good as a rule set for years, and Games Workshop is wise enough not to tinker with it too much. Partially, this is because it wasn’t broken (so it didn’t need fixing), but also because of all of Games Workshop’s games, this is the one that feels most like a more traditional wargame and has its own fanbase who will just collectively ignore any rules they don’t like.  

So, what we get is a neater-looking rulebook, with better references and colour-coded chapters, and some of the more fiddly rules (mostly connected to magic and similar special powers) getting some smoothing out. We have a new stat, intelligence, which seems to have very narrow uses, aimed mostly at reducing the need for special rules for every odd thing in Middle-earth.  This isn’t a big change to the rules; it’s more one little change that removes the need for lots of tiny rule changes. To be clear, the changes don’t actually affect the scenarios in The Lord of the Rings Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game – The War of the Rohirrim™ – Battle of Edoras™ box; it’s a minor update. It’s the sort of thing that existing fans of the game will adopt with no effort for a smoother game.

Over at the STARBURST Gaming Thunderdome, we would like to see games like this come up for review. (Thank you to Games Workshop for sending it over.)  This new box captures a lot of the great things about fantasy wargaming: good models, fun terrain to build and alter, cool artwork and photos and an absolutely great game that you can really get into (without breaking the bank.)

It’s the best iteration of a Middle-earth miniatures game we’ve ever seen, and we’ve been around for a while. Recommended.