The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies - SU&SD Review

[Music] back in 2018 we reviewed war of the ring the sprawling asymmetric beloved war game that took over our table with over 200 miniatures bamboozled us initially with maybe half as many rules but then worm tongued its way into our hearts it was huge and fiddly and at first quite frustrating but when we saw the light it was a dazzling blast niche yes it wasn't for everyone but my what an amazing game and now finally back in print today we're looking at the game's younger brother cousin the battle of the five armies this game is still quite big but much notably smaller with a board that look you can play on a normal human table and if you're struggling to see any other differences between that game and this game then well fair enough but the rules are quite different in subtle simple ways largely the systems that dictate the rules of both games are quite similar but there's some crucial changes underneath the bonnet of this uh elven jeep there's no hidden hobbit movement mechanic here with an elite squad moving across the map secretly trying to throw a ring into a big hot bin you also don't have to contend with the delightfully frustrating element of the political side of war of the ring in which you have to run around the map and just try and convince people the threat is real before you can even mobilize any of their units there are far fewer plastic pieces in this which means set up and tear down is much much quicker but i wouldn't go so far as to say that this game is much simpler yes there are fewer mechanics but for everything stripped away from the design there are lots of new additions here that do just slightly gunk and fuzz things up and on this smaller map the battle of the five armies takes place prior to the events of lord of the rings being one of the final events in tolkien's previous novel the bobbit little bobbit in the big city after a botched robbery that ends in the murder of a dragon our hero billy bobbitt gets smashed in the head with a brick or a rock and misses most of the ensuing battle which is depicted here in this board game humans elves and dwarves and everyone in between must unite against the forces of darkness as the little goblins tried to burrow their way through the mountains and if you're a fan of lord of the rings then check it out gandalf is here as well as a thrandwill he's the king of the elves and uh and that's it that's it that's your phil a little sean being in sight you've had yourself and now go to bed so fans of lord of the rings might feel a little underwhelmed but if you're a fan of war of the ring then there's a ton of stuff here that you're going to recognize and love as players you'll still roll these gorgeous dice and then take it in turns to play them as specific actions with the good guys and the bad guys both sharing this seemingly complicated little menu that just explains all of the different things that each of these dice results can do and so army shuffle around and smash into one another with handfuls of dice being rolled to determine if your strategies will be backed up by the required luck so playing as the fastest of darkness it's your job to just cause trouble bashing your way into fortifications will get you the points you need to win the game as you trudge around the mountains with your wargs and big orcs and chip away through their defenses from behind with your little goblins bashing their way through the mountains now this is one of the coolest things about battle of the five armies you can't move these goblins until they've filled up one of their little goblin boxes at which point they smash through the stone and start spilling out onto the board to cause untold grief and meanwhile in the realm of men and their business associates it's your job to simply hold on against this horrible red explosion each turn you're going to be pulling a token from a bag or a mug or your trouser pockets or someone else's trouser pockets whatever number is on that token is going to move the fate track along that many spaces and if you can get far enough along that fate track then question mark question mark question mark question mark you've won the battle and along that track you're going to be making new friends it's your old friend bilbo billy bagpins he's here he's on the board what can he do he sort of just like runs away and disappears cool the eagles are coming i can see them they're literally just around the corner they'll be with you in two minutes honestly they're on your road right now and that's not all it's the shape-shifting murder bear broadband from abba famously one of the most op characters in the original book could probably completely win the battle on their own but doesn't like to get involved it's your call bjorn you're cool and finally it's thorin who's thorin i don't know but he does come with this card in the game which means i'm pretty sure he's banned from public playgrounds and listen if you're simmering quietly with rage now my lack of respect for the hobbit and this world then congratulations you've activated my trap card we should probably go and have a frank conversation in the reality check cavern i like the hobbit it's fun but the characters here aren't nearly as evocative as those in war of the ring and partially that's because the lord of the rings had these fabulous films to draw from vividly painting in all the gaps in my imagination but mostly here it's the fact that war of the ring draws from three whole books of stuff whereas this is just pulling from a chapter in one quite small book so how could it compare anyway that's that get out of my k there's a thinness here that can't just be patched over and it's really quite notable when you're playing as the forces of darkness as the game goes on the other player is going to be unlocking new characters adding cards to an increasingly complicated connected tableau of things that they need to reference and things they can do meanwhile on your side of the table you've got bolg what's up youtube it's your boy bolg that's kind of it it's bog and because sauron hasn't unlocked the nazgul on his skill tree yet instead you've got giant bats that you just sort of pop around on the board and do stuff giant bats quite cool but crucially not the nazgul and let alone that sauron on his skill tree hasn't even unlocked being sauron yet as this player you play as the shadow a nebulous force of darkness that has yet to fully show its hand or hands but much like in war of the ring most of the colour that's going to spring up during a game is going to come from these cards that represent the events the characters the possibilities that exist within this world as shown here in this beautiful piece of storytelling in the traditional three-act structure sadly the game didn't ship with the fourth card in this series which we've unfortunately had to photoshop ourselves and the color that these cards adds doesn't feel nearly as vivid as it did in war for the ring but this game does flesh itself out in different ways adding for example a lot more granularity to the tactical side of battles in the game each unit type has a corresponding card that you add to your hand whenever they're in that conflict both players then choose one card at the start of the round and if you've played a card that matches one of the units that you've put into that fight then when you roll the combat knight for each unit of that you're gonna roll a black die rather than the white one because if that type of unit hits after you've played that unit's card then you're going to trigger a special ability on that card which will then not be discarded from the game but put into your own discard pile which you'll then be able to get back during the battle using a regroup card sounds a bit fiddly that's because it is and that's not all some types of terrain have role modifiers that only last for the first round of combat and each unit has preferred types of terrain which means before any fight you're going to check all of the different units and their preferred terrain types and work out which army has the preference and the winner of that is going to get a free combat car that they can draw into their hand and you will forget to do this all the time because it's slightly one too many rules and it's not quite exciting enough to be worthwhile a big change here though is that units don't die after they take damage instead your armies build a stack of wound tokens that don't trigger until you have more of them than units in that army at which point you keep discarding two of them at a time in exchange for one unit until you're back below that threshold now in principle i really love this and also it is absolutely horrible for example let's say we got a fight going on here in good old dale town five units five wound tokens seems bad but it's fine equal number of things and things which means nobody's hurt but then we have one more round of combat and let's say oh we take three more wound tokens well that's fine just remove two wound tokens remove a person fine how many are there now six tokens four people not ideal remove two more tokens remove one more person it's fine we must be there now no four tokens three people i guess we remove two more tokens and another person and now we have two tokens and two people which is fine but one more token now oh oh oh it's a beautiful idea in principle that you can roam these armies around being ragged and half broken but still being at their maximum effectiveness but [Music] huge but huge awk butt it's kind of fiddly and annoying honestly these tokens these little triangle tokens and keeping track of them and moving them around the board with your armies you might remember in war of the ring there was a special box on the board in which you would go and put armies that were fighting against things because there wasn't enough room that was fiddly but you've actually got some breathing room now and that breathing room is immediately kind of swallowed up by cardboard triangles so in principle i like it in practice it's slightly worse i think with a lot of the new tactical systems that weren't in war of the ring this idea of having specific combat cards for each type of unit fun but in reality it means you're having to assemble and disassemble your combat hand of cards before each individual fight in the game and there are lots of them and also these new factors to consider and take advantage of don't really change the fact that fights in this game are mostly absolute because yes dice now listen you've made all of the right moves the odds are hugely in your favor but it doesn't matter because yes dice big swings here fives and sixes it often feels quite deeply unfair but once you've learned to accept that once you've realized that that's the nature of the thing and washed away that saltiness with a nice big glass of okay whatever then this is pretty enjoyable stuff but crucially i don't remember being quite so frustrated by the luck based swings in war of the ring even though arguably on paper arguably arguably on paper they're exactly the same and this is the point i realized that actually a lot of war games are just like this it's just that maybe war of the ring is the one war game that i really really like and hey if you replace the hobbits going to mordor with a ring with a spy trying to get a package behind enemy lines then it's literally just world war ii but with a gandalf now if we're being charitable about dice rolls in games like these we could say that it actually places more of an emphasis on the wider broader strategic choices you can't rely on this so you have to be tight everywhere else and maybe that's where these terrain-based bonuses come into play whereas you have to chip away and get every tiny advantage you can because hey the dice are not your friends but i don't know about that honestly war games these binary bash ups red versus blue i increasingly think that they're not about winning at all the one thing that binds them together is detail right these granular little nods to specific little wrinkles and i always assumed that this focus on detail was for the purpose of accuracy you know simulation and i think a lot of people who are fans of the hobby in this particular part of the genre will still claim that that's the case but i don't i don't necessarily think that's all that true i think the detail here is just about texture and i think that secretly war games have a ton more in common than you might expect with role-playing games maybe war games are just an exercise in collaborative storytelling in which you explore a familiar setting that then mutates because of the choices you both make and because of the outcomes of rob dice and i think that's why my relationship with the battle of the five armies failed to ever really blossom i just don't have a framework in my imagination for me to play around with and yet holding those story cards in war of the ring felt so exciting it wasn't about winning or losing it was about luxuriating in a shared bath of possibilities and what about if aragorn did that what about if gimli was over there and oh no i've literally i'm just spouting gibberish in exactly the same way that people are into marvel films do about those or about dad's barbecues discussing out of uh production obsolete french tanks and while that whole generation grew up on a steady feed of macho reimaginings of a world war that they never actually saw we grew up on the nazgul we grew up on christopher lee we grew up with complicated romantic feelings about aragorn right that last bit isn't true there's nothing complicated about it it's just a straight-up babe but i must say that it is telling that one of the bits you get in the five armies box is a mini module for war of the ring that lets you start that game with a reimagined history in which the battle of the five armies is won by the shadow and i'm a lord of the rings fan but i'm just i'm not i'm just not that into it but if you are i can i get it now i understand war games i've gone big galactic brain thanks battle of the five armies is fun but it doesn't gain that much from the additional tactical rules and detail that have been added and it loses a lot from the stuff that's not here the narrative the characters having this rich quantity of stuff to draw from misses out on that but also political aspect the spy mission to the volcano lots of really really exciting stuff that just isn't here and so while i'd love to say that this is like hey it's like war of the ring but a more mini manageable version it's just lacking so much of that spark that i'm not entirely sure who it would be for other than die hard tolkien people and there's a lot of stuff in this that's still kind of annoying in the same way that war of the ring is like the miniatures yeah it's okay if you're the bad guys all quite different but you know what's the difference between a pikeman and an arrow man and a narrow elf i don't know um the bases are different but apart from that it's it's squint city and so it's my opinion that battle of the five armies is a game that doesn't really find room to exist beneath the shadow of its frankly startlingly terrifyingly large older brother and that's a really disappointing conclusion for everybody involved i think we can agree but i am taking some heart from the sort of realization i've had that maybe a lot of war gaming is just world war ii fanfic being unknowingly written by 60 year old men i think a lot about the first time i ever went to a big board game convention and how within 30 feet of each other you had children having a great time playing the my little pony collectible card game and older gentlemen having a great time playing their world war two war games and at the time i remember being quite sad about the fact that often that second group those older men would look down on other parts of the hobby now at the time i knew that those men were wrong okay that's part of the reason why i personally helped to build this channel and do what we do and it's definitely a part of why i still do what i do of proving those people wrong proving that actually this hobby is for everyone but now i can see just how wrong they were and how it doesn't matter how you package it up it doesn't matter what kind of texture you have on the canvas we're all just doing the same things you can dress it up however you want and you can pretend if you like that your thing is better than someone else's thing as i do so often and everyone does and it's not a great human habit let's be real but we're all just doing the same thing we're all just having a wonderful time exploring the stories that we love thrilled that we get to do so with other people who care about these things as much as we do and i think that's kind of beautiful i think that's beautiful and certainly while this game i couldn't find a place for it in my head or my heart playing it was a reminder of why i do this and why i care about this and i'm thankful of it for that alone and hey if you've enjoyed this video i'm just going to say you know sheldon sit down we've been going for 10 years we've grown the team recently i'm proud to do so and i'm proud to continue to to put this out into the world and uh yeah if you watch our videos a lot but you've never clicked the subscribe button then hey you could do that that would be really great we'd really appreciate that and we usually mention it once or twice a year but hey we have donations funded as well so if you fancy donating to this project that we've been doing now for 10 years then you can go to shutdownsitdown.com forward slash donate deeply unusual for me to ever mention that outside of our our allotted two times a year allowance but hey i don't know i'm feeling kind of emotional about this and i'm realizing just realizing that those old men were wrong has made me feel um good pretty good inside hopefully if you are one of those old men watching this then you can find it in your heart to listen to what i've said and at least consider it no funny ending this time sorry i got a bit real loved you all we'll see you next time

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 154,864

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Matt Lees, Tom Brewster, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Battle of Five Armies, War of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Id: 6qbeq8dk7To

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/SpecialTacticsGames]

Really enjoyed this review! I normally enjoy Wargames for the tactical and interactive element. However War of the Ring will always be my #1 due to the stories you gain and tell from every play. Matt shares my feeling with battles of 5 armies, there isn’t enough for the game to draw on to make the story while playing exciting enough, will always play WotR instead.

[u/Robin_games]

You either die a bronie, or live long enough to see yourself become an old man playing war games

[u/withdensemilk]

This is great for all the hobbit heads out there. 6 bags of popcorn and one of those the one ring key chains.

[u/APhysicistAbroad]

I play both boardgames and wargames (well, GW 40k, Killteam, BFG). I think boardgamers often are looking for that win, whereas non-tournament wargames are still trying to win but it's completely fine just to use the game as a vessel for narrative, I liked how he saw through the looking glass to see the other side.

[u/Mazzelaar]

Fantastic review. Some deep thoughts from Matt there, loved it.

This is why SUSD will always be the best for me. Not even close..

[u/SutterCane]

Wasn’t the reason for this game that it’s War of the Ring in reverse? Instead of the good guys having to put their all in to win, it’s the bad guys.

[u/mdillenbeck]

Was enjoying the review and seeing why his point of view exists in the game - then it went into the deep end railing against "those old wargamer gatekeepers who look down on everyone in the hobby" stereotype. It became about some gamers who wronged him and now uses to characterize a whole group. If I were to do that, then every Magic card player is hyper competitive table flippers who spit in your face when you win once with an awesome combo they didn't expect. That isn't true, most are just regular gamers... Same with wargamers. We aren't some xenophobic judgemental subgroup seekiing to gaming for all the "unworthy"or judge your game choices.

In fact, people often do that to us as they look at something like the Next War series and go "why would anyone want to waste so much time learning an unnecessarily complicated game as that, or worship Nazis or Napoleon by begging to play them in a game." (For WWII or Napoleonic wargames). It's like saying it you want to play a game of Brass you're a child labor loving capitalist pig.

In the end, wargamers are probably one of the most discriminated against tabletop gaming groups. The tone at the end of the review shows just how looked down upon we are. (I'm not in luding minis wargamers I'm this unless they are historical based - warhammer and those games are okay, but exporing history through play makes you evil apparently.)

[u/psgunslinger]

It's world war 2, with Gandalf.

[u/ProbablySlacking]

Interesting. I own Bo5a, and have played it maybe once.

Weird to see a SU&SD talk about an older game. Maybe I’ll watch this and it will spark some interest in the game?