The Other Partizan 2024 preview: Tolkien’s Battle of Five Armies

Somehow the second Partizan show of the year has snuck up on us, so it’s time to show what I’ve been quietly working away on over the last six weeks. This is the biggest game that I think Morris & Chums have ever put on, with around 1500 28mm miniatures on a 12′ x 8′ L-shaped table. It’s part wargame, part art project, and I hope you enjoy it!

I reckon the project started when I was around 15, creating a large sculpture of the Battle of Five Armies at school, having been inspired by reading The Hobbit and playing Warhammer.

Sadly this clay artefact has been lost to the mists of time, but the idea remained, and was poked back into life by two things: reading The Hobbit graphic novel to my son (a joy) and then watching the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies with him (some fun bits but largely a travesty of JRRT, especially the Battle of Five Armies).

While browsing pics of Historicon 2021, I also came across a lovely game of the Battle of Five Armies by David Kujit. What struck me about this was the painted backdrop, immediately setting the scene for the battle, which planted the seed for our game.

The plan then went a step further as Middle-earth games became very popular within the Midgard Heroic Battles play test group and Dave Hunter – a bit of a Tolkien fan – joined and got involved with running games. We’re going to be playing the Midgard rules on a grand scale at the show, hopefully their final appearance before expected release by Reisswitz Press in November 2024.

From there. it was perhaps a slippery slope. I can’t remember what finally pushed the button, but it may have been James Deering from the play test group suggesting he come up to Nottingham and we put on a big Middle-earth game. Anyway, one day I woke up, and told myself that’s what we were going to put on at Partizan in October. And here we are.

I dropped a line to Simon Toey, well-known on the Facebook Wargaming in Middle-earth group for his cracking Tolkien miniature projects. I’m a huge fan of Simon’s style, where he combines classic metal and newer miniatures onto diorama-style bases with some conversion and stunning basing.

Not only did Simon agree to get involved, but he also added additional pieces to the collection to bring units up to size.

Simon’s dedication is demonstrated by his new Beorn model; we had a brief discussion about the original Reaper mini being a little small for the scale of battle that we had planned.

A few minutes later, he’d ordered up a new model and then set to work swapping heads and sculpting new fur as soon as it arrived. Following a quick suggesting from me about basing, and he was hard at work putting together Beorn’s goblin victims…

Other members of the group have also chipped in and we hope to have a veritable host of Goblins, Wolves, Dwarves, Elves and Lake Men to show you at the weekend!

An honourable mention needs to go to Sam Lancashire, who is pitching in with the hobbit himself, Mr Bilbo Baggins (wearing his magic ring, of course).

Dave Hunter and I sketched out the plan for the table with help from the Facebook group; I had an idea for an L-shaped table, leaving out the ruins of Dale but keeping in both spurs of the Lonely Mountain involved in the battle. With Dave’s expert Tolkien knowledge, we put together a possible battlefield that would also meet our gaming requirements and I built a maquette to test it out.

After several design changes, I got to work creating the battlefield. This is all work in progress at the moment – I’ll do a full photo game report once Partizan is over.

Colour schemes and designs were heavily influenced by Tolkien’s artwork for the book, as this was very much the inspiration for the game.

Anyway, I need to head off and finish the layout, so hope to see some of you at The Other Partizan on October 13th!