Memoir Third Age 3019

My son was bugging me to play a game and I had just read Bob Cordery's post about his rainy day game here, and I thought why not give it a try.

I have never played Memoir 44 and am only vaguely familiar with it, Command and Colors, and Battle Lore which are all adaptions of the theme. Or at least that is how I understand it. I do have a copy of the game Lords & Levies, which I thought I first saw on Rudi Geudens site the Universal General but had to look on the internet archive for the files here. Here is the BGG page.

Anyhow I took Bob's rules and tried to figure out the dice from his AAR. After studying hi pictures I figured that I would "label" my d6 thus: 1-2: infantry, 3: grenade, 4: tank, 5: star, 6: flag.

Next I was going to use the games LotR Risk and Conquest of the Empire for board and pieces. I used the LotR board because I like fantasy. I then used the following pieces: Infantry as Infantry, Mounted as Tank and Monster as Artillery. I thought about using the Catapults from CotE but decided against it, I did use the galleys from CotE.

Ships cost 3 but only had 1 combat die. They could be defeated by two 5(star) results. I also chose to use the leader pieces from LotR and gave them for free with 1 combat die and defeated on three 5(star) results. I also decided that the named fortresses gave an added die on defense.

Next I determined that I would play the combined Mordor/ Harad side and my son elected to play Gondor. My daughter said she would play Rohan, but never even came to the table. I decided to do initial force points by the printed reinforcement bonus for holding a kingdom and the additional bonus for number of territories held. I did the three players as individuals, this decision made it harder for me the evil player. So we came out with Mordor 9pts, Gondor 10pts and Rohan 7 pts. I think I will do it differently next time an use the kingdom bonus and 1pt per province held. Then it would be more like Mordor 16pts, Gondor 17pts and Rohan 9pts (I'm not positive as I didn't write it down.)

I did not remember to take pictures until near the end. It got to be a terrible slog and it seemed that it was only a matter of time till Mordor lost. The good side had a lot of advantages, two reinforcement rolls to my one, two movement rolls to my one, so it was just a matter of time. Perhaps give them a d8 for movement and maybe just keep the reinforcement level based on provinces held.

I started getting a little loose with the division size.

Showing the killed units with dice next to them.

Decided that Gondor should retreat to South Ithilien rather than over stack.

I called it there because my son had lost interest and the kids kept on interrupting me and I couldn't keep it straight what I was doing. Fun but needs a few more tweaks. I'll try again another time.