Somewhere there must have been a miscommunication, but this didn't depress us,
after chatting a bit I set forth to battle Wim ``On turn four I've won''
Heemskerk, while Simone ``do not complain, I already played a siege on
Wellinghal'' (?) de Ruyter explained the game to Erwin Barendregt, in between
she even had time to pose for a picture.
Wim was in search of The One, while I played a group of earth digging Hobbits in search of treasures which may have Rolled Down to the Under-deeps, with Ioreth as healer.
My wolves performed relatively well, seeing that they tore apart two characters of Wim, while he only killed two sets of Wolves. None of my spiders showed, though, and most of the boosters appeared near the end of my deck, where there were no more creatures left...
Wim was Building a lot of Power by Waiting, but I guess most of his Drakes/Dragons didn't dare to enter the Under-Deeps, and those that did were ducked by my Hobbits.
In the mean time my Hobbits went to Mount Gundabad for Wormsbane and then went down to search for more stuff. They found (just after Wim played Bane of the Ithil Stone) two palantíri (Osgiliath and Amon-Sûl), which threw up the question whether four Hobbits and a fragile Lady, would be able to carry them. We decided that they would roll one of them a couple of meters and then go back for the other.
The corruption of these treasures turned out to be a larger problem. Frodo kept trying to slip away by himself, by falling from the table (or was this still the weight of the Palantíri?).
While the Little People were having fun ducking from the Balrog in the Under-gates, Wim's three companies (minus two characters) joined at the Easterling Camp and continued in the direction of the feared Mountain. Having arrived over there, it turned out to be good that we had three sets of dice on our table, since he had three rings, and three Wizard's Tests, so he could use three sets at once. If the One were not unique, he could have played Three... a short dunk later the Ring was destroyed.
It turned out that Wim was delayed by only one turn.
So after all, it wasn't really the huge introduction to Middle-Earth as was planned, but it definitely was a nice evening!
Timco Visser
P.S. If you are at a site with more than one automatic attack, and your opponent playes a card to boost the automatic attack, wait until the movement/hazard phase is over and the site phase begins, before asking on which of the auto-attacks the card was played. Chances are that otherwise you will get a second card for the other auto-attack! ``Oh, good that you mention it, I only double the strikes for the first automatic attack, let me play another card to also double the strikes of the other...'' (sigh)