H is for Hobbitt'iss, more Horrible Little Hobbitt'iss . . . It's NOT Fair!

Poor old Gollum! Another week another charity-shop board-game, for 95p this time I think, it was a few weeks ago, it's been sat in Picasa while I waited to do the last shot, as I had to dig them out of the attic!

 

Rio Grande Games, who have been seen here before, and a nice little game with a 30-40 minute play-time, so easy by the standards of a lot of games which can take that long to organise and get started!

 

It's mostly punched card, or it is once you've punched it - the norm these days is to charge the customer extra for a larger box, then have them do half the work they used to paying the manufacturer to do - That's 39 years of small-'c' conservative, Thatcherite-Reganomic, 'free-market' theory in action and a global trade war won't stop domestic greed, nor is it any use shooting the messenger, the message stays the same!

 

And - once you've punched all the die-cut sheets, you end up with a box that has a centimetre gap at the top so everything flies around!

 

But all that doesn't matter as you've added two figures to the stash! They are actually pre-coloured PU resin and quite brittle - in the wrong hands they won't last long. The game is one of those lay-as-you-go random path mechanisms (match edges like-for-like) with smaller, added companion and challenge cards liberally spread about.

 

And there's a volcano, rings, into, throwing, for the use of.

 

You may remember Graham Apperley donated a set of Hobbits to the Blog just over a year ago, and they match well with the two Rio Grande ones so it seems I'm fated to slowly build The Shire as a set of questing, ring-bearing, stroppets - Gollum doesn't stand a chance!

U is for an Unexpected Journey . . .

. . . otherwise known as 'The Hobbit'. Picked these up the other day, sans board, sans rules, sans everything else! But - a complete set of game figures, and as it's a week or two since we last had games figures, lets have these . . . now!

Metallics always photograph with difficulty and these have come out two different colours, neither of which is quite what my eyes are seeing, but I have an unfulfilled prescription for glasses kicking around somewhere, so that's saying nothing!

Softish PVC, 25mm 'game size' which leaves Bilbo slightly taller than Gandalf! These six are the player pieces and like some of the other figures we've looked at here recently from board-games, the more complicated poses are made in several parts and glued together.

There are also four other pieces, much larger, both 'in the flesh' and compared to their descriptions in the book, I don't know what they are for (obviously part of the game play but I don't know their function), but on-line images show each f them holding sway over a corner of the board.

This game - incidentally - should still be available on-line; published by Vivid Imaginations according to BoardGame Geek.

I don't remember Poseidon from the books, but he seems to have put in an appearance, along with one of those sad-looking, fat, giants who always come to a sticky-end, shortly after all the sympathetic old ladies in the theatre (or readers) have fallen in love with him, think: King Kong or some darker, more adult versions of Jack and the Beanstalk!

A couple of scalers with a 23mm/1:76th figure and a vaguely 54mm space monster! As the Wargs (giant wolfythings) in the books are ridable by  humanoid characters it would appear that the silver figures are either around 54mm or between the four - 1:no scale, however all useful for the larger sizes!