Sick as a Parrot, Odo.

Two more games against Joey and I'm still without a win. If Arsene Wenger managed like this he'd have been out long ago. Still, I present for your viewing pleasure my complete and utter humiliation.

Game one was a Scenario from the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring rulebook. I prefer scenarios to pitched battles: mindless bloodbaths are fun, but they can get very same-y. Joey's objective was to get over half his force across the finishing line, and mine was to stop him.

The Battle: Evil (left) has to get half it's force past the ruins to win.

The plan was to put my advance force of archers in the ruins to shoot up Joey's big shieldwall and thus get him under half strength once the infantry had mopped up.

The archers were, as always, outgunned by Evil.

This plan may even have worked, if the dice had been in my favour, and if I had resisted the temptation to charge the Rohirrim in without infantry support. As it was, I was unable to win combats, and when I did, I couldn't roll the 6's I needed to wound Easterlings in their heavy armour.

I charge in the Riders of Rohan too early.

Shortly after this, all my men died.

 To finish, Joey lined up all his men and finished the scenario in one go. Better luck next time lads?

The last survivor sneaks off home. 

 Our next Punch-up was Kings of War, a rather excellent, easy and fun set of rules which I've played before, but Joey hadn't.* I anticipated success, despite Joey's points advantage.

My Normans so far: The narrow deployment will hurt me as you will see...

 Foolishly, I fudged the rules to beef up the pike units, which transformed them into murderous spawn of evil. Orcs don't even get pikes in Kings of War, I just decided to add the Phalanx rule to a unit of two-weapon-fighting orcs ('Morax'). This made them really good against Cavalry, the chief offensive arm of the Normans.

There we go, a nice wall of pikes to charge.

 Yet another reason for my failure was my decision to start off by throwing out KoW's chess-like turn system, which makes the opponent's turn a boring period where your troops die, but does balance the game.

I discover that humans aren't very good at fighting.

 To detail the sordid events of the slaughter; the Uruk berserkers minced my shieldwall, my knights couldn't touch his phalanxes, and the archers were no use whatsoever. In a last ditch bid, I charged my smaller unit of knights into Lurtz, hoping to kill him and overrun into the berserker's exposed flank. This failed spectacularly, leading to my knights being flanked themselves and facing 40 (FOURTY!!) attacks from the counter-flank.

Charging knights fail to kill Lurtz. The game is up. 

 In conclusion, next time I will make proper bases and force the uruks to conform to proscribed KoW basing rules. I will also charge points for the "Phalanx" special rule, and not get boxed in during my own deployment.

Bishop Odo and my Bretonnians are my only survivors.

*I heard from a friend that KoW is nothing but a schill to sell cheap models for people to play warhammer with. I would still recommend the rules as easy to pick, fun, and 'feeling; like a Fantasy Battle.