You’re the target audience for Battle of Osgiliath. Whether you’re a former player who fell off the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game or a longtime fan who’s stuck with it since the beginning, you’re welcome here. Essentially, it’s a homecoming for Rob Alderman, Middle-earth’s product manager.

During our conversation about The Lord of the Rings Battle of Osgiliath in November 2022, he mentioned something called the hobby gene. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but those who do have it we try to keep with us for as long as possible. Those people who had the hobby gene in 2001 [when the game first launched], or even later, when Battle Games in Middle-Earth, our magazine series with De Agostini, came out, are really the ones we’re seeing come back. Generally, there are a lot of Warhammer hobbyists who claim that was what got them interested.”

Since the set celebrates the past, it’s not surprising it feels so precisely engineered to stir nostalgia.

In addition, it’s a statement of intent for the future.

Feedback from fans

As a fan in the early 2000s, and then as part of the team working on it in 2018, Alderman has been involved with the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game in some form or another since it joined the best board games 21 years ago. This is his opportunity to give back to a community that he’s been part of since the beginning, and it guides everything he does.

“It has been a great opportunity to help fill in some gaps in the range,” he said. “Because I’ve been a member of the community for a long time as well, [I want] to feel like we’re doing them a service by doing the things I know are important to the community. It’s obvious that we cannot always do everything. Our resources are limited. But we do our best to use them so that we can make as many people happy as possible at any given moment.”

As a result, Games Workshop released Battle of Osgiliath, its latest boxed set. Fans requested more plastic characters and terrain to fight over, based on feedback on the last one (2018’s Battle of Pelennor Fields). As a result, a perfect storm developed. A location from Tolkien’s legendarium which lends itself to flatpack scenery of this kind was the ruined city of Osgiliath, and because the heroes associated with that location – Faramir, Damrod, Madril, and Gothmog – had never been available as anything other than metal miniatures that can’t be sold in certain territories, it all came together very neatly indeed.

Additionally, we had the opportunity to try something new.

The important thing for us as a design studio was to offer a truly modular set of Middle-earth terrain, which we hadn’t really been able to offer before,” Alderman said. “We did a little bit of that with the Rohan house, which you could build big or small. But this is the most modular terrain we’ve ever created.”

However, this is easier said than done. In order to match real-life movie sets that now exist only on film, you have to create scenery that can be arranged in dozens of unique ways. In order to ensure they looked right, Alderman and his team referred to copious amounts of reference footage from the Two Towers and Return of the King.

As time passes, the road continues to go on.

Taking on threads like this allows the team to work with resources such as Weta Workshop (the effects company that defined the look of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies). This game provides “a wealth of references that aren’t available in the public sphere”, such as Snaga’s “what about their legs? They don’t need those…”.

This is the only film-accurate snugger model or collectible ever made, according to Alderman. “Because in the movie, you only see him from, like, the shoulders and above. We actually asked Dan Falconer [Collectibles Art Director from Weta Workshop] if he had any references for Snaga, because we wanted to make the best miniature we can. And he found a photo of Jed Brophy, the guy who played Snaga, in costume in a T-pose on a photo he had taken on set that was in his personal collection. It was just awesome to be able to say, like, head to toe, that is a film-accurate Snaga you will not get anywhere else.”

You won’t get everywhere by paying attention to details. Due to this, the modular terrain was made glue-fit rather than push-fit like the miniatures in Warhammer Underworlds: Gnarlwood and Cursed City. “We actively wanted this to be part of a range so that everything could integrate with each other.”.

As this last part illustrates, the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game team isn’t just looking backward. While nothing has been announced and attention is firmly focused on Battle of Osgiliath for now, it became clear during our conversation that Alderman hoped the modular terrain might one day be expanded upon. The same holds true for the franchise’s miniatures. Remakes have traditionally been limited to heroes and villains (known as the Forgeworld Character Series), but he hopes they can go one step further someday.

“We would love to go and do plastic warriors, whether that’s existing ones that are already plastic sets and we decide to do new versions for, or models that are currently metal or Citadel resin and move those into plastics. That could be something we do in the future.”

This is not a sneak announcement – it’s a personal wish that shows the team’s dedication. Although it’s been kicking for over two decades, it still has some life left in it.

For now, Alderman is content to see what the community manages with Battle of Osgiliath.

“The thing I’m most excited to engage with myself and to see other people engage with is the terrain sets,” he said. “I really want to see what crazy madness people come up with… I’m really excited to see what people do with that because we have some amazing hobbyists in the community.”

The same is true the other way around. In spite of the movie saga being long over, Games Workshop’s return to Middle-earth gives the impression that the future ahead is bright – it’s not simply a rehash of old glory. When we return to the game after a long absence, that is nothing short of comforting.