Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game 25mm Uruk Hai

I love the Pete Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, and the licensed miniatures from Games Workshop (despite the horrendous expense!) are Perry miniatures - and hence awesome.  My son likes the bad guys, so we started with a box of Uruk Scouts and a box of Easterling infantry.  A friend of mine sold us his collection of very early LOTR miniatures, including orcs, more Uruks, and some humans / elves for them to fight - plus the rules and some character models.  eBay and a few of his birthday gifts provided more orcs, some Rohirrim, and more orcs, and some more Uruks, and some more orcs... and, well, suffice it to say that the hordes of darkness are not short a soldier or two.

Early on, we decided not to paint these as Saruman's troops - so no white hands!  Instead, they all get a crude 'Eye' badge somewhere on them.  Apart from the amended paint job, these are out-of-the-box miniatures.  The lack of 'eyes' painted-in on the bare headed miniatures is not noticeable when you're gaming, but sticks out like a warning beacon in these pictures.  I'm going to dust them down, paint the eyes and teeth in, then post them again - let you decide whether they look better!

Colours used were mostly fairly dull - dark yellows, sand, light browns.  I used a Games Workshop colour 'Dark Flesh' for the skin, though since I'd primed them in red oxide primer, I could easily just have shaded-down from the primer and got a similar (albeit more matt) effect.

The metal areas are GW Boltgun Metal, washed with thinned brown ink to give a 'dirty-but-gleamy' effect.  In the movie, the uruk scouts are mostly in leather armour - but a bit of metal here and there helps break up the brownness.  And maybe The Great Eye can just afford more metal.  Speaking of which, the chap on the left of the above shot has a home-made shield from 30 thou plastic card.  The shield is useful in the game, as well as giving the miniature something to do with his left hand.  It's just two pieces of slightly tapering 30 thou plastic sheet, chamfered to 60 degrees or so where they meet.  The spikes are two 'chips' of plastic sheet, roughly triangular.  Not as movie-faithful as the Perry sculpts, but they blend in okay.

The bases are too green... the idea was to replicate Rohan / Gondor / other places the evil uruks might attack.  While repainting the faces, I think I'll scrape some green and patch it up with sand and rocks, to better match my current basing style.

Another home-made shield second from left.  The heavy 'cleaver' type sword is my son's favourite uruk weapon, so we've got loads of these guys.  Personally, having played the game, if I started from scratch I'd have an all-archer force.  Missile weapons are better in GW's LOTR game than in many other rule sets.

And here they are - some uruk archers.  I don't like the blades on the bows, but they feature in the movie so I haven't scraped them off.  Yet.

More archers.  It's not always easy to find a spot for the 'eye' badge, when models are shield-less, so some of the archers have painted quivers.

The two on the right of the picture have been modified slightly.  My son doesn't like too many bare heads, preferring helmeted troops.  So I partially-decapitated two of the bare-headed archers and filed-down Perry Wars of the Roses helmeted heads to fit.  The middle guy looks good - but the chap on the right has the helmet set too high.  One day, when I'm feeling brave, I'll pop it off and trim another half millimetre off it.

I bought the Wargames Factory orc plastic kit because it was very cheap.  The bodies and legs are really good, though I wasn't so sure about the some of the weapons and arms, which didn't look so hot.  I had in mind a sort of 'mercenary orc' idea - professional orc crossbowmen marking themselves out on the battlefield with a distinctive colour scheme (dull yellow).  I used spare Perry Miniatures European Mercenaries crossbow arms (which worked okay, though the chap on the left looks like he's wearing a fashionably-baggy parachute shirt from the late 80s), and used spare GW Space Marine ammo pouches for their bolt-cases.  The greaves are from the Warlord Games Roman veterans kit.  Overall, I wasn't happy with the result - not everything I dream up does!

Attempt number two.  This time, I left off the yellow garments, and attempted to wedge Perry crossbows into the Wargames Factory arms.  The end result was, from left to right, a homicidal gorllia, an uruk who looks like he's lifting a bolt so heavy it must be made of uranium, and a chap who doesn't know which way up his crossbow goes.  Hmm... a fix is needed, and here's the plan;  Step one - hack off the WF heads and replace with Perry medieval heads (opening and enlarging some of the mouths / jaws here and there); Step two - repaint the yellow in dark grey / dark brown; Step three - lose the WF arms, replace with more Perry arms.  I'll repost the 'after' shots and let you judge for yourselves.

One last view of a slightly more successful modification.  The chap in the middle of the above shot has a home-made shield, and a butchered Perry helmet.  Again, it's just too high up - needs to be chopped down by half a millimetre or so.