Lord of the Rings – Rohan Watchtower & Palisade

The Rohan House wasn't released by it self, but came with a second Rohan terrain kit, the Watchtower and Palisades.

The defensive terrain bundle comes at a price of 55 EUR and covers 4 sprues. Similar to the rohan house, it is the same sprue included multiple times in the kit. This kit covers a watchtower and four wall sections including a gate. Games Workshop does not supply a length of the walls - we'll fix that later on.

Casing is crisp and compared to other kits, the connections of the pieces towards the sprue are comparatively low. Which makes removing them from the sprue and cleaning the mould lines pretty easy. You'll need the content of four of these sprues to assemble a full watchtower.

The kit was used on the Rohan village showcase at Warhammer World. I took a few close ups of the converted watchtowers and showed them in my coverage from the Warhammer World Exhibition Centre. There is a fortified tower, using the wall sections from the houses, along with a larger gate, where the watchtower used sections of the palisades, to be upgraded to a sentry tower. The sentry tower is a rather easy conversion, as you only need one of the segments to close 3 sides of the tower, but the fortified tower shown needs at least 3 rohan house kits to be build.

Let's start the build with the watchtower. This begins with the plateau. Nice and easy.

Next one of the sides is added, consisting out of three low walls, that interlock with eachother and have connections towards the beams of the tower. I wouldn't wait to long for the remaining pillars to be build, as they have little play, but interlock and stabilize eachother. So do that while the glue settles and have a wobble-free tower.

There are two additional accessoires for the tower. A ladder, that is build from two individual pieces and a connector, and the bell. You'll have another bell as a spare, and two further ladders, but these are used with the palisade.

For some reason Games Workshop forgot to mention are rather important measure for walls, fences and palisade. The length! A single palisade section is 22 cm in length, or a bit more than 8,5 Inch. That means we get a total of 88 cm of palisade. Not bad. Not enough to part a table, but enough to contain a corner or large enough part of a regular or skirmish table.

The walls are stable enough to stand on their own, but have a wall-walk that is roughly an inch wide and has three supporting posts.

You will notice that the wall-walk is crudely build from tree trunks and overlaps with different heights. That's design with a feature. This way you can connect two sections and create a corner, without a gap. Neat!

On each side the wall sections have two hollows, which can be covered by matching panels. Numbering is irrevelant, you can swap them as you like, just make sure they have the right orientation.

But what are these hollows for? Well, two of the sections can be build with half a gate, and for that you add hinges. One set left, and one set right. The gates doors are build with hinges as well and even come with a hook, that allows you to lock the gate with a wooden beam. Don't glue this in place, same goes for the hinges, just hang the gates into the hinges.

As you can see, you can move / open and close the gates, as well as block them, using the wooden beam.

And the palisades are quite handy, they are the proper size to be played. The wall-walk is deep enough to place a single row of warriors on top and high enough to create proper cover (and for your enemy to require proper siege equipment to conquer).

A single set is enough to build a small fort, two sets will give you quite the freedom.

Conclusion
At first I thought, 55 EUR is quite the statement. But you get a tower and almost 3 feet / 90 cm of wall. And not just palisades, but with a wall-walk that is usefull. So if we'd say the tower would be 20 EUR and the walls would be 35 EUR, that is a good deal. I'm thinking about getting a second kit, so I can divided a table and / or build a proper fort with the pieces.

And similar to the Rohan House, this kit is great for use beyond Lord of the Rings. Combine it with the spikes of the WarCry kit and have a Norse / Slaves to Darkness fortress. In historical settings, beside the tower that would need a bit of love, the walls could be used for quite the broad time period. And I like multipurpose terrain.

What's not to like? Not much, the casting is well done, as is the design. It went together pretty fast, the fit was convincing. And for terrain pieces of that size, removing the mould lines and cutting the individual bits from the sprue went pretty quick. As this is not a Age of Sigmar product, we won't see it in a Ravaging Land bundle, and the Rohan Stronghold is unfortunately sold out. So the only thing that would make this kit even better, would be a double pack, giving you 2 towers and 6 ft / 1,70 m of wall, more than enough for your average gaming needs.

The Lord of the Rings and Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Games are tabletop miniature games by Games Workshop.

The reviewed product item was provided by the manufacturer.