My usual gaming opponent and I want to try the lotr sbg out. I have the old blue rulebook + angmar/Moria sourcebook. We are both familiar with miniatures games (usually play kings of war) but have very little experience with this one-I played a couple of times decade ago and my opponent had never played. I own the following minis:

Mines of Moria set (fellowship, 24 goblins, cave troll)
Durburz
Goblin shaman
Burdhur
6 warg riders
3 spectres

How would you recommend we get a feel for the game? Balins tomb scenario feels a bit overwhelming for the good side. I was thinking maybe a few members of the fellowship vs equal points of evil (200? 300?)

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

I know this might sound silly, but if you split the goblins in to two groups of 12, you could just go through the simple combat easily, just to get the hang of support with spears, how rolling to fight then to wound is different than in other systems etc.

That's how I begun just in a very rough way before adding the captains / shamans and so on.

The way that LOTR works with moving each figure individually and how important it is not to block each other / hiving off enemies so they can't support combats and so on is quite precise and doing very rough low model count stuff helped me out.