OUR REVIEW

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MIDDLE EARTH IN FOUR DECKS

THE LORD OF THE RING

THE CARD GAME

I gladly admit it! I am a fan of Lord of the Rings. I love cooperative games and many of my favorite games have been published by Fantasy Flight. It seems that Fantasy Flight knows me that well by now that the newest LCG from this publisher combines all these factors.

LCG stands for the term Living Card Game, a term that has been created and that is used by Fantasy Flight for games that allow you – like trading card games (CCG) – to assemble your personal deck, but at least are fair enough to note the content of the package. This eliminates the thrill of collecting, but keeps the costs in check and acceptable, even you want to acquire every single card published.

For the Lord of the Rings topic the Core Set has been published now and – according to the publisher – it contains all that is necessary to be playable for 1-2 players. The use of a 2^nd Core Set gives 3-4 players the opportunity to play.

My experience with the game has taught me that you can play with four without any problems using only one Core Set, all you need to do is to mark the Threat Levels for two more players, - a sheet of paper, some Kauri shells or percentage dice should do nicely and the game can be used by four – promise!

What’s in the box? A beautiful, big, color-printed and very long rulebook, which might deter a lot of hobby gamers who might have expect a somewhat lighter diet like Knizia‘2 cooperative Lord of the Rings Game.

The components are two sheets with tokens for Resources, Damage and Progress, two Threat Trackers – discs where you can mark values between 0 and 100 – as well as 226 cards of good quality with excellent images of characters and locations from the books. Die illustrations on the cards subjectively viewed are very well done, but do not relate directly to the films. Especially the Legolas card divides the audience, the figure depicted with his dark hair and dangerous demeanor does not resemble Orlando Bloom at all.

There are 12 heroes (just enough for 4 players), four decks with 30 cards each which do not correspond to the tournament rules – which demand 50 cards – but allow very different ways to play and challenging games. The cards are divided into four colors, each deck is geared to its heroes and only holds cards of one color. The decks are: The red Tactics Deck, which is strong in conflict, but not very able in other aspects; the green Lore Deck, which can heal damage to heroes and allies and allows frequent drawing of cards; the blue Spirit Deck, which facilitates the achieving of victory conditions but cannot fend of strong monsters, and finally the purple Leadership deck, which comprises able fighters and excellent revenues.

The remaining 94 cards are sorted and used for three adventures that are provided in the game. Lord of the Rings LCG is a cooperative game in which the players try to master adventures together. The Core Set offers three of such adventures in levels 1, 4 and 7 of 9 possible difficulty levels. The first adventure is rather simple, accordingly, a fact that is proven by me not having been defeated once in the approximately 15 tries I gave this adventure.

Fantasy Flight is planning and has announced regular publication of expansions, so called Chapter Packs, which will expand the game by 60 cards each month. The Chapters announced so far promise one new adventure each, including the Hung for Gollum (already published) and new heroes like Bilbo and Frodo. After six such miniature expansions a cycle ends and there will be – if all goes according to the experience with other LCGs – a deluxe expansion published before the start of the next cycle.

Of course this sounds very much like a trading card came which demands the investment of lots of money, but the good news is – even without one expansion set the Core Set is a complete game offering fun and challenge for some evenings.

The rules of the game are – typically for a Fantasy Flight Game – too long to be read and explained to fellow players directly at the start of the game. But one player who has mastered the rules can explain the game within 10 minutes.

So, each player chooses a deck of cards and lays out the corresponding three heroes. Then you draw a starting hand of 6 cards from your deck pile. Next, you extract the 3-4 Quest Cards from the cards and implement the set-up instructions on the first card. These cards feature some introductory text and list the Encounter Cards that must be found and shuffled into the Encounter Deck. This differentiates the diverse adventures by providing different opponents and dangers.

Now the first round of the game can start. A round in the game comprises several phases which are all implemented by all players – sometimes even simultaneously – before the next phase starts. The round starts with the Resource Phase. Each hero receives a resource and each player draws a card. Then – in the Planning phase - players can play allies like Faramir or attachments like chainmail into their display. These cards show their cost in big print and – while playing the Core game with the standard decks – you can pay for each card with any resources of your heroes. Only when you start to mix the decks the kind of resources used or needed to use comes into play. In addition to this, there are event cards in the players’ decks which can be played later in the round depending on the momentary situation, but cards staying in play permanently can only be played in this phase.

All character cards – heroes, allies and monsters, too – show a bar featuring similar symbols for the different strength with numbers for the values of those strengths. The bar shows three symbols/numbers for Willpower Strength, Attack Strength and Defense Strength as well as a big number denoting the Hit Points. These three values are interesting insofar as a character usually can use only one of these values/abilities in a round. A character using his Willpower in a round cannot defend himself. And an attack can only be made by a character who did nothing else for the whole round.

In the third phase, the Quest phase, players declare their characters for questing, that is the implementation/carrying out of the adventure. You use the characters by turning the respective cards by 90 degrees. This is a feature common to all trading card games and is called tapping. As this is a cooperative game it is of course recommended that players coordinate their tapping.

Then you draw a Threat card from the Encounter Deck and placed into the so called Staging area of the table. The staging are is a central are in which enemies are placed that have not yet entered into combat with players. Enemies and locations feature a Threat Strength that is functioning like negative Willpower Strength. That means that monsters and location remain threatening until the group either arrives at the location to set things to right or directly fights the monsters. Many of those cards have a feature, that is activated instantly when the card is turned up – for instance, the Crebain can draw additional cards, or the the Orcs can directly inflict damage on a hero engaged in a quest.

Furthermore, the Encounter Deck also features Treachery Cards which inflicts effects as soon as they are turned up.

In the Quest Resolution Stage following the Staging stage in the Quest Phase you add up the Willpower Strength values of the previously chosen heroes and allies and deduct from this the Threat Strength values of the various cards displayed in the staging area. If this results in a positive value you place the respective number of progress tokens onto the active Quest Cards. If the result is negative, each player must raise his threat value on the Threat Tracker accordingly.

How many and what characters to send on a quest is a central tactical decision in this game, very often players start to calculate to find out the best possibility and heroes are exchanged, because of course it is not yet known what the Threat Strength value will be at the end of the round.

In the Travel phase players decide whether they want to expose themselves to the distraction of a location. Locations have threat values, too, and if there are too many locations in the staging area it can become difficult to amass the necessary Willpower Strength to advance the quest successfully. However, all players together can only visit one location per round and finally, the rules demand that the next Progress tokens acquired must be first placed on the active location cards which is meant to simulate a detour.

The next phase is the Encounter phase comprising the stages Player Engagement and Engagement Checks. First, in the encounter phase, each player can volunteer to engage one enemy in the stating area by relocating him from the area to the player.

Then an Engagement Check is made for the remaining enemies in the staging area to determine whether any of them will engage one of the heroes. The enemies will attach when the Engagement Cost is equal or lower to the Threat value of a player.

This takes us to phase 6, Combat. First, the enemies attack. Each enemy is dealt a face-down Shadow Card, these are cards from the Encounter Deck with a special backside so that you cannot “forget” to deal with a monster. The monsters attack one by one and each player can choose if one of his heroes engages the monster. This exhausts another hero or ally but you can deduct the Defense Strength value from the damage. Then the Shadow card is revealed and – in case it has an effect – added and the resulting Damage tokens are placed on the Character card. If nobody confronts the monster the Shadow card is revealed, too, and usually the result is much worse. The player must allocate the damage to one of his three heroes without deducting the armor. Only when all monsters have attacked players can retaliate with yet untapped characters.

Monsters always con use their Threat Value while being displayed in the staging are. Also in combat, they can always attack and defend. Characters of the players must make a decision which of the three actions/values they want to use.

The 7^th and final phase at the end of the round goes by the name of Refresh. All tapped cards are untapped, that is turned back to standard position and each player must raise his Threat Tracker value by 1. Now the game can continue with the next round with resources, quests, travel and combat as the main phases.

As the structure of the rounds is rather complex it is highly recommended to keep the rule book open at those pages for the first few games as not to forget anything vital. Even more complexity results from the fact that the cards very often feature interactions with other cards, which offer lots of possibilities but also leave lots of room for discussions and leeway on interpretations of possible results.

But once the rules hurdles have been overcome you will find that you play a cooperative game that adheres excellently to the topic and offers lots of depth. Ideally in each round you are confronted with the decision which of your heroes to send out and which resources to play onto the table. The decks strong in combat abilities must assist the weaker decks. As regards to complexity the game is the most difficult of the current cooperative, even if the difficulty level of the quests in the Core Set is not too high after all.

One problem of the game that the game has in my opinion is a bad gradation of the difficulty level when playing with varying numbers of players: For a solitaire player the first quest is difficult and the other two are nearly impossible to master. When two are playing the difficulty levels for the quests seem to be correct, easy, middle and hard for the three of them. When more are playing, especially with four players, it takes lots of bad luck to turn the quests into a real challenge. Some assistance is offered by some of the suggestions in the rulebook, you can count victory points and optimize them, or string all three quests together, but that does not change the fact that the number of players massively influences whether the game plays easy or difficult.

What will be the future development of the game nobody can guess yet. Due to additional cards for the player decks soon there will be serious possibilities for deck construction, which will then make the scenarios easier. Very probably this will result in more difficult future quests.

I was already able to play the cards from the first Chapter Pack. I was intrigued to see that the designers have withstood the temptation to make the cards much stronger to achieve an intense inducement for buying the Chapter Pack. Actually, the additional cards are interesting but definitely not stronger than those featured in the Core Set. Therefore you only need to buy the Chapter Pack if you want to acquire the new Quest “Hunt for Gollum”, the new Hero “Bilbo Beutlin” or simply more choice when constructing your deck.

Most trading cards are confronted with the problem that it is hard to find an opponent on one’s own level of play. If you do not play League and own all rare, expensive and good cards in sufficient numbers, you are only left with the choice to construct two decks that you deem to be equally strong and hope to find another player. Due to the fact that the LotR LCG is a cooperative game my opponent can believe for the first time my protestations that I did not hide weaknesses to my advantage in his deck and I can play with several people on any level of expansion.

That a game offers that many possibilities and that huge amount of fun when playing is – at least from my point of view – an all-time first in a trading card game, therefore my recommendation: Try it out without fail!

Christian Grundner

Players         : 1-4

Age             : 13+

Duration       : 45+

Designer      : Nate French

Artist           : Kevin Childress and Team

Price            : ca. 30 Euro

Publisher      : FFG / Heidelberger 2011

Web             : www.hds-fantasy.de

Genre          : Living Card Game

Users           : With friends

Special         : For 1 or 2 players

Version        : de

Rules           : de en fr it pl

In-game text : yes

Comments:

Level of difficulty changes with the number of players * can be played with four using one Core Set * no varying rarity for cards

Compares to:

Other LCGs like Call of Cthulu or A Game of Thrones

Other editions: Heidelberger, Galakta, Edge Entertainment, Stratelibri

My rating: 6

Statement Christian Grundner:

A cooperative game that offers lots of fun, even for four, with the Core Set alone, additional Chapter Packs are nice, but not necessary

Chance                1

Tactic                   3

Strategy__          0

Creativity            0

Knowledge 2

Memory               0

Communication   3

Interaction          2

Dexterity             0

Action                  0