For the last few days, my wife and I have been trying to figure out, pin down, and execute The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. While there is a steep learning curve to conquer when starting the game, the payoff at the end is well worth the effort is given.
Let’s break this sucker down through the eyes of an amateur card gamer.
The positives
The set
This is by and large one of the more gorgeous card games I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. From the artwork to the packaging, there was a lot of love put into creating this set. Everything feels like it will last for decades, and quite frankly it probably will. The cards are sturdy with some of the most stunning art that I’ve seen in a card game. It rivals the likes of Magic: The Gathering when it comes to style and perfection, which isn’t surprising considering the pedigree that it was born from that has survived for decades. Even the resource and health tokens feel like they’re just well-made. It’s a sturdy game that looks and feels like something that will be long-lasting. These are the first things you’ll be wowed about with the card set and rightfully so.
Playing the game
The card game is built for 1-4 players. So, you can get a group of your friends together to play this or you can play one wicked game of solitaire. Your choice of which direction to go and no direction is wrong, it just determines how much time you need to play the game.
For this review, we played a two-player game, just so we wouldn’t bore or frustrate another set of players. We played a standard mode, where we chose our own card decks (and yes, you can create your own deck) that were broken up into:
– Leadership: The go-to deck that contains a hodge-podge of every type of gaming card.
– Tactics: A well-balanced card deck that focuses mainly on both attacks and defense, but is vital for success.
– Spirit: A deck that focuses on Will Power (an important element) and exploration (the way to win the game, if done right).
– Lore: Lots of good heroes in this deck with lots of good powers to bring to the table, including a very powerful Gandalf.
The decks bring their own good and bad. We had a questionable time playing the Spirit deck, though it could probably be written up as a bad draw/shuffle on my wife’s part. She didn’t love what it brought to the table and our journey through Mirkwood ended pretty darn poorly because of that deck.
The reason why my wife picked the Spirit deck to take through Mirkwood is that it offered up Willpower points more than any other deck. The reason why that is important is that you compare those total points from all players involved with the Threat Level points of all the enemies on the staging area. If we have more Willpower points than Threat Level points, we take the difference and turn those into progress points (small footprint resources), which we need to complete the game’s overall journey through Quest cards.
You’re wondering, “what the hell are Quest cards?” Those are cards that set the story’s stage for you and lead the narrative. You draw multiple Quest cards that go from one scenario on your quest to another. The more progress points you obtain, the more Quest cards you pass through. Once you pass through all your Quest cards, then you win the game. So, the Spirit deck made complete sense, even though it was weak as heck by itself.
Unfortunately, our encounters during the journey through the quests brought out some of the worst spiders and even worst shadow cards. The latter of which enhanced the capabilities of said spiders and allowed them to kill us…twice. They were tough spiders.
The enemy deck was played at the beginning of each round, which either added enemies or locations. The latter of which had not only its own price for the players to play (almost always works against the heroes) and could only be explored/conquered with the right amount of progress points. Do you see the balance in this overall scenario? It’s maddening when you get too many enemies and not enough help.
Our experience aside, as each round plays through, the players get some advantage by being allowed to pull another card from their deck and decide whether to use it or not. That player deck card could be an event, ally, or attachment. The events can be played immediately, and some are well thought out, but the ally and attachment cards cost resources to use. The ally cards can be anyone that could help, including Gandalf, who would take an enemy card completely out of play. That’s a nice option. The attachment cards enhance heroes but also cost ample resources to use. Those resources are gathered through each passing round based on how many heroes you have left as you traverse through the game. It is one resource per hero, or so it was with our game. Those resources and deck cards require some sort of forethought strategy on how you want to go about spending your coin to make for the best play. Admittingly, this works together with this game’s replay value and sparks a sense of adventure and motivation to break it out again, even if you lose.
I like good strategy games, and this takes the cake.
For every passing round, you add an enemy from the encounter deck, which makes the game harder and harder, especially if you don’t keep up with enemies and dispose of them. One added factor each round to make the characters think about progress points and resources is that you have the option to exhaust heroes and allies before the round begins. Exhausting cards adds Willpower points against the enemy’s threat levels number, but also make those players unavailable for battling. If you don’t exhaust players, then you can’t count their Willpower points, which means that you may turn a negative amount of Willpower points and that could lead to no progress points and an increased Threat Dial level (getting there, just hang tight).
Fascinating, right?
All the above considered you have much to decide in the game. Moreover, there is an overall Threat dial the player must consider, which goes up each round depending on Threat Level v Willpower (when you don’t have enough Willpower points, the negative difference gets added to the dial). When your Threat Dial hits 50 points, you’re toast, and the game is over. So, to recap, you have to worry about enemies, keeping your heroes alive, spending your resource points on a good strategy, and not running up a Threat Dial. Not at all complicated.
As stated at the beginning, the learning curve for this game is steep as hell, but the payoff, once you get into the groove of things, was well worth the squeeze of the lemon. Not that this game is a lemon, far from it.
The negatives
While that might read ‘negatives’, I would prefer to call them improvements to be made. I think most of the improvements are just aesthetic complaints about the game.
Those numbers
While my wife and I are certainly drawing towards the big 5-0, the numbers on the bottom right of the cards, which dictate which cards are what and what cards you should be playing for whatever game you want, they’re very difficult to read. I think we squinted back and forth trying to divide up decks and trying to figure out what section of cards to pull. The numbers are super-duper tiny. It’s mindboggling what font size was used at the printer. Maybe in the negatives? I’m kidding, probably four.
Decks and Resources
The other issue we had with the game is the severe lack of organized storage. This goes together with the above complaint because if you mix decks up accidentally, you’re bound to be squinting for 20 minutes trying to reorganize them. It would be nice to have dividers for each deck, so they have a home to go back to at the end. It would also be nice for baggies to be included with the resources because they’re just a pile of everything put together when you’re putting up the set. It’s not impossible to sort all of this out, but it does slow down the start of the game considerably when you’re trying to organize it all to get it going.
Anyway, let’s wrap this up.
Final Thoughts
Other than the above improvement suggestions, there isn’t much to complain about with Lord of the Rings: The Card Game other than the steep learning curve, which is easily rectified with two go-arounds of the game. There are a lot of moving parts and strategies to consider when playing by yourself or with friends. The game does a helluva job with laying out the step-by-step round instructions for you on the back of the ‘Learn to Play’ guide, which does speed up the process, but you must know it’s back there, which we found out at the end of our second go around.
A big plus for this specific set is that they included a Campaign Mode for it. This allows you to combine quests and go on one gigantic quest of your own. This even comes with its own character and journey sheets, which is cool. I’m anxious to dig into this revision addition.
All in all, this is a good game overall for players looking for a challenging card game experience. The stories are nice and plentiful, the multiple quests you can play, and the longevity of the battles can really turn this into a memorable experience that you will want to revisit.
