I’m on an eternal quest to share my love of gaming with my wife. The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games is an intriguing option. Phoenix enjoys the LOTR universe and deck-building games like Thunderstone and Ascension.
Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is a one-to-four-player adventure where you fight enemies and explore locations. You build decks of up to 50 cards from four spheres of influence: Leadership, Lore, Spirit and Tactics. We recently discussed the game on the Outside is Overrated podcast.
Each player controls one to three heroes. These leaders collect resources from their sphere of influence each turn, allowing you to buy cards from the same school. Although some iconic heroes have multiple versions in different spheres of influence, you can only have one of each hero in a game. If you want to play with three or four players, you will also need two copies of the base game.
What’s in the Box
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game base game contains starter decks for each sphere of influence and three heroes for each sphere. It also includes three adventures: Passage Through Mirkwood, Journey Along the Anduin and Escape from Dol Gudur.
For the purpose of this review, we also used cards from the Conflict at the Carrock Adventure Pack. For the podcast discussion, we included cards from several adventure packs in the first two cycles.
Setup
For this review, I used Legolas (Tactics), Thalin (Tactics) and Theodred (Leadership). I built my deck of low-cost meat shields and ranged archers. My goal was to have a wave of soldiers tie up the enemies, and use my heroes to attack. Archers are ranged and can target enemies engaged with either player.
Phoenix used Eowyn (Spirit), Frodo (Spirit) and Glorfindel (Lore). Her deck consisted of healing abilities, scouts and magic. Most of her utility came from having scouts explore multiple locations at once.
We used multi-colored decks for our first few playthroughs, then adjusted to use a single color as we incorporated more adventure packs. Having played multiple games with two, three and four players, we favor multi-color decks for two players and single-color for three and four players.
Threat Level
One of the core mechanics in LOTR is the threat level. You start the game with a threat level, and if it ever reaches 50, you lose and your partner is on their own.
Each hero has a threat number, which determines your starting level. Enemies also have threat levels, and will only attack players with the same or higher threat levels. Several events and other cards also target players at or above certain thresholds.
Playing the Game
Each turn in Lord of the Rings: The Card Game has seven phases. Each adventure consists of multiple phases that require different setups and sometimes introduce new mechanics. For example, in Passage Through Mirkwood, there are two versions of the final phase and you choose one at random.
Resource Phase
Each of your heroes gains one resource token and you draw a card.
Planning Phase
Spend resources off your heroes to purchase cards from your hand.
Quest Phase
Choose which heroes and allies to send on the quest. You exhaust (tap) these characters and they are unavailable for future phases, like combat. Once all players have committed characters, you add one encounter card per player to the staging area. These could be enemies to fight, locations to explore, or treacherous events.
Once you fill the staging area, you combine all of the questing characters’ willpower and compare the total to the threat strength of each card in the staging area. If the willpower score is higher, you place the difference in exploration tokens on the active location. When there is no active location or if you complete it, place leftover tokens on the quest card. If the threat level is higher, each player adds the difference to their threat dial.
Travel Phase
Next, if there is no active location the group may decide to travel to one of the locations in the staging area. This takes the location’s threat strength away from the next quest phase, but it can cause other difficulties for the players.
Encounter Phase
After the travel phase, players will encounter enemies. First, all players have the option to engage any enemy in the staging area. This mechanic allows you to manipulate who each player fights.
Once players have either optionally engaged an enemy or passed, each player makes an engagement check. Starting with the first player and moving clockwise, each player compares their active threat to each enemy in the staging area. The monster with the highest threat rating that is equal to or lower than that player’s threat level will engage the player.
Combat Phase
For the first step in combat, deal a shadow card to each enemy engaged with a player. Then, starting with the first player, players will choose an enemy to attack, resolve their shadow effect and execute the attack. Players may use allies and heroes to block, or if unable to block they can assign the full damage to one of their heroes.
After each enemy has attacked, the players get to activate attacks. You can use any heroes or allies you did not exhaust by questing or defending enemy attacks.
Refresh
After resolving the other steps, players ready all characters, raise their threat dials by one and pass the first player token to the next player.
Combat
Fighting the denizens of Middle Earth is challenging. It’s a fine balancing act between sending characters on quests to advance the game and maximizing resources for attack and defense.
Unless you have an ability or event that says otherwise, only one of your characters can defend against an enemy. You compare the monster’s attack to the defender’s shields and assign damage to the defender. Imagine you are fighting a goblin with three attack strength and block with an ally with two defense, the blocker takes one damage. If you don’t have anyone to block with, one of your heroes has to take all three points of damage. If one of your heroes dies, they are out of the game and you lost a significant source of resource generation.
The enemies’ shadow cards make combat even more challenging. When they attack, you flip the cards to reveal shadow effects. These have a range of negative outcomes for the player, from allowing the baddie to do more damage to wounding your characters.
Making the Most of Your Deck
Successful combat requires nuanced use of your deck. Some characters are ranged, allowing them to attack enemies engaged with any player. Others are sentinel, which means they can block enemies engaged with any player. You can also buff your characters with weapons and other attachments.
For example, if you use the Tactics hero Legolas, you get to place a quest token on the quest card every time he kills an enemy. As a bonus, he is ranged so he can attack any enemy in the game. This meant I never committed him to a quest or defense, and always saved him for offense. I was also fond of equipping him with the horn of Gonder, which grants the hero a resource every time a character leaves play.
If you manage to kill an enemy they go to the discard pile, if you wound them they remain engaged with you for future turns.
Adventures in Middle Earth
Before starting this campaign, Phoenix and I tried the initial adventure, Passage Through Mirkwood a couple of times with single-sphere decks to get a feel for the mechanics. Once we were really ready to dive in, I built two multicolor decks.
Taking the First Steps in Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
Our first playthrough with the new decks was catastrophic. Mirkwood has a low difficulty rating and pits you against the spiders orcs and various forest cards. In the first game, I shuffled my deck poorly and wound up with a handful of leadership cards. With two of my three heroes hailing from Tactics, two-thirds of my resources were wasted waiting for me to draw those cards, which make up roughly 80 percent of my deck. My heroes were constantly tied up on defense, and I couldn’t clear any enemies off the board. We were both quickly overrun and all six heroes perished.
Coming Back For More
Our second attempt at the Passage through Mirkwood (Difficulty = 1) went better. I drew more tactics cards and was able to stem the tides of the oncoming horde with Gondorian spearmen. Between Legolas and another archer, I cleared enemies and kept us from being overrun. With me engaging enemies, Phoenix’s heroes were able to quest us through the adventure.
Using Fantasy Flight’s handy scoring system, which allows you to track how well you performed in an adventure, we came up with a score of 97. Scores are influenced by your threat level and how beat up your heroes get. The lower the threat level the better.
The second adventure in the base game is Journey Along the Anduin (Difficulty = 4). It pits you against cards from the Journey Down the Anduin, Sauron’s Reach, Dol Guldur Orcs and Wilderlands sets. The core mechanics change for this adventure, making it longer and more challenging. There were more monsters and more locations. I summoned meatshields and Phoenix played a scout who helped us burn through locations.
It was an intense and evenly balanced adventure. We had to work together to spread out the enemies and maximize our combat opportunities. We defeated the adventure on our first attempt and finished with a score of 145.
Practically Jumping Into the Fires of Mount Doom
The final adventure in the base game is Escape from Dol Guldur (Difficulty = 7). In this adventure, you take on cards from the Escape from Dol Guldur, Spiders of Mirkwood, and Dol Guldur Orcs sets. It begins with one hero being captured, one Nazgul hovering ominously over the board, and three objectives you must complete to win.
This adventure was another disaster. We lost in approximately six rounds. I had lost one hero, and we both wound up with a threat level over 50, which knocks you out of the game. Even with outstanding luck, I’m not sure how we could beat this adventure with our existing decks. It felt unfair, like a tool designed to push me to buy more expansions, get new cards and come back in the future.
Overall, the game is very fun. We had several hours of enjoyment from the base game. The core mechanics are very fun, and the threat level keeps the pressure on throughout the game. I just wish there were more heroes, more adventures and more enemy sets included in the base.
Looking to the Future and 1,000,000 Expansions
Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is a living card game, meaning there is an endless stream of expansions as the game keeps growing and evolving. You can expand beyond the base game ($30) with a series of cycles that add new cards. Each cycle has of six adventure packs ($15), each including one new hero, one new adventure and two new cards for each sphere of influence.
If you want to continue your adventures, there is also a series of deluxe expansions ($30). Each deluxe expansion includes two new heroes and three new quests, and allows you to play a series of six new adventure packs (also $15 apiece). That’s $120 per cycle.
There are also Saga Expansions ($30) that recreate iconic moments from the Lord of the Rings books. These expansions require only the base game to play. Saga Expansions include one to four new heroes, three new quests and over 100 new player and encounter cards.
Note: Since this article was initially published, Fantasy Flight has reprinted and repackaged two of the cycle and altered the business model.
Is the Journey Worth the Burden?
Overall, Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is very fun. The business model is difficult to accept, with each cycle running over $100. If you have the resources to keep up with the ever-expanding game, I recommend jumping in. It’s a fun adventure game that plays great at two, three and four players. Each scenario gives you a great reason to fiddle with your decks.