Or the rulebook says: “The Shadow must try to slowly cuorrupt Frodo, burdening him with wounds toils, sorrow… blah blah blah.” My Comments: There is an extra level of abstraction since it is a card game, but this game does a good job at both capturing the Lord of the Rings theme and feeling like an adaptation of the board game. As the Shadow player you lead the hordes of the Dark Lord and his most powerful minions as they try to bring darkness to Middle-earth. Legions of Orcs, Trolls, Wolfriders and the dreadful Ringwraiths await your command. Hunt the Ring-bearer and bring the precious Ring to his Master, or crush your enemies with your unstoppable armies. Now with locations explained, the first thing to know about rounds is that you take turns doing one action each. Eventually, everyone will pass, then you resolve each of the locations. But before you get carried away from all these cards in hand, there’s one REALLY important rule: every time you drop something from your hand, you HAVE to discard another card in your hand as a cost, this is called ‘cycling’.

At the beginning of each round a new path card is selected. These cards represent the locations the fellowship visits on their path to Mordor. A battlefield will also be put into play. Whichever side is the start player will be the defending side for the battlefield. Set up of the game is straightforward. Assuming you are playing the full trilogy scenario for 4 players the game is set up as follows. War of the Ring: The Card Game has launched an interest in Tolkien in my kids that I’ve been quietly hoping would come along for about 15 years. (Admittedly, my oldest was 2 then, so I was perhaps being a little premature.) I played the game with my 3 boys, 17, 13, and 10. They were all very taken with it. My youngest in particular has now wanted to learn more about Middle Earth ,its stories, and characters. I am in clover!Cards are played to one of the two locations, or into your reserve for use in future rounds, and this is done through cycling another card from your hand. I really like the simplicity here in not having to worry about the cost of cards in my hand but also knowing the agonising decision that I have to get rid of something I might want to play another card. Inspired by the best-selling and award-winning War of the Ring board game, War of the Ring - The Card Game allows players to journey to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and create their own version of the dramatic conflict between the Dark Lord, Sauron, and the Free Peoples of Middle-earth. Inspired by the best-selling and award-winning War of the Ring board game, War of the Ring - The Card Gameallows players to journey to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ringsand create their own version of the dramatic conflict between the Dark Lord, Sauron, and the Free Peoples of Middle-earth. With more than 100 original illustrations from the greatest Tolkienian artists in the world, including an amazing gallery of landscapes from The Shire to Mordor by John and Fataneh Howe, War of the Ring - The Card Gameis more than a game – it's also a memorable collection for all lovers of the world imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Discussing the main mode of the game (Trilogy Mode) but we have a little on the official 2 player duel modeThis po-tay-toe based stew is definitely gonna taste different for your playthroughs with the draws, but WOTR CG CAN jump through all of its hurdles, and there can be really cool moments when the cards line up and its so close to what happens in the storyline… a truly shorter version of the board game. War of the Ring is the greatest board game based on THE LORD OF THE RINGS™ ever created! WAR OF THE RING is a grand strategy board game that allows its players to immerse themselves in the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien and experience its epic action, dramatic conflict, and memorable characters. Frodo– Free Peoples: Dwarf, Hobbit, Rohan, and Wizard cards (Sidenote: “Dwarf” is just Gimli and his axe!) As the Free Peoples player you command the proud hosts of the most important kingdoms of the Third Age. From the horse-lords of Rohan to the soldiers of Gondor and the Elven lords of Rivendell, you lead the defense of the last free realms of Middle-earth. Face the evil minions of Sauron on the field of battle in a desperate attempt to delay their onslaught, while you lead the Fellowship of the Ring in the Quest for Mount Doom.

Games are broken into 9 rounds (as given by the 9 sets of Path cards). Each round is broken down into 5 steps. Step 1 – Location Step Choosing where to play cards is sometimes limited by where the location is, so certain cards can only be played to locations that fit with the narrative of the books and so this adds to the tension of a bad card draw but being able to play cards to your reserve area is a positive way of mitigating this or you have the option of cycling two to draw one. You can effectively choose to lose a round, knowing you can use those cards to better effect further down the line. I Have No Memory Of This Place It is, to a degree, an asymmetric game. It feels hard to win if you’re Free Peoples. Much as in the book, the forces of Sauron are so strong as to be overwhelming. As the Free Peoples player, sadly, there is no Deus Ex Machinato see you through to the end. (Although there is an eagles card to get you out of a tight spot!) Nevertheless, every game has been very close, and more importantly an absolutely barnstorming Lord of the Ringsexperience. Lord of the Rings gem War of the Ring: The Card Game will receive its first expansion later this year, introducing new cooperative and solo modes.

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We gotta bring up “Ride to ruin, DEATH!” It is actually it is the epitome of War of the Ring CG. A cool sounding thematic card, promises good teamwork moments between Rohan and Gondor, but ends up needing very specific board states of Rohan HELPING mostly Minas Tirith, which might not even be in a game, or your Rohan troops may all be dead before it CAN trigger… so its usually discard fodder to fuel OTHER Lord of the Rings interactions.

There are a few other minor actions you can take, but these are rare and don’t have much bearing on the core structure of the game. And you know how to play any card, you must cycle another card? Well that’s card inflation, meaning you’re basically paying 2 cards to play 1, making certain ‘drawing cards ability’ not as healthy as you think. These 2 cards can be REALLY good, especially since you can +1 off of getting 2 cards, but what if you draw 0 of what you’re looking for? Then you just played 2 cards to get literally nothing, which feels absolutely terrible. This play alone won’t lose you the game, but its like you threw some part of your hand into mount doom. The two FP equivalents to these Shadow drawing events are Eomer and Theoden… but if you fail these, you still have a dude on the board with some upside, so not sure why these Shadow cards don’t just let you draw more so they don’t poop out. All in all, I think War of the Ring: The Card Gameis an excellent gaming experience, especially for fans of the Lord of the Rings.The way it captures the essence of the saga whilst also delivering a tactical workout, all in under an hour, makes it more than worthy of being GeekDad Approved! Character Cards (Like Aragorn or Saruman) can be played to Battlegrounds or Paths. Again they must have a matching icon. In the case of paths, there are no icons, but each character has a set of path numbers printed on them. This tells you which path you can play cards to. Not every character can be played to every path card. The Balrog can’t, for example, be played to Bag End and you can’t deploy Fatty Bolger to Khazad Dùm. Item Cards are played onto characters that have already been played. They usually convey buffs or alter some of the game rules so that they don’t affect the character they are played to.For Paths, one of the cards that have the current round number on it is chosen at random. There are 3 possible choices for each round. They have subtly different effects on them, allowing variation between games. This can also make the replayability of the game not as high as initially thought with all the cool cards with this strategy- each side just becomes aware of the what the other is trying to do. Compare that to the board game, where while Frodo still needs to get to mount doom, there’s a bunch of paths to get there, and there’s a bunch of different areas of middle earth for the Shadow to CHOOSE to mobilize against, rather than spurned on by card flips. So now onto gameplay cons, and we have to start with how randomness is handled. Now granted, this is a card game so there’s always going to be an element of randomness with card draws or card flips, but War of the Ring CG does this to a severe way in many areas. First are the battlegrounds, you know where you’re forced to fight, where since they’re flipped over randomly every round, it makes early-mid game combat pretty volatile and unfair feeling. Playing a four-player demo at Gen Con 2022 ahead of a planned release later this year, the upcoming card game spin-off from War of the Ring proved itself to be far more than a basic simplification of the richly thematic and strategic board game. Her Comments: There is enough variety in the cards and locations that the game will often play out differently. I also appreciate that the two player game and the team game are different experiences.