Speaking of the original WOTR, that game was INSANELY hard to learn, its like the the rulebook and its player aids were some archaically worded parchment that were ACTIVELY gatekeeping the play. Happy to report that learning this War of the Ring is mostly good, with good examples, good use of space, fantastic card breakdown, etc. etc. This is helped by the good player aid that explains all the symbols, and slightly differentiated for the opposing teams here. The Path and Battleground cards depict key locations in Middle Earth. The path cards feature significant places that feature in the Lord of the Rings narrative, like Bag End, Moria, or The Dead Marshes. Battlegrounds depict the places fought over in the War of the Ring, for example, Minas Tirith, Morannon, or Isengard. The locations in the game very much give War of the Ring players thesense of being immersed in the saga. Step 2 – The Action Step 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. 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.

Once everybody has passed, the action step is over and we move on to the combat step. Edoras is a Free Peoples Battle Ground. Note it can only have Rohan, Wizard cards played to it by Free Peoples players and Isengard by the Shadow players Step 3 – The Combat Step The goal of the game is to score more victory points than your opponents. The Free Peoples play against the Shadow Players. Setup Uhh, I lied, there’s one last action: voluntarily cycling, aka discarding a card as an action, but you rarely do that. Her Comments: For the most part I liked the card play and the choices present, but it was annoying to feel like I could not do anything at times because I did not have the needed cards required for a path or battlefield. Shadow isn’t weaker, but need careful playing and do not follow the rulebook’s marketing. If you’re a really careful gamer, this won’t be an issue. I won’t spoil the details of the strategy: but essentially you cannot get concerned that the FP are utterly destroying you in points- you just need to keep that a little below 10 until late game, where paths 8/9 are very shadow favored.

Contributors

Players will take turns playing cards that represent the people, armies, items, and events of the War of the Ring during the course of the game. Each card they play will either aid or obstruct the Fellowship’s progress down its Path or be used to defend or seize Middle-earth’s strongholds as they contend for possession of the fresh Battleground cards that are activated each round. Players will take turns playing cards that represent the people, armies, items, and events of the War of the Ring during the course of the game. Each card they play will either aid or obstruct the Fellowship's progress down its Path or be used to defend or seize Middle-earth's strongholds as they contend for possession of the fresh Battleground cards that are activated each round. The Path mechanics are particularly clever. Being able to play certain characters and cards only at certain times greatly adds to their power to invoke the central story. After Rivendell, the Ringwraiths can’t be played on paths until later on in the game. There are few things better when Gandalf gets to head the Balrog off at Khazad-Dùm. An occurrence made all the sweeter by the fact it won’t happen in every game. There is also another clever mechanic concerning Gandalf and Aragorn. They start the game as Gandalf the Grey and Strider. You do have access to cards for Gandalf the White and Aragorn, but once they are played, the original incarnations are completely removed from the game. Path cards follow the story of Frodo and the Fellowship, while battlegrounds represent the wider conflict across 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 Game is more than a game – it's also a memorable collection for all lovers of the world imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien.

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. Like, you might have asked yourself, what if Minis Tirith gets flipped over round one? Well this THREE point battleground is gonna be pretty hard to Shadow to get with its defense and free people helping ability… and remember Free People don’t even have to commit troops there to necessarily win! the walls And if you do the math, Shadow needs between 2-3 troops to get over Minas Tirith’s base defense value AND the troops need to match the battleground type… this is a LOT to ask on the first turn, so the shadow HAS to essentially give it up, giving FP an early VP lead, putting the burden on the Shadow to later re-activate this place, spending their own resources. There are several possible path cards for each of the game's nine rounds, providing plenty of variation between plays. 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. War of the Ring: The Card Game centres around two locations played in the middle of the table each round. One is a battleground representing one of the key battles between the Free Peoples of Middle-earth - elves, dwarves and the nations of Rohan and Gondor, as well as the Fellowship of the Ring - and the orc and Uruk-hai forces of Shadow, while the other is a path card that divides the journey of Frodo into nine key chapters, from the Shire to Mount Doom.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. War of the Ring is widely considered to be one of - if not the - greatest adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to a tabletop experience. Recreating the entirety of Tolkien’s book trilogy as a Risk-style board game, War of the Ring is soaked through with the dense lore and worldbuilding of the novels, combining a faithful commitment to the story of Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring with the sprawling battle between good and evil that spans the whole of Middle-earth. 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’. Like many of the best card games, it’s a simple set of rules made strategically complex by the possible combinations and effects of the cards themselves. Many cards grant bonus abilities when played to a player’s reserve area, making it not quite as obvious as throwing your most powerful cards into the fray.

We are using a custom rating scale. Each game will be evaluated by both of us on 1 to 10 scale in five areas. When combined, this creates a possible score out of 100. Note: It is not possible to pass until your hand is below your “carryover limit.” This means that sometimes you are forced to play cards before you would ideally like not to. 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. While there are two and three-player variations, this game plays best as a 4 player game: 2v2 – with players teaming up to represent the Free Peoples and Shadow forces. 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.

Step 4 – Victory Check

Unlike the LCG, which sees players working together through scenarios, in this game up to four players will play against each other in teams of up to two fighting over paths and battlegrounds to see which side can amass the most points by the end of the game.