Lord of the Rings LCG

At the annual Board Game event in Prague I got the chance to try this game out. There wasn't anybody around who would explain the game so I just grabbed it and started reading the rules.

Lord of the Rings LCG is a cooperative game by Fantasy Flight Games and it's been around for a while (two years). This game can be played either solo or cooperatively with 1 to 3 players. The main objective of the game is to complete all the quests in a scenario. If a player reaches 50 threat level or loses all his heroes he is eliminated from the game. Each player has 1-3 heros at his disposal. Each turn each player gets some resources (including one card) and his threat level is heightened by 1. Resources can be spend to play either allies (that help mainly in combat), events (one time effects that can be played more or less anytime - when the card says that is) or attachments (equipment). After this heroes can commit to a quest. This is very important as this is the only way how to progress in the game. The will power of commited heroes is then compared with the threat level of all cards that are in 'the staging area' (when players commit one new card from encounter deck per player is placed in the staging area). The difference is either added on a location/quest (if heroes) win) in the staging area or is added to the threat level (if threat level is higher). If they commit to a quest they become exhausted (tapped) and cannot fight. Readied (untapped) heroes can defend or attack or use other abilities. Heroes can also travel to a location. That is needed because if there is a location in play the counters from the questing are put there (instead of being put directly on the quest). If a hero travels to the location he can explore it (if the number of quest counters reaches the number that is printed on the card the location is explored and then discarded). This more or less describes what happens in a turn.

From this you can see that there are all kind of resources that you need to manage and mainly it's about the heroes. Almost each action requires a hero to tap which means that the hero cannot do anything else till the end of turn. Heroes also generate points that can be spend to play cards, thus if one dies it will hurt your deck in more ways. In a multiplayer game the roles can be divided - mostly by spheres. Because one sphere is good for questing but can hardly fight. That is the reason why you can decide to let your heroes attack enemies (before checking which enemies will attack whom). This requires quite a cooperation from the players but if you are going to play with the core set preconstructed decks you'll see this quite soon.

There are four spheres of influence - lore, tactics, leadership and spirit. By choosing heroes of one of these spheres a player decides what kind of flavor, play style etc his or her your deck will have. Not to mention the fact that choosing heroes from different spheres of influence limits the player (as playing cards from your deck will be a harder). This box (Core set) contains 226 cards from which a custom deck can be build. The box contains 3 different scenarios. One is introductory and is relatively easy (if played in a two player game and you choose 2 spheres of influence that support each other - thus you have enough will power to quest and enough 'attack power' to beat enemies). The other two scenarios are more difficult (difficulty level 3 and 7).

I did not spend much time playing and exploring this game but one thing is clear. Playing this solo can be pretty difficult. Certain spheres are more or less incapable of actually gathering enough will power to win in the questing phase. And those who actually can gather the power die in combat. This probably is good because this forces the player to build his own deck that contains cards and heroes from two spheres. In more players this game should be easier as players have access to a wider variety of stats and cards. Still if you get stuck at one point and you start getting more location in the staging area the threat level can be getting higher quite fast.

Even after the first game it seemed to me that this game can become pretty repetitive and that is also an incentive to buy new Adventure Packs. These contain 60 cards including new quests for players. Another thing that we are used to already is that some cards can be found only once in the core set. So if you want more of them you need to buy a new box. If you want to build a solid deck from two spheres you need to get a second copy of the core set. A deck has to contain 50 cards, and is limited to have a card in 3 copies maximum. The PCDs contain 30 cards. If you have only one box you basically take all of the cards of the corresponding spheres and set aside five from each sphere (or well just you won't be playing 10 cards from no matter their sphere of influence). Not much of a deckbuilding...

The graphical design of the game is pretty neat and it is an original design. Thus no movie rip offs or based on it. This is a nice change I have to say but it also made it a bit confusing sometimes because I could not distinguish an elf from dwarf^_^. The counters and other stuff in the box is nicely done and the quality is higher than I expected.

The game is actually quite complex which I did not expect for a cooperative game. I'd rather play this game alone because I could focus more on deckbuilding and figuring out how the game works. But that's my take on the game. I'm not really into cooperative games.