Lord of the Rings TCG

The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game is a collectible card game produced by Decipher from 2001-2007.

Overview
The object of the game is to advance your Ring-bearer and fellowship (a group of Free Peoples companions) through nine sites on an adventure path (which will be built as the game progresses). Along the way, your opponent will play Shadow minions and other cards to try to stop you (you’ll return the favor on his turn, when his fellowship moves). If you reach the final site first, you win, but if your ring-bearer dies, hope is lost. So plan carefully!

The characters in this game have strength, vitality (defense), and other attributes.  Example cards are shown below.

One unique feature of this game is that you'll play both the good and bad guys.  Your deck must be half Free Peoples cards and half Shadow cards; both sides have several cultures as shown below, giving you many deck building options.  Generally cards of the same culture work well together.

Simplified Gameplay
Players alternate being the Free Peoples player and Shadow player.  When you're up as the Free Peoples player, you do the following:

• Play Free Peoples cards to the table, paying their cost (upper left corner) by adding tokens to the twilight pool
• Move your fellowship to the next site
• The Shadow player then plays minions, paying their cost by removing tokens from the twilight pool
• You assign your characters to defend against any minions present
• For each character battle, you skirmish (compare strengths; higher wins) and the loser receives a wound, dying if their accumulated wounds equal their vitality
• You then choose to move to the next site or end the turn
• If you keep moving, the Shadow player gets another opportunity to draw cards, play minions, and fight skirmishes
• If you end the turn, all shadow minions are discarded and your opponent becomes the Free Peoples player

The first person to have their Ring-bearer (probably Frodo) survive after skirmishing at site 9 wins the game!

A typical game in progress looks like the below.

Review
This is a good game; you can tell Decipher used its years of experience in designing this.  They worked out a lot of the problems that plagued their earlier releases (like Star Wars CCG).  The skirmishes incorporated concepts similar to those found in Magic and Vs. System to good effect, and the 'press your luck' element (keep moving or rest?) is a nice twist.  Here are other things I liked:
- There's a good level of interaction.
- Card drawing is fast.
- Playing both sides is fun.
- The cards look great and are of high quality.
- The twilight pool concept- to a degree, the good guys get to control (by choosing which cards to play) how many resources the bad guys have available.  That's a neat twist.
- They capture the spirit of the movies well.  The bad guys go down easily but wound the good guys in so doing.  You feel the tension building as the game progresses- can they make it without dying?
- They balanced the advantage pretty well.  The first player may seem to have the advantage (because this is effectively a race), but that's countered by the second player playing most of the sites from their personal adventure deck.  That can be game-changing.

A few things could be better:
- The game is 'busy'- there's a lot to keep track of.
- It doesn't replicate the 'epic' battles and landscapes of the books/movies (though, to be fair, I've never found a LOTR game that does).
- It doesn't follow the complete story.  Before starting, you have to choose which block (one per movie) to play.  So each game follows one movie only, and the overall experience is only a third of the epic.

Overall, this is worth a look if you're a fan of the movies and the CCG genre in general.

Links
The wikipedia site gives a nice overview.  A mirror of Decipher's old site has some good information, but the best is the LOTR TCG wiki- it includes an excellent card database resource, rules reference, and starter deck lists.

Rating: B