The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth

Today's review is of the 2019 release, The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth.  For 1-5 players, it takes 1-2 hours per session.

Overview
Your and your band of heroes as on an adventure.  Your job is to complete the objective(s) (outlined by the free companion digital app) before the threat meter is too great.  You each have a character with role, skills, items, and other abilities to help you.  But watch out- your foes are strong, and the menace strengthens in the unknown lands.  Can you and your fellowship prevail?

Journeys in Middle Earth is a campaign played over a series of adventures.  Each adventure (or game) takes 1-2 hours.

One game is played over rounds.  Each round, there is an action phase (where you have four actions to travel, attack, or explore), shadow phase (where the enemy moves and fights), and the rally phase (where you shuffle your used cards back into your skill deck and the threat meter increases).
- traveling allows you to move around the map
- attacking eliminates enemies who are trying to kill you and the fellowship
- exploring reveals situations that force you to decide how to proceed.  It could be helping a farmer capture his escaped chickens, exploring an ancient tomb, climbing a tree to get a view of an area, etc.

Key to the game is the skill deck each hero uses, which consists of basic cards + character-specific cards + role-specific cards.  Most of those cards are established at the beginning, where you'll create and shuffle the deck per the rules.  Each round, you'll use the skill deck to overcome challenges and enemies, and can also use specific cards to lay down in front of you for ongoing effects.

game in progress; image from here

As an app-assisted game, you follow the app's instructions to set up your party, lay (and expand) the map tiles, place and move enemies, and so on.  The app (free of course, but requires a smartphone or tablet) will keep track of everything and save, enabling you to continue the campaign from where you left it.  The app also introduces variance (no two games will be identical) and adjusts difficulty based on the number of people playing.

Review
For years I've been looking for an epic LOTR game that captures the spirit of the movies.  While this isn't quite that, it is the closest thing I've seen.  Breaking the overall campaign into multiple game sessions is a good idea (and necessary to capture the epic nature of the world in bite-size chunks).  There are mostly familiar characters (the base game comes with Aragorn, Legolas, Bilbo, Gimli, Beravor and Elena), but there's no mention of the one ring.  It's largely an "explore Middle Earth" game, as far as I've seen.  And it's fun. 

This is my first app-assisted game, too, and I enjoyed that.  Built-in variation is nice and enhances replayability (and future expansions promise no end of possibilities).  It does, of course, require a tablet (smartphone works, too, but tablet is much better for visibility).  Overall, I recommend this one.

Rating: A

UPDATE: in early 2022, we played through the 14-adventure Bones of Arnor campaign.