Overview
Anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings knows the story: save Middle-Earth by destroying the one ring and defeating Sauron and his armies. The task seems impossible, with swarms of Orcs, the fearsome Nazgul, and other threats in the way. Yet hope remains, if the fellowship is true . . .
This is a cooperative game in the Pandemic line, meaning the basic rules follow that game system. Each player controls two characters from the story. On your turn, you will:
- Perform 4+1 actions (one of your characters takes 4 actions, and the other takes 1, in either order)
- actions include travel, give/take a card from a player, discard a card to take a token, add an army to a location, attack, or capture an enemy stronghold
- Draw 2 cards
- if you draw a 'shadow increasing,' follow the (regrettable) instructions to add threats to Middle-Earth
- Draw X shadow cards, where X=2-5 based on where the marker is on the threat rate track
- resolve them one at a time, which generally means moving shadow armies (and attacking), moving Nazgul towards Frodo (and searching), or other terrible things
There are many details to the above, and this video is an excellent (if lengthy) overview of everything.
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| Game contents; image from here |
Review
I was greatly looking forward to this one. I love both the Pandemic game engine and The Lord of the Rings; I wanted to see how they combined them. I think they did it well. This is more complicated than the other Pandemic games (there is a lot going on), but the core concepts are still there, so it was easy enough for my playgroup to pick up the rules. It is challenging and lengthy, so be warned. It is highly replayable, with 20 different objectives and 13 different characters, each with unique abilities. Overall, this is well done and worth a look.
Rating: A
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