Embark on a journey that may either save or doom Middle-earth.
The Pandemic system has spawned quite a few games now, and while I’m not a big fan of co-operative games, I hoped that The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship would be different enough to offer a new and, for me, better, experience. And all the elements are here to make a more compelling game – it just seems that co-ops still aren’t for me.
The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship boils the books down to a series of objectives you must complete before the final push to drop the Ring into the Crack of Doom. These can be mixed and matched to create scenarios that concentrate on various parts of the tale – for example, the taking of Isengard and the battles in Rohan – or you can just choose a random set of them. Each player controls two characters and must complete 4 actions with one, and 1 action with the other, on each of their turns. Your hand of region cards has icons on them that allow you to pay for some of those actions or get dice re-rolls. At the end of each player’s turn, a number of shadow cards are drawn according to the threat level, and these cards dictate the movement of troops along battle lines on the board as they head inexorably towards the strongholds of the good guys, or move the Eye of Sauron and the Nazgûl around the map. Occasionally, Skies Darken cards will pop up that, among other things, instruct you to shuffle the shadow card discards and put them back on top of the deck, in true Pandemic fashion.
I appreciate that this game is an interesting and very thematic evolution of the Pandemic system, but unfortunately I find the constant maintenance required by that system – moving the troops around the map in little conga lines, shuffling the cards back on top of the deck – pulls me out of the game’s theme. I sometimes found myself in situations where I had nothing I could do with my characters (probably my poor playing, but still…) Crucially, I simply can’t seem to get excited about winning or losing against a game system rather than real-life opponents. And finally, while the included dice tower is a solid, attractive bit of gimmickry, I found the game’s graphic design lacking a unified direction and a little bit amateurish. So in the end, while I can definitely see why this game has been reviewed so well and why so many people will love it, after a couple of plays, I realised it just wasn’t for me and I decided to sell it on to someone who would enjoy it more.
For more detail, check out my video review, coming tomorrow!
