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Ares Games War of The Ring: The Card Game – 60+ Minutes of Gameplay for 2-4 Players – Card Games for Teens and Adults Ages 13+ - English Version

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Games are broken into 9 rounds (as given by the 9 sets of Path cards). Each round is broken down into 5 steps. Step 1 – Location Step Path combat works a little differently, though for the Free Peoples it is ostensibly the same. Free Peoples are always the defenders on path cards. Cards that can be played to path have slightly different shaped shields on them to the cards that are played to Battlegrounds. Many cards have only one type of shield, but some have both. Choose how you deploy them wisely! The Free Peoples desperately try to complete their quest to destroy the One Ring, while at the same time defending their homelands from the encroaching hordes of Sauron and from his evil allies.

All in all, I think War of the Ring: The Card Gameis an excellent gaming experience, especially for fans of the Lord of the Rings.The way it captures the essence of the saga whilst also delivering a tactical workout, all in under an hour, makes it more than worthy of being GeekDad Approved! War of the Ring: The Card Gameis a game about choices. The Free Peoples players have less leeway to make sub-optimal decisions, so it suits the game best if you give the Shadow cards to the less experienced players. Because it’s semi-cooperative I found it possible to play with my youngest son, for whom the game would probably be a little too hard for him to play solo. His big brother could help to explain his options. Note: It is not possible to pass until your hand is below your “carryover limit.” This means that sometimes you are forced to play cards before you would ideally like not to.

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It does take at least 3 games to start to form strategies. To work out the best way to be efficient with your cards, and even then, I’m sure there are many nuances I’ve yet to discover. The depth of the game is truly impressive. Many cards work well together, but which combination do you go for? Because your cards are also currency, you can’t ever play them all. I loved this game, but before I explain why, let me just point out the only reason I can see for not liking the game. Choosing where to play cards is sometimes limited by where the location is, so certain cards can only be played to locations that fit with the narrative of the books and so this adds to the tension of a bad card draw but being able to play cards to your reserve area is a positive way of mitigating this or you have the option of cycling two to draw one. You can effectively choose to lose a round, knowing you can use those cards to better effect further down the line. I Have No Memory Of This Place Cards are played to one of the two locations, or into your reserve for use in future rounds, and this is done through cycling another card from your hand. I really like the simplicity here in not having to worry about the cost of cards in my hand but also knowing the agonising decision that I have to get rid of something I might want to play another card.

Like its board game cousin, War of the Ring: The Card Game is highly faithful to Tolkien’s original novels. Not just in the luscious artwork and deep lore on the cards, which stretch into corners of Middle-earth sometimes passed over by other games, but in the way that the story of The Lord of the Rings shapes the flow of the gameplay itself.

Step 3 – The Combat Step

The player(s) control the Free Peoples, using the normal rules and cards included in the War of the Ring – The Card Game. Playing a four-player demo at Gen Con 2022 ahead of a planned release later this year, the upcoming card game spin-off from War of the Ring proved itself to be far more than a basic simplification of the richly thematic and strategic board game. Like its board game cousin, War of the Ring: The Card Game is highly faithful to Tolkien’s original novels. We gotta bring up “Ride to ruin, DEATH!” It is actually it is the epitome of War of the Ring CG. A cool sounding thematic card, promises good teamwork moments between Rohan and Gondor, but ends up needing very specific board states of Rohan HELPING mostly Minas Tirith, which might not even be in a game, or your Rohan troops may all be dead before it CAN trigger… so its usually discard fodder to fuel OTHER Lord of the Rings interactions. This can also make the replayability of the game not as high as initially thought with all the cool cards with this strategy- each side just becomes aware of the what the other is trying to do. Compare that to the board game, where while Frodo still needs to get to mount doom, there’s a bunch of paths to get there, and there’s a bunch of different areas of middle earth for the Shadow to CHOOSE to mobilize against, rather than spurned on by card flips.

Character Cards (Like Aragorn or Saruman) can be played to Battlegrounds or Paths. Again they must have a matching icon. In the case of paths, there are no icons, but each character has a set of path numbers printed on them. This tells you which path you can play cards to. Not every character can be played to every path card. The Balrog can’t, for example, be played to Bag End and you can’t deploy Fatty Bolger to Khazad Dùm. For the Free People, how about Gandalf who says you shall not freaking pass on a path to get a new one! Then he can die there, no problem, because Gandalf 2.0 can ride Shadowfax to rush to defend Minis Tirith for insane stats! My Comments: There is an extra level of abstraction since it is a card game, but this game does a good job at both capturing the Lord of the Rings theme and feeling like an adaptation of the board game. Or how about when you see hobbits on a path- shouldn’t you be putting Nazgul on there to search for the ring- no actually you don’t want to do that in this game because Nazgul ALL DIE AFTER GOING ON PATHS, and Hobbits ALWAYS survive, don’t have the Nazgul tap themselves out too early from going on the hunt for the ring they’re thematically supposed to do…

What’s in the Box?

Shadow isn’t weaker, but need careful playing and do not follow the rulebook’s marketing. If you’re a really careful gamer, this won’t be an issue. I won’t spoil the details of the strategy: but essentially you cannot get concerned that the FP are utterly destroying you in points- you just need to keep that a little below 10 until late game, where paths 8/9 are very shadow favored. The goal of the game is to score more victory points than your opponents. The Free Peoples play against the Shadow Players. Setup All cards apart from event cards can be played into reserve. This is often done to allow you to use a beneficial effect printed on the card, but can also be a way of holding useful cards for later rounds (using move actions). With so many Lord of the Ring games on the market, I really feel this does enough to elevate it above others to warrant a place in your collection. This is certainly a game that benefits from multiple plays and trying the various game modes and it’s fantastic that you can play a shorter 1v1 scenario or a larger full scale sprawling recreation of the trilogy story as a 2v2 or 2v1 straight from the box. Once you’ve got your head around the rules and understand the terminology and interplay between the cards there is a deep and rewarding card game here that feels epic compared to the sum of its parts. Each round is full of tough and meaningful choices that will impact on how you can approach subsequent rounds keeping a high level of tension throughout. It might not have the table presence of War of the Ring but then why shouldn’t I keep it?

Path cards follow the story of Frodo and the Fellowship, while battlegrounds represent the wider conflict across Middle-earth. For Paths, one of the cards that have the current round number on it is chosen at random. There are 3 possible choices for each round. They have subtly different effects on them, allowing variation between games. Unlike the LCG, which sees players working together through scenarios, in this game up to four players will play against each other in teams of up to two fighting over paths and battlegrounds to see which side can amass the most points by the end of the game. Lord of the Rings gem War of the Ring: The Card Game will receive its first expansion later this year, introducing new cooperative and solo modes.

Step 5 – Draw Step

When we put it all together, path 6 becomes a huge contention for both teams, because the Shadow wants to use Gollum to spam the Shadow favored effects, whereas Free People are trying to move the paths to 7 as fast as possible, which are all Free people favored, AND they can use this Gondor homie to start scoring them for free. Like, you might have asked yourself, what if Minis Tirith gets flipped over round one? Well this THREE point battleground is gonna be pretty hard to Shadow to get with its defense and free people helping ability… and remember Free People don’t even have to commit troops there to necessarily win! the walls And if you do the math, Shadow needs between 2-3 troops to get over Minas Tirith’s base defense value AND the troops need to match the battleground type… this is a LOT to ask on the first turn, so the shadow HAS to essentially give it up, giving FP an early VP lead, putting the burden on the Shadow to later re-activate this place, spending their own resources. Each player is given a ring token and a player aid. (The ring token can be used to give you a one-off extra card draw during the game or can be cashed in for a victory point at the end.) The Path mechanics are particularly clever. Being able to play certain characters and cards only at certain times greatly adds to their power to invoke the central story. After Rivendell, the Ringwraiths can’t be played on paths until later on in the game. There are few things better when Gandalf gets to head the Balrog off at Khazad-Dùm. An occurrence made all the sweeter by the fact it won’t happen in every game. There is also another clever mechanic concerning Gandalf and Aragorn. They start the game as Gandalf the Grey and Strider. You do have access to cards for Gandalf the White and Aragorn, but once they are played, the original incarnations are completely removed from the game. Eliminate is a key concept in the game. Cards that are eliminated do not take any further part in the game (similar to forsaken cards).

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