I feel reborn. My first shot at War of the Ring.

I dont think the rules are hard at all. There is just so many bits and pieces to remember. And the bits make things harder, rather than easier. Miniatures that aren't distinguishable enough, a board with poor region sizes, those nation tokens with no text on them, meaning I'm supposed to remember what symbol represents what nation (I still can't!) etc.

War of the Ring is pretty good. But count me among the people who find the rules a bit daunting. While the core mechanics are straightforward enough, there's sufficient wargame in the design for there to be too many exceptions and nigglely little rules for my comfort.

Being relatively long and two-player, I don't play it anywhere near as much as I'd like to. My game sessions usually attract 3-5 and are primarily about meeting and chatting to people, so there's no way we'd split it down to 2 two player titles.

That's actually a really good point, Frank. The rules themselves have some complexity but for anyone who's played wargames it's not insurmountable. The component usability is actually a bigger obstacle, like you pointed out. I didn't really think about this the first few games I played because I liked it so much but now when I bring it out I almost kind of dread dealing with the tiny regions, the Language-independent junk, pieces that all have spears and flags but nothing else to distinguish them, those clumsy Nazgul...

Component functionally (ie hard to distinguish different nations for the free peoples) and very poor rules are what really hamper WotR. It's a stellar game otherwise.

I suppose finding out where certain borders and regions are could be difficult to for someone not really familiar with Tolkien though.