Weighing the Upsides: A LotR: Fate of the Fellowship Review

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Thank you for this review. I will also save my money. The beautiful production almost had me, but I fear that it would just sit on a shelf given the gaming/family group that I have.

You're welcome. I'm still of two minds here in that I'm kinda reluctant to talk anyone out of it, but I also certainly don't want to talk anyone into it. I'm still going to give it a couple more tries before (likely) offloading it, but mostly because I'm a long-time LotR fan and, again, it's such a nice production.

I was in the exact same position as you in regards to possibly picking this up. Thankfully, you addressed all my concerns in this review and all of the neat tweaks that might have swayed me. Great review, I can safely say it's not for me... even if it is really a great production.

I've watched a couple of full playthrus (one by Paul Grogan of Gaming Rules and one with Matt L and a developer and another guy when it game out) and bot of them have me very interested. Yes I can see some of the quests are very challenging depending what characters are playing and I can see that the whole game is kinda scripted of what you need to turn most turns but I think that can be lived with (accepted that's what the game is about).
A lot of games can have scripted ways to win that can appear to suck a bit of the fun of it. I have War of the Ring and played a new gaming mate earlier this year, he had never seen it before so watched a few videos before he came around (disclosure, I have never read much strategy on it so am unaware of most of the different tactics). He played the Free Peoples and proceeded to follow the advice of one video of just running straight for Mt Doom with the whole fellowship, killing off the party as required, resulting with him getting to Mt Doom with Frodo only left and winning the game. Admittedly I had a few really bad dice rolls in a couple of big battles, and he was slightly lucky with some of his, but the speed at which he did this meant I was never able to get enough of Sauron's units near his strongholds to even threaten a military victory.
I was stunned that it was so easy to win an epic game like WotR with a scripted play like that and it has completely taken the gloss of it now for me as a great strategy game.

Yeah, I think that's the difference between people that want to engage in the game on its own merits and people who just want to win the game, by any means necessary. I've had a couple discussions like this over Star Trek: Ascendancy on BGG, where people have asserted that a tactical approach was "unbeatable" and therefore the only way to play which was unfun and consequently made the game flawed or in need of reworking or whatever. My response was usually that if you run into those people who make the game unfun, you should probably play with someone else. Now, in that case, they were pursuing niche tactics (every planet they discovered was placed in a switchback pattern with one ship left in each, to make challenging their home system/empire a tedious exercise), whereas what you're talking about is almost literally the story that WotR was based on, minus the entire Fellowship doing one thing and one thing only. But, yeah, it doesn't surprise me that someone has figured out an approach that removes most of the game from the game for a title that's that old, even though there are many others even older that haven't been subject to that.

And, granted, I may be guilty of some of that lack of engagement on my own part in analyzing what this game is doing, as opposed to how it feels. But I will say that the "feel" part was pretty forward in my mind when playing and writing this.

If you see some is moving the Fellowship a lot in War of Ring, you have counters.

It doesn’t get diminished because someone managed to use an approach against you that you didn’t recognize and develop a counter strategy for. There are also strong and fast Shadow strategies that can surprise a FP player who is unaware of them.

n815e wrote: If you see some is moving the Fellowship a lot in War of Ring, you have counters.

It doesn’t get diminished because someone managed to use an approach against you that you didn’t recognize and develop a counter strategy for. There are also strong and fast Shadow strategies that can surprise a FP player who is unaware of them.

This was more than moving it 'a lot' - he basically sprinted for Mordor killing off nearly the whole Fellowship to shield him, I had an unlucky roll or two (it's a dice game, have to expect that) but had no time to do much during his sprint. I'm sure if I read lots of strategy posts there may have been something I could have done if the right cards had come up (in the limited time I had to draw cards) and my dice were well above average, but then using action dice to look for cards to try and head him off means fewer to get any type of war engine going although, again, the shortness of the game meant that was never going to work for me anyway.
It's a great game, I'm just disappointed that it can be scripted like that.

Jackwraith wrote: ...people who just want to win the game, by any means necessary. I've had a couple discussions like this over Star Trek: Ascendancy on BGG, where people have asserted that a tactical approach was "unbeatable" and therefore the only way to play which was unfun and consequently made the game flawed or in need of reworking or whatever. My response was usually that if you run into those people who make the game unfun, you should probably play with someone else.

Those are the exact people that game designers need to seek out for playtesting. Players will eventually discover any weaknesses missed by your playtesters, and probably post about their broken strategems on BGG or other sites. I understand that game designers want to get past the playtesting phase ASAP, because they don't want to make changes to the game after every single playtest. And it is also harder to recruit playtesters than to just find people to play a published game. This is why solitaire games to tend to be better designs on average.

Finally had a play of this last night - two of us just using the introductory difficulty level with intro characters and quests. We had watched the rules videos and read the rules so knew what we were doing (the rules aren't complicated) and managed to - just - get a win with about two thirds of the player cards gone and Hope on 2. It was fan and you needed a bit of strategy until, at a certain point, you realize just have to sprint to Mt Doom .

But I can see this being pretty difficult for four and five player counts - it's like the Legendary Encounter: Alien deck-builder in that the main deck is the timer for the game and so with more players you get fewer and fewer turns. In LE: Alien this means you have less time to build a deck to kill the Queen at the end (and you all usually die), and in FotF it's to get those four quests done - I'm sure it is more possible in the latter with all your interactions (moving each other, more characters to head off enemy raids) but I can just see it coming down to lack of time ... I'll find out in the near future.

The story of The Lord of the Rings is epic, especially the movie version. The books are also good, but padded out with poetry and detailed descriptions of meals. Because the story hinges on a desperate gambit during a lopsided military conflict, nearly every game based on Lord of the Rings feels scripted, with that desperate gambit always presented as the best path to victory. The one exception was the Middle Earth ccg of the '90s, which still had that gambit possible but generally offered a variety of more reasonable strategies.

southernman wrote: Finally had a play of this last night - two of us just using the introductory difficulty level with intro characters and quests. We had watched the rules videos and read the rules so knew what we were doing (the rules aren't complicated) and managed to - just - get a win with about two thirds of the player cards gone and Hope on 2. It was fan and you needed a bit of strategy until, at a certain point, you realize just have to sprint to Mt Doom .

But I can see this being pretty difficult for four and five player counts - it's like the Legendary Encounter: Alien deck-builder in that the main deck is the timer for the game and so with more players you get fewer and fewer turns. In LE: Alien this means you have less time to build a deck to kill the Queen at the end (and you all usually die), and in FotF it's to get those four quests done - I'm sure it is more possible in the latter with all your interactions (moving each other, more characters to head off enemy raids) but I can just see it coming down to lack of time ... I'll find out in the near future.

With more players, each player gets fewer turns, but the table as a whole gets the same number of total actions. I've only played it with 4 players ( 2P, but each playing two handed ) . I do wonder how it plays with lower player counts - sure each player has more actions, but with only 4 characters, parts of the map will be harder to wipe out Shadow armies moving towards Strongholds .