And my axe-! A LotR Fellowship of the Ring Trick-taking Game review

In recent years, trick-takers have gone from being a thing...

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The last couple of co-op trick takers have flopped at my table. I don't know if The Crew spoiled us or not.
My daughter played this and gave it a "It's Fine."
Oddly enough, the number of Star Wars and LOTR
games in my collection are even at zero.

Both your and your daughter's reaction are exactly what I was trying to convey: It's Fine. Unless you're an LotR fan and then it's a different kind of "fine." If you'd never played The Crew before, it might be mindblowing. But you and I and a lot of the boardgaming world already have and this really doesn't do that much that's different. I'm still interested to see if a new concept breaks through with Two Towers, but wouldn't be surprised if nothing did. They're just working the license which again is fine. Most people are buying it because of that, not because it's doing something new like The Crew.

The only LotR games are have are three that I've picked up all in the last four months: this, Fate of the Fellowship, and War of the Ring the Card Game. Hadn't had anything LotR since I traded War of the Ring last year. As you know, Fate has been on kind of thin ice with me. Only picked up WotRtCG a few days ago, so haven't gotten it to the table yet. We'll see.

Lord of the Rings is a very good story in a very good setting, and the movies were impressive. This is my Ameritrash bias talking, but I think that any game about Lord of the Rings should deliver a strong sense of the setting and characters. I am disappointed to see that there is Lord of the Rings Monopoly, but at least there isn't a Lord of the Rings Clue. Yet.

And while it seems like this game successfully addresses the setting and characters, I tend to think of trick-taking games in general as themeless and even abstract. I generally avoid trick-taking games because Euchre was really popular at the university I attended, and it bored me. A hand often ended early, as at least a couple of players considered the outcome to be a foregone conclusion and would toss their remaining hands on the table. And nobody wanted to take the time to teach the rules, and there was always alcohol around, so I just never really learned the game. All that said, I would be willing to give this game a try if someone else brought it.

Like you, I'm not fond of Euchre, even growing up in Michigan because, like you, it kind of bored me. (My business partner and (really) best friend have enough of a bond that we're really good at it.) But I kinda love trick-taking games. It may be years of reading Dan Thurot that has sold me on them, but I have a good handful of them on the shelves and they're not going away anytime soon. One of my favorite recent games is Power Vacuum, in fact.

The thematics on this actually brought in a bunch of pretty non-gamers and made the various objectives and special situations/characters makes sense to them in my house, despite the game feeling a little themeless or a Crew ripoff. So in that way, mission accomplished on giving it the LOTR skin.

Totally true. I forget sometimes that there may be a broader audience not only reading here but playing all of these games, too. In the same way that Hasbro understands that marketing is why LotR Monopoly works, that same angle to sales is present here. Most non-gamers wouldn't be familiar with the term "trick-taking", to say nothing of a "cooperative game." If they're drawn in by the theme and then have a better/faster understanding of the way the game works because it carries the basic mechanism of following the Fellowship story, that's a success. It's the same reason that Fate of the Fellowship is a better game than base Pandemic, IMO, because you're not just doing "random mechanism to win a game about diseases." You're following a story that many non-gamers are anywhere from vaguely to intimately familiar with.