not yet engaged by the players) will reduce this value. Adding up the will value of all heroes and characters questing provides the total progress that will be made each turn however, enemies and locations in the “staging” area (i.e. Manipulating resources on each individual hero also opens up all sorts of interesting ability interaction possibilities.Īctually defeating a quest requires committing characters to “questing” each turn, which utilizes their will value. These resources can be spent to play cards from that sphere or trigger a variety of powers. Rather than laying down cards from your deck to function as resources ala Magic or the WoW TCG, each hero generates one resource per turn matching the sphere they belong to, which is marked by a token placed directly on that hero. Each of the player cards that make up the deck also belong to one of these four spheres and have a resource cost which typically ranges from 1-6. Each hero belongs to one of four thematic “spheres” Lore, Tactics, Spirit, and Leadership sort of like the different colors of mana in Magic. The heroes also double as the resource system for the game. It’s an interesting trade-off and provides a lot more depth than simply balancing all heroes to be on the same power level. ![]() Putting Aragorn in your party is nice because he is such a powerful hero but it also tips the bad guys off that they should perhaps be paying a bit more attention to you. Each player starts with a threat value equal to the cost of his heroes and high threat is very bad, so there is actually incentive to use weaker heroes as they start the game with less threat. Threat is tracked on a per-player basis using nifty little 2-digit dials. ![]() However, from this basic system there are of course a multitude of powers and card interaction that skew with the numbers and results. Characters accordingly have three stats will (the value used when questing), attack (the value used when attacking), and defense (the value used when defending). Basically each hero or ally can exert to do one of three things either defend against an enemy, attack an enemy, or quest. Here the game in many ways resembles the WoW TCG except, instead of having one powerful hero on the board at the start, the players start with 1-3 weaker heroes which function in many ways the same as allies. To face these challenges each player has a set of 1-3 heroes which start in play and a deck of cards which consists of allies, attachments, and abilities. Treachery cards are basically one-time bad effects. Location cards are more passive and basically slow down questing until the players decide to “travel” to them in what basically amounts to a side quest they all have some kind of negative or positive effect upon being traveled to. ![]() Enemy cards may sit back and harass or actually attack the players depending on the threat that a player has accumulated. These sub-groups are mixed and matched by different quests in a similar way to how the Thunderstone monster types work, though of course the Lord of the Rings LCG ones are much more thematic when adventuring in Mirkwood you can expect lots of spiders, for example. Depending on the quest several sub-groups of enemies, locations, and treachery cards are shuffled together to make up the encounter deck. The quests provide the framework of the game and are made up of a few stages, each of which has their own card with special instructions. If the players defeat the quest they can calculate a score based on their performance which is what provides the basis for a competitive element two teams of players could try the same quest and, if they both defeat it, would have a quantified score for how well they did that could be compared to the other team. The game comes with 3 quests and the idea is that every new small expansion will add one additional quest, gradually building up something of a library of quests to choose from. 1-4 players (3-4 players work together to defeat a challenge called a quest, which consists of a variety of difficulties and enemies who’s actions are controlled by the game mechanics. The Lord of the Rings LCG is unique in another way it is completely co-operative. This means there is no gambling aspect of blind boosters and no secondary card market. The idea is that it plays similar to a collectible card game with regularly released sets of new cards but there are no blind purchases, all the cards you buy are known to you in advance. The LCG part is new for me it stands for “Living Card Game”, a concept invented ( and I think even trademarked) by Fantasy Flight Games. Once I did, however, I was hopelessly hooked. ![]() I’ve seen it slowly creeping up the hotness list on Boardgamegeek but for whatever reason I’ve avoided looking into it until recently. The Lord of the Rings LCG from Fantasy Flight has been something of a ticking time bomb for me.
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