Lord of the Rings!

[shannon_a]

I've been experiencing a strange slow-down in my review copies lately. I've actually got a ton of small things to review, but a relatively small number of full-length games that I'm willing to center an evening of gaming around. Thus I set up for play tonight a (non-review-copy) game that I've been wanting to review for a long time: the Friends & Foes supplement for Lord of the Rings.

And, we had a great time. The best night of gaming that we've had for a long time. There was constant interaction and lots of yelling when good or bad things happened.

Everyone except Brody had played before and so a lot of us were comfortable with the game. We had a lot of fun interactions through the early game with people really talking about what they were doing and no one overpowering the arguments.

The coolest happenings were at Isengard. We conspired to finish the friendship & hiding tracks rather than moving along the main track. There's an event that lets you skip Helm's Deep if you dump 12 fighting cards, as long as you've got those tracks done, and we were all set to do it. It was the only time that I've played LotR where we were hoping for an event. We finally got it, and we hopped past Helm's Deep, but ended up with 5 foes out.

Then through very careful management of resources (it took expending a firebrand and a special Gandalf card that allowed some card draws) the ring-bearer managed to kill all 5 of the foes and we skipped Shelob's Lair too.

Things were looking good!

Alas, everything fell apart in Mordor. Events overran us through a bad sequence of tile draws and Sauron captured the Ring.

The ending was really weird because we'd completed all of the tracks on the Mordor board except for the main track. Which, in retrospective, was a mistake.

We'd also purchased all 8 of the Gandalf cards by the end, which I've never seen. (Actually, we discarded one, but they were all used up at the end).

The ending was quite sad. At the penultimate tile flip we got an event and had to discard 7 cards to avoid disaster in the form of Sauron overrunning all of the hobbits. Then we flipped the next tile and saw we had to discard 3 more cards to avoid another event. And between the 5 of us we only had two cards left.

Ouch.

Anyway, despite that, great fun. A good game.

I can see that I should up my rating of the original game, which I'd only given a "4" for Substance. But really, there isn't anything better in the cooperative arena. And then I need to rate this one too.

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

This game has worn quite well, I think; when it first arrived, we played like a fiend, and then lost interest for a bit, but it's hung around. Shadows Over Camelot, too, has faded for me since the original four or five plays. It remains to be seen whether it will stick around like Knizia's LotR. I have my doubts, but one never knows.

[shannon_a]

I initially liked SoC more, but LotR has risen back up. It's much more unrelenting, and just-plain-tough then SoC.