Just like many of you around the world, I have been cooped up at home for most of the last week or so. I’ll admit, it’s been nice working from home (although teaching grade fours solely online is going to have its challenges) and being with my family full time. That being said, I know this is a very tough time for many people. My heart and prayers go out to the families of those who have lost their lives or jobs or are running into others difficulties. I hope that by standing together as people across the globe, we can slow this thing down and give our scientists and doctors a chance to fight this thing.
Being stuck in the house has given me a good opportunity to get some solid solo gaming in. We’ve played a few family games - my girls (4 and 6) especially enjoy My First Castle Panic and our storytelling cards - but I’ve spent most of my “me” time in my board game nook (my Bud Hole - please watch The Good Place).
A little under a year ago, I picked up the greatly anticipated The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth from Fantasy Flight Games. Being a super Tolkien nerd, I quickly jumped into and completed a campaign (with Legolas and Gimli, obviously). I posted a review here. I’ve played the game solo and cooperatively a few times since then, but now, almost a year later, I finally worked through another campaign, this time bringing Aragorn and Bilbo on the adventure. How did this second time stack up to the first?
In a general sense, it went exactly the same way. Even though I made some different choices and had different characters, I made it to the final mission and lost, a little earlier than last time in the mission, if I recall correctly. Losing is not the worst thing, as long as the game is fun, but, there are definitely some pros and cons in this one.
+ Components
Fantasy Flight is nothing if not consistent in their components. The miniatures are solid, sturdy, and detailed. They feel really in your hand as you move them around the board and not like you have to be too careful with them. The art is beautiful; its the same art that they have in The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (I tried so hard to love that game). Middle-earth really seems to come alive on the stunning boards that they've created.
+ Card-play
There are people out there who have dissed the card-play in this game, but I really enjoyed it. Finding the balance of preparing powerful cards but also having your "success" cards on the top of your deck creates a lot of unique and important choices. There are often times, especially with Aragon, where I would stop and think, "Do I want to prepare this card and add 3 to an attack, or do I need this for a success when I try to search in this pile of mushrooms."
+ Upgrades
There are a lot of cool and interesting ways to upgrade your character. As the game progresses, you get experience points that allow you purchase better cards for your deck. Also, the weapons that you begin the game with all get upgraded, even giving you choice of how to level them up. Adventuring through the world of Middle-earth, you will find items that can be equipped (and upgraded!). Also, as you perform different tasks and side quests, you earn different titles, more cards that are added to your deck. All of these make levelling up varied and engaging.
+ Uniqueness
Playing with Bilbo this time really showed me the versatility of this game - he plays like a sneaky rogue who jumps out and stabs people, much different than the tank Gimli was. Building Bilbo the way I wanted, choosing the best cards and upgraded weapons that played off each other and also off of the strengths of Aragorn was the most engaging part of this campaign. Also, there are six different characters to choose from with six different roles to choose from. That's 36 options right there (how do you like that math?) plus all the choices you make throughout the game. Lots of replayability in how you build a character.
- Tiny cards
Oh the tiny cards - those cards are so teeny! They’re a pain to shuffle and you just can’t appreciate the art when it's the size of your thumbnail. I'm pretty sure I understand the reasoning for this choice, the game takes up quite the amount of table space, but it's still a shame. Maybe the items, wounds, boons, should be small still? Please, though, give me a regular sized deck to shuffle!
- Theme
A lot of the game doesn’t feel very thematic. It usually seems to boil down to “did I draw enough successes?” and you don’t always realize/remember what you’re doing (Am I stabbing a goblin? Climbing a set of rickety steps? Banishing a wraith? Who knows?!?). I don’t know what the solution for this is, as many games struggle with this issue. It’s just something I noticed and it may even be my own fault (maybe I need a better imagination). A game like Gloomhaven, for example, succeeds here. It also uses cards for your actions, but you really feel like you’re running around battling things and not just playing cards.
- Huh?
I also thought of titling this category "what the heck am I doing?" I feel like in almost every mission, some worse than others, some a bit better, going the right way is a total guess. You have a million search spots and you try to search them all, never really knowing what you’ll get until it’s (usually) too late (as in the final round of several of my missions). This, for me, is the biggest disappointment of this game. In my last mission, I really wanted to play smart and win this time, but I didn’t know how to. I did my best to follow the clues and go where they sent me, but there just aren't enough clues. It seemed like most of my time was spent wandering around aimlessly, digging in piles of mushrooms or decaying bones, while orcs ran around killing everyone behind me.
- Done
And then I died and it was all over. If this were a video game RPG I could reset and try that mission again. But nope, we’re just done. I basically wasted the last 10 hours of my life. Well, not a waste because I did have a lot of fun, but it feels very anticlimactic. Dying is ok with me, but to die on the very last (of 12 missions) twice, sucks. There should be some way to reset that last mission so it's not just a restart from the beginning. The game is too late to have to start all the way over again.
There you have it, some more thoughts on the most recent Tolkien board game implementation (I think? Have I missed any others?). No, it's not perfect and there are actually some pretty big blockades to making this an amazing game. Will I still play it? Yes, there are a lot of great things to enjoy here and I hope that as the game gets more campaigns released on the app and more expansions that some of my issues will be ironed out a little bit. We can always hope, right?
"Who knows? Have patience. Go where you must go, and hope!" - Gandalf
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