A younger sibling that knows its place
WAR OF THE RING THE CARD GAME
Designer: Ian Brody | Publisher: Ares Games
There are games you love that are such a drain you barely play them. The set up is fiddly, the time it takes to play is dayconsuming and the mental wrangling required is exhausting.
Yet it hangs around your cerebrum, poking you every so often. You say things like, ‘we should play this more’.
You start to sound like one of those married couples who know that their coitus is great but syncing the desire and the calendar has become too much, and so these wonderful games languish on your kallax gathering dust. War of the Ring is like this for me. It’s so good but the effort in playing it often makes it a peak I’m not willing to bag.
This is why you have card game versions. They are not meant to deliver the same experience but get close enough that you feel like you’ve had a taste of what the full game can offer. War of the Ring-The Card Game is not simply a shadow though. It will never live up to the epic scope of its older sibling but it delivers more than just a taste, it stands alone as a rip-roaring way to spend a couple of hours.
War of the Ring-The Card Game is essentially a tug of war where good and evil fight over the classic locations and battlegrounds of Middle Earth. There are nine rounds and every round a battleground is drawn and a path card. The battlegrounds are iconic locations such as Helms Deep and the Pelennor Fields. The path cards are story beats, tracking the journey of Frodo, Sam and the Ring. Players, in teams of two, play cards to these locations in an attempt to wrest control from their opponents. If your attack points exceed the defence points, you win the location and the victory points that go with it. The side with the most points after the ninth round determines the future of the lands of Arda.
The basic structure here has none of the rules crenellation of the board game but, as it should be with a card game, the game – and your efforts to wrest victory – live in the effects on the cards.
These cards are beautifully designed and their interactions are wonderfully engineered. You can play cards out in front of you in a tableaux that bolster the cards you want to put into combat. There are items to attach to characters that give them deeply thematic abilities that draw a grin from anyone familiar with the books.
Not all of these items live in your own deck either – they might be in the possession of your partner across the table – so your strategising could give vital information to your opponents.
Team play is where the game really shines. Teams can be a difficult square to circle sometimes, but War of the Ring-The Card Game nails the valuable interchanges between you and your partner.
It couldn’t be a Lord of the Rings game without the lore, and the rules on these cards drip with it. The game is peppered with thematic nods, such as Theoden only contributing his attack value if he is paired with Gandalf. It’s clear that there is a deep knowledge of the source material here, even if it’s all a little more Peter Jackson than Tolkein sometimes.
For all that, this is not War of the Ring. It lacks the scope and grandeur of that game; not a replacement but an accompaniment. It retains the spirit but is snappier. There is room on your shelf for both.
BEN MADDOX
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 120 Faction cards
◗ 41 Location cards
◗ 41 Tokens
◗ 1 Turn order tracker
◗ 4 Player aids
WE SAY
This game amply evokes the feel of the board game with almost none of the overhead.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED AIR, LAND & SEA…
If you like that big game feeling in a smaller box, then this is an ideal classic fantasy upgrade.