A few years ago I came across Fantasy Flight Games’ Lord of the Rings LCG (Living Card Game, is a format of card games with an expanding card pool that is not randomized. Yet the elements of building customized decks is still the core element, but without the gambling aspect of collecting cards that are rarer than others). It drew my attention as it featured one of my favorite fantasy series and up to four-player cooperative gameplay. My friends and I sat down to play it and handily beat the first quest. We later discovered that this was because we were playing the game wrong and proceeded from there to get beat by the game’s brutal game mechanics, regularly.
This game is incredibly difficult at times. One quest took us nearly ten attempts before we barely beat it, one attempt was lost in the first turn. Yet we found the challenge exciting, modifying our decks to better handle specific quests, trying new strategies, and buying more expansions to play. These expansions usually added a good number of deck building cards plus a few quests, introducing new mechanics and challenges. Certain expansions, called “Saga”, continue the story of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the idea being players could play through the entire trilogy through these expansions. There are also expansions that surprisingly dig pretty deep into the lore of Middle Earth. The last of the expansions are nearly all out and that means the game is going to get an update. In the past with other games, Fantasy Flight has released the game again as a 2nd edition introducing improved mechanics or incorporating an app. Well for Lord of the Rings LCG, Fantasy Flight went fully digital. At PAX East 2018 I got some hands-on experience to see how this brutal strategy card game translates to the digital realm but also how it compares to games like Hearthstone and The Elder Scrolls: Legends.
Up front I want to say that my experience did not include deck building, or multiplayer. Those aspects of the game were not available at the time, though they will be in the final build of the game. Which is good, considering part of why I enjoyed the tabletop game was losing as a team. This also means I got to see how they were going to make this game more appealing as a single player experience, for those times you can’t find or want to play with others. At first glance, I was pleased to see a lot of the art used in the tabletop version of the game was present while modernizing the look to better suit gameplay on a screen. A few things noticed right away is a player pool of resources instead of a character pool of resources. This drastically changes the resource management of the game. Progressing through turns is done automatically, this means less management of the game in general. This allows for more focus on the strategy, and less on properly proceeding through each phase. Gameplay is as one can expect to see from a card game, select the card to play and swipe/slide to play it. Card descriptions are easy to pull up. Players are pit against scenarios with branching paths promising some replay value, different enemies, and some fully voice acted story.
Finally the greatest improvement to the Lord of the Rings LCG formula is no more lengthy set-up. The tabletop version requires locating every card set needed based on specific icons. This can mean going through every single card in a collection to find every card needed to set up the specific scenario. Certain scenarios require specific rules that need to be referenced. To commit to sitting down to play meant setting aside a few hours to play. All of that goes away with the move to digital. Being able to play sooner is always better. Considering Fantasy Flight Games can be a bit notorious for their lengthy setup and in-depth rules for their games, I hope this move to digital will broaden the audience for this amazing game.
Early access to Lord of the Rings LCG will offer various levels of “founders packs” and will be available sometime in Q2 of 2018. After that it will go free to play, where more cards and scenarios can be purchased with money or the in-game currency. The difference here versus Hearthstone and Legends is NO RANDOM CARD PACKS. Fantasy Flight has chosen to keep with their LCG model, and you will know exactly what you are purchasing each and every time. It’ll be interesting to see how this model impacts their presence on the digital market. I personally am very excited for this clearly better version of a game I’ve spent a lot of fun hours losing to with friends. The ability to do so more swiftly and online may mean a lot more time spent in the world of Middle Earth.
