I love J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, to the point where I had fully unrealized aspirations to start a Tolkien fan club in middle school and learn elvish. Into this obsession stepped Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-Earth collectible card game (CCG). The art was breathtaking, the deck-building was deep, and I was terrible at it (when I could actually get a game in). But that was kind of par for the course with me and most CCGs at the time. Still, I bought more cards, dreamed of being a great player some day, and eventually sold it all off. Also par for the course.
Quite a while after middle school, my wife and I listened Robert Inglis' reading of The Lord of the Rings. The rich world of Middle-earth captured me again and I started looking for an accessible way that my wife and I could enjoy some great adventures there together. We tried Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings board game, but it was more of a puzzle than the adventure we were looking for. I considered returning to the Middle-Earth CCG again, but we wanted to traverse Tolkien's world side-by-side. Then I stumbled on a article about Fantasy Flight Games' newest project - The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. This was designed as cooperative card came that would continue growing, with pre-set packs giving players new adventures and new abilities each month. Could this be the game for us?
Three years and three full cycles of adventures later, we are still enjoying this gateway into Middle-earth. But not at the pace it is being released. In fact, our backlog of quests is pretty embarrassing. So we're taking a pause. Not from our love of the game, but of our purchases. While the glimpses of upcoming player cards continue to look amazing (here's looking at you, Trouble in Tharbad), it is time to enjoy the journey for a while and focus on the great decks we can make with our current collection.
From my calculations, we have forty-one official quests on hand (not having purchased the nightmare quests and only having the first print-on-demand quest, The Massing at Osgiliath). At our current rate of play, it will take my wife and I a few years to achieve victory for those (it took us eight or nine plays to beat The Steward's Fear). I want to set a goal of 100% quest victory before future purchases, but I don't know if I'm quite that patient. Some of these upcoming cards look pretty amazing.
One beautiful thing about The Lord of the Rings: the Card Game is its ability to stand on its own as a solo game as well as a cooperative game. While my wife and I will continue working through our backlog at a slower pace, I will also be working through the quests myself in a semi-chronological path. "Semi" because I will separate out the saga expansions and print-on-demand expansions, either saving them for the end or taking them on in chunks between cycles. I plan on playing a unique deck for each quest and only blogging about a quest one victory is achieved (with the number of attempts listed). In most cases, I won't give a full play-by-play, but simply provide highlights, impressions of the scenario as well as the cards I used, and the deck list used to achieve victory.
Join me in this journey through the beautiful and treacherous lands of Middle-earth. The end may be dark for me at times, but you can sit back and enjoy the highlights.
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