💍 "I told you he was tricksy..."
Asmodee and Office Dog are in the process of releasing a complete trilogy of trick-taking games based on the book The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. The first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game, was released early this year to much acclaim, and a sequel based on The Two Towers is scheduled to release in January—although there will be pre-launch release events this month—and you can bet your sweet bippy that I will be acquiring a copy as soon as possible. I adore the first game, and not just because it combines one of my favorite gameplay mechanics with one of my favorite IPs. It is, in fact, an excellent adaptation of the source material as well as being a very refined and inventive game engine that is heavily thematic. And if there's one thing that I love as much as trick-taking games and The Lord of the Rings, it's thematic storytelling!
In fact, I would go so far as to say that this specific game mechanic (cooperative trick-taking) and this particular set of books work together far better than would be possible from most story-to-game adaptations. And I'm going to spend the bulk of this post going into why that is, how this thematic marriage plays out, and mostly just geeking out about it. My insights are drawn largely from Fellowship, but I will be expounding and speculating based on what is known of The Two Towers game that I have every intention of getting my hands on later this week!!!
But first, let's take a step back. Because in order to talk about this game, we have to talk about The Crew.
If you're already familiar with trick-taking games, skip down a couple paragraphs. If not, here's the basic rundown. You have a set of numbered cards in various suits. A number of players, typically 4, will take turns playing a card. Whoever plays the first card sets the suit, and all subsequent players must follow suit if they can. After all players have played a card, the highest card in suit wins the trick and that player then leads the next trick. The exception is trump cards, which are cards that beat all other cards except a higher-ranked trump. In the game Spades, for example, spades are the trump suit, meaning that a spade will beat any other suit and, therefore, whoever has the Ace of Spades is guaranteed to win at least one trick.
Not all trick-taking games have trumps (Hearts, for example) and scoring and goals vary by game. In Spades, for example, you and a partner bid on the number of tricks you think you can take and work together to achieve that goal. But sometimes one partner tries to take no cards at all, in which case the other player is trying to make their own goal while also supporting their teammate. One of the things I always loved about Spades was the collaborative nature of it. So when The Crew came out a few years ago, to my way of thinking it just takes all the things I love about Spades and kicks them up a notch.
The Crew was the first really popular fully-cooperative trick-taking game and it has a sequel that is even more refined. Instead of playing against each other, all players are working together to achieve a set of common goals. Goals include things like "take the Yellow 3" or "win a trick with a 7" or "win exactly 2 tricks". They are determined at random and players choose them after they've drawn their hands. Each round is a "mission" and after you complete a mission, you move on to the next. If you fail a mission, try again. Missions get increasingly difficult over the course of the campaign. There is a mechanism to allow you some limited communication about what's in your hand, and a fair amount of variety as increasing the difficulty and quantity of goals is paired with changes to setup. One other thing that I appreciated about it is that the trump suit is short: there are only four of them, which keeps them from overshadowing everything else. Anyway, it's a great game, very smartly assembled, and it plays pretty cleanly from three to five players. Recommend!
The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game builds on the gameplay ideas from The Crew and lays heavily into the theme of the books. First, it's worth noting that this is an adaptation of the books, not the movies, which means we do get characters like Tom Bombadil and Glorfindel. We also get art based on the books... for the most part. Frodo and Pipping definitely bear resemblances to Elijah Wood and Billy Boyd, but the rest of the characters feel disconnected from their film versions. Also the balrog doesn't have wings! There are four suits with eight cards each: Forests, Hills, Mountains, and Shadows, all with gorgeous stained-glass art that draws from locations in the world like The Shire, Mount Doom, and The Misty Mountains.
Instead of "missions" you have "chapters" and goals are tied to characters that have their own setup rules. Chapters will define which characters are required/available and the variation in gameplay comes from different combinations and from "Events" that alter setup. The chapters don't follow the book precisely (Fellowship takes like five chapters to actually get Frodo out the door), but it's pretty close. Like the book, Fellowship is divided into two parts. The first part takes Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Frodo from Hobbiton to Rivendell, and the second half takes the Fellowship from its formation in Rivendell to its breaking at Amon Hen.
There is also a fifth suit of Rings that only has five cards. The 1 of Rings is the only trump card in the game (1 ring to rule them all... get it?), and this is a great example of how the game uses theme to drive even simple gameplay elements. Frodo is leading the fellowship, and he bears the One Ring, so whoever draws the 1 of Rings has to take Frodo and Frodo will always lead the first trick. His goal is to take a certain number of Ring cards, and Rings can't be led with until they've been broken. This is a straightforward goal, but one that requires some attention from all the players.
Many characters allow you to exchange cards during setup, so you have to be thinking about making sure Frodo has the high Rings cards, but probably not all of the Rings cards. Aragorn's goal is determined by Threat cards, which represent the Ringwraiths in the first half and Gollum in the second half. Legolas has to take Forest cards. Gimli has to take Mountain cards. Pippin is useless at this point in the story, so he has to take the fewest tricks. Boromir has to take the last trick, but if he ever takes the 1 of Rings, everyone loses. And yes, this can happen, because the 1 of Rings is optionally a trump card. It can lose if the player who plays it so choses. Is it likely that Frodo would voluntarily give the One Ring to Boromir? No. But it is thematically appropriate, and let's be honest, it's pretty funny.
Some chapters will include items for members of the Fellowship, like the Shards of Narsil or the Horn of Gondor, that provide boosts. And then there are the Event cards, which can get pretty wild. To take an example from early in the game, there's a chapter where the hobbits get lost in the Old Forest and are set upon by Old Man Willow. In this case, Old Man Willow is the 9 of Forests. That card and the other Forest cards are shuffled into a Forest deck that ignores suit and will win any trick where its rank is higher than the player cards. That adds some challenge to achieving your own goals, and it makes the confrontation feel like more of a... for want of a better word... event.
Now, I've talked a lot about theme informing gameplay, and I think that's a big part of what makes this such a successful adaptation. The other thing I want to call attention to is that The Lord of the Rings is adaptable in this manner in a way that most other books would not be. What makes it so unique? Well, it's a wildly popular but also highly unconventional book. It defies structure. It is steeped in lore that is under-explained. It's highly episodic—especially Fellowship—and features slews of interesting and powerful characters who show up briefly and then are never heard from again. And while these things would make it very difficult to sell to a publisher in modern times, it turns out they're great for game adaptation.
Episodic chapters translate pretty smoothly into chunks of gameplay with achievable goals. And those cameos from powerful side-characters? Great! They can have very extreme setups and goals that only stick around for a round or two. Tom Bombadil gets extra cards and then has to have taken cards that correspond to what he's got left over. Goldberry plays open-handed, but has to win exactly three tricks in a row and nothing else. Glorfindel has to win all of the Shadow cards. These things add a bit of brief novelty that would be tiresome if they had to continue. And there are a lot of them: Haldir, Celeborn, Galadriel, Barliman Butterbur, Gwahir, Fatty Bolger, Shadowfax, even Bill the Pony gets to join the party. And the regular characters get to mix things up too, to reflect the way they change through the narrative. At the Prancing Pony, instead of Frodo or Aragorn you are playing with Mr. Underhill and Strider, who have different setups and goals. All of these different combinations with some occasional extreme characters and events make for a compelling game.
Now, as I mentioned up above, The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game is coming out soon. It's not an expansion, but rather a stand-alone game that continues the story. I've been looking at some of the revealed content and it's obvious that they are continuing to lay hard into theme. Like the book, the first half of the game follows Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Merry, and Pippin, and the second half follows Sam, Frodo, and Gollum. Since there's no Frodo in the first half, there are no Rings cards. Instead, there are Tower cards. Two of them. Get it? They are both trump cards, but they cancel each other out, which is hilarious to me. While both Saruman and Sauron are villains in the book, they are not working in concert like they do in the movies; Saruman, rather, wants the One Ring for himself. Ergo these towers are all-powerful except when they're getting in each other's way, and that's pretty great.
(Side note: one of the more confusing things about The Two Towers is why it was named The Two Towers. Towers aren't hugely pivotal story elements in the book. This is further confounded by the fact that Middle-Earth has a great many towers in it, but Tolkien never bothered to definitively answer which two the title refers to. Now, one of them is certainly Orthanc, because Saruman, but the other is up in the air. From my reading, I would assume that the second is the Tower of Cirith Ungol, where Frodo is taken captive after being stabbed by Shelob. The two halves of the book each end with the heroes arriving at a tower, and Cirith Ungol is the other one. The movies don't get to Cirith Ungol until the third installment, so that wouldn't work; instead Peter Jackson and crew use Barad-dûr, which is where Sauron lives. The game goes with Minas Morgal, which is the tower at the base of the Pass of Cirith Ungol and is residence to the Nazgûl, who are a present force throughout the book instead of just a location at the end of it.)
The Black Tower card represents attacks from Saruman, so goals will shift after it gets played. For example, in the prologue chapter Boromir has to stop taking tricks after the Black Tower has been played. There are also orc cards. These are suitless and they can't ever win, meaning they have to be sloughed. And if you ever are forced to lead a trick with one (e.g., you have control of the board but don't have any other cards) you automatically lose, so you have to consciously deal with them at some point. In the second half, there are Weariness cards that also are suitless and can't win, but if you play one without leading the trick, you lose. Also, there are lots of events in this one and, it looks like, many of them tower-related.
The art has been updated. Existing characters get new art, as do the main deck cards. Hills are now patterned after Rohan rather than The Shire. Forests are based on Fangorn instead of Lórien. There are playable villains! Early reviews call out that there's more variety and a little bit of gameplay refinement as well. So like I said, I'm eagerly looking forward to the next installment. It's going to be an exciting edition to my game shelf.
That's what I think anyway,
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