So due to a little miniature game burnout and other life reasons, I haven’t gotten to The Only Game In Town to play Warmachine for quite some time. We’ve been having our every-other-week board game nights and playing video games, but I had started to feel like I was missing gaming a little bit. Eventually I decided that I wanted to do something, but trekking out to the store still doesn’t work very well. Enter Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, the living card game from Fantasy Flight Games.
As a little background, this game came out in 2011 and has multiple really interesting factors. Firstly, it is one of Fantasy Flight’s Living Card Games. This means that rather than buy randomized booster packs, you buy a starter and expansions all where you know the exact contents. All the expansions have 3 copies of every card you need, which is all you’re allowed to have in the deck. The core set is a little lame in that it doesn’t come with 3 of everything, but there’s still no randomization.
The other really interesting thing about the game is that it is cooperative. 1-4 players play against scenarios with rules that control the events and monsters, like other coop games. The difficulty scales with the number of players for the most part. Since it scaled, you can play with just 1 player against the game. Fantasy Flight has also produced a scoring system so you can tell how well you do against the game as a way of gauging how well you do. Please note that the scoring in the rules has been updated on their website.
So LotR has become my way of getting in more games. The games usually take less than 30 minutes so I can fit them in whenever. I can also spend time thinking about the deckbuilding. It’s been working pretty well so far. I started by playing with the core decks and then branched out into building my own 50 card deck. After a couple of games to get the feel, I started recording my plays with FFG’s quest log.
Here’s the deck I started with. I own 2 core sets and the first 3 adventure packs:
Heroes: