The first thing to know about Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is thatWhile you’re building decks and stacking odds in your favor like you would in Magic or Android, you’re not playing against a human opponent, you’re playing against a pre-made “encounter deck.” After all, there is only one Lord of the Ring, and he does not share power. The encounter deck can feel as evil as Sauron himself, as it spits out locations to travel to, enemies to detroy, and dastardly treacherous events that may doom any fellowship that’s not prepared enough.

You might be wondering how much variety LOTR:LCG can offer if it’s using a pre-made deck to play against. “Wouldn’t that get old?” The game has an aswer to this, in the form of scenarios. Scenarios are quests that you can choose to embark on, each one with its own little story, and specific objectives that need to be cleared in order to win. Furthermore, each scenario has its own custom-tailored deck, so rest assured that you won’t be playing against the same cards every time you play.

The object of the game is to beat the scenario. Every scenario is broken into multiple parts, and you’ll have to beat whatever objective is currently in front of you in order to advance to the next. The scenarios are made up of three objectives each, though some of the expansion quests may deviate from this number. Typically, advancing requires a certain amount of progress tokens (which I’ll explain in more detail in a moment), but sometimes you might just have to destroy one of Sauron’s big baddies instead. This is one thing that’s great about LOTR:LCG. Every quest is different, and the three that are included in the core are three completely different experience that do well to showcase the breadth that this game has.

To play the game, each participating player (the core set supports two) will build a deck, or used a pre-made one that the game provides for you. Each player will start with a hand of six cards drawn out of their shuffled deck, as well as three chosen heroes, and then the game begins. Each round is broken down into seven phases, and the game will go on until the players have won, or until Sauron’s minions are enjoying a fine wine over the corpses of Middle Eath’s heroes. Additionally, reaching a threat level of 40 will end the game immediately, which is measured by a dial, and will be explained more below.

The player cards consist of four types of cards, referred to as “spheres,” that encompass different types of abilities.

-Leadership is a good all-around suite that also provides plenty of useful allies to help you out.

-Tactics cards focus heavy on offense, making it easy to kill enemies, but harder to complete objectives.

-Spirit is essentially the opposite of Tactics, focusing heavily on progression and avoidance of conflict.

-Lore is the support suite, filled with cards that can heal your heroes or provide remedial effects.

A player deck can be comprised with up to three different spheres, but most decks tend to specialize on just two. Each hero is also assigned to their own sphere. After your deck is prepped and ready, it’s time to start your journey.

The game begins with the Resource Phase. In this phase, you’ll add a card to your hand (drawn off the top of your face-down deck), and every hero collects a coin (referred to as “resources” in-game), which can be used to play cards. Although you can hold as many cards as you please, most every single one has a cost which will have to be paid to actually use it.

Once you’ve collected coins, you’ll move on to the Planning Phase, in which you can play certain cards. Ally and attachment cards can only be played during this phase. Ally cards are friendly characters that can help you progress, attack, or defend (essentially watered down versions of heroes), and attachments are cards that you can attach to said allies (or heroes) to augment their abilities.

The game then moves on to the Quest Phase, which is very important, because this is where you obtain progress tokens, which, again, is the main means through which you typically complete objectives. The Quest Phase is basically that one part of Fellowship where you see them walk over that rocky pass in single file while the iconic theme plays. You know, that one part? The part that you think of any time you ever hear the music? Your heroes are “questing” here, and if their willpower exceeds that of the threat that surrounds them, they’ll make progress.

In the Quest Phase, you’ll exhaust as many characters as you please to commit them to the quest. Beware though – once a character has been exhausted, they can’t reactivate for the rest of the round, barring certain exceptions and specific card actions. You’ll need characters to do stuff in the later phases, so if you exhaust them all now, you’re setting yourself up to be Orc-fodder later.

Committing a character to a quest adds their “willpower” (noted by a star icon on their card) to a pot, which is compared to the “threat” of enemies and locations that appear while you’re questing. In this phase, a card will be drawn from the encounter deck, and added to the staging area, which is basically a sitting room for all the enemy cards that haven’t engaged you yet. In order to gain progress tokens, the combined amount of your committed willpower must exceed the total threat of enemy cards in the staging area.

For every point of threat that your willpower exceeds, you’ll gain a progress token. Should the threat exceed your willpower, your threat dial will move up by the corresponding amount. Remember that reaching 40 will end your game, so you’re essentially forced to quest, which becomes a delicate balancing act; you’ll have to use up characters to quest, and you’ll have to save some for combat later.

Next up is the Travel Phase, which is a moment where you can “explore” a nearby area. Mechanically, this means that you’ll take one of the location cards in the staging area, and make it into the active location. If a location is made active, it no longer contributes threat. In order to make it easier to gain progress tokens, travelling is essential. Unfortunately, most places in Middle-Earth are dangerous, and travelling can hit you with some nasty side effects. It’s a double edged sword – you need to explore to reduce the threat level, but it can also punish you.

After this, you’ll reach the Encounter/Combat Phases, which is where you’ll engage Sauron’s minions. In the Encounter Phase, enemies in the staging area will engage you, depending on their threat level. If it’s too high, they’ll stay up there until you’re at their level, but you can optionally take them on if you want to get rid of them prematurely.

Once you’ve engaged an enemy, you’ll have to choose a hero or ally to defend against their attack. Enemy attack power is compared with your own defense level, and you’ll receive a hit for every point that their attack exceeds your defense. Unfortunately, you’ll also have to exhause a character to take a hit. This means that characters that defend cannot attack, so you’ll have to take all of this into account when you decide what to do with your characters. This gets sticky when you have, say, three enemies engaged with you and only four characters. You’ll have to quest, attack, and defend against every hit with four exhausts. You’ll be lacking in one of those areas, and that’s where Lord of the Rings can become a real challenge.

With any characters you have left, you can perform attacks against the enemy, and damage is calculated in the same way. One attack exhausts your character, but fortunately, you have the option of exhausting multiple cards to team up their damage against one enemy.

Finally, you’ll taste the sweet nectar of the Refresh Phase, which is where the round ends, and your characters can refresh from the pains of exhaustion. All of your characters are reactivated (though they retain any damage they may have received), your threat increases by one point, and you begin the round anew. Rounds will continue on in the same fashion until the game has ended.

One thing I haven’t mentioned are the “event” cards, which are basically action cards. While attachment and ally cards can only be played in the beginning of the round, these can be played at any moment, and knowing how and when to use these is one of the most important parts of the game. Some cards can halt enemy attacks, while some can reduce your threat level. Others can augment your heroes’ attack power, while others still can heal damage.

The important thing to remember here is that this is a card game, so every single step above could be dealt with in about a billion different ways depending on how your deck is configured. There are so many cards that it’d be a daunting task to attempt to list them all, but it suffices to say that you will have fun pulling cards out of your deck and playing them efficaciously to get through these phases as cleanly as possible. It suffices to say that you won’t be lacking for options in LOTR:LCG, and even if you’ve cleared a scenario before, doing the same one with a different deck can be just as rewarding.

The last point to make is that, thus far, everything I’ve explained has applied to solo play only. Everything functions more or less the same way in a two player game, because the game scales with the player count. For example, in the Quest Phase, two cards will come out with two players instead of one. Players can take on certain roles – one player can exhaust most of their characters to quest, while the other can engage most of the enemies, or you might choose to play where both players have a healthy balance. Either way, the game essentially just doubles up on however much it throws at you, but all the main rules stay the same.

I could, of course, go on and on and on about the finer details of LOTR:LCG’s gameplay, but at that point, I may as well be writing the entire rulebook. Let’s move on.