Review Notes

• “War of the Ring: The Card Game” will be abbreviated as “War of the Ring CG”, or “WOTR CG”

• Free People = Good Guy team (The 2 decks of Rohan/Wizards/Hobbits & Elves/Gondor)

• Shadow = Bad Guy team (The 2 decks of Sauron & Saruman/Monstrous/Southerlings)

• Discussing the main mode of the game (Trilogy Mode) but we have a little on the official 2 player duel mode

• Comparing this to the board game, but mostly in cons & scoring.

How to Play

The goal of the game is to have the most victory points from mostly cards called locations: Paths & Battlegrounds. After path 9 gets resolved, the game immediately ends. Free people get points from properly defending their path cards and winning battlegrounds. The Shadow are trying to ATTACK path cards, and win battlegrounds.

You flip one battleground a round, do its text, and see who is attacking or defending it. By round end, you’ll actually do the fight amongst the cards that have been played there throughout the round, and if the attacker has more swords, they get the battleground for VP. However, defending units don’t contribute to the battle UNLESS they’re eliminated to add their shields, meaning those cards will be removed from the game permanently. Attacking units always get eliminated after the combat no matter what.

Paths are similar, note that there’s a number restriction for cards going on them. Free people win on defense, they grab the path, get points. Little twist here though, is that the shadow win on the attack, they get victory points EQUAL to the difference of their attack and the free people’s defense.

Now with locations explained, the first thing to know about rounds is that you take turns doing one action each. Eventually, everyone will pass, then you resolve each of the locations. But before you get carried away from all these cards in hand, there’s one REALLY important rule: every time you drop something from your hand, you HAVE to discard another card in your hand as a cost, this is called ‘cycling’.

Now all you need to know is 5 actions:

1. Play a card. Either to a location, or in front of you called a ‘reserve’.

2. Move a dude from reserve to a location, as long as you didn’t play it in reserve this round.

3. Use card text that says, this is an action.

4. Flip your once per game ring token to draw 2 cards.

5. Eliminate 2 cards from your hand permanently from the game to draw a card.

Uhh, I lied, there’s one last action: voluntarily cycling, aka discarding a card as an action, but you rarely do that.

Also also, instead of doing an action, you can choose to pass if you have 2 or less cards, OR you can pass if both of your opponents have more cards than you in hand.

Once every single player passes in a row, you see who wins each location, teams draw their cards. Then you pass the starting player, flip locations for the next round, and do it all again. Remember when the last path, or 9th path gets flipped over, it’s the final round (alternatively you can win if you have 10+ points). If your deck ever runs out at any time, just shuffle your discard, and that’s your new deck, note that eliminated cards can never get re-added to the game.

One last thing, which is some cards will ‘activate’ paths mid round, which means you just immediately commence fighting on it, whoever wins it just gets the path points like normal. You then get another path depending on what the card says, and that will give points like normal at the end of the round. Activating battlegrounds means you just grab another battleground that’s not in play, and then put it in play. If re-activating a battleground, you take it from someone’s scoring area- whoa that means you fight over it again. So you can have board states with multiple battlegrounds in play, but you can only ever have 1 path in play at a time.

PROS

Starting with components, yeah, this game has a ton of component polish, with a fantastic insert, sturdy chits, and just good feeling cards, whether big or small.

And the art! Tolkien fans, can just soak in the art, from the Locations of Bag End, Amon Hen, Osgiliath, etc. then to the heroic Gondor warriors, hungry hobbits, and more in the decks. There’s zero duplicates of character cards, meaning there’s just so much diversity of art. Even though they did borrow art from the original WoTR game for some characters, there’s just SO much new art its not a big deal. Locations from Bag end, to Amon Hen, to Osgiliath look great… and this is just the paths! Strongholds are also pretty cool, different artist, different styles there. Flavor text on cards also reads well.

Speaking of the original WOTR, that game was INSANELY hard to learn, its like the the rulebook and its player aids were some archaically worded parchment that were ACTIVELY gatekeeping the play. Happy to report that learning this War of the Ring is mostly good, with good examples, good use of space, fantastic card breakdown, etc. etc. This is helped by the good player aid that explains all the symbols, and slightly differentiated for the opposing teams here.

And seeing how this game is just 4 decks of player cards, with 3 location decks that mostly don’t need to be in any order, setup is REALLY easy. So let’s get to gameplay pros, and we’re actually gonna start with all of the cool abilities in the game. See, there are some army cards in each deck, but MOST of WOTR CG is dominated by character effects, and they’re usually quite fitting for lord of the rings.

For the Free People, how about Gandalf who says you shall not freaking pass on a path to get a new one! Then he can die there, no problem, because Gandalf 2.0 can ride Shadowfax to rush to defend Minis Tirith for insane stats!

Or how about all of these cheeky hobbitses that have some way to help paths without permanently dying, Frodo Baggins can escape again and again! Or actually, if you want to use a Hobbit again, use Eowyn: she can straight up bring back Merry or Pippen from the discard when played! Or use her in battle to kill Nazgul!

Back at Gondor, Denethor is calling his son from the deck as an action… Faramir or Boromir, its up to what he’s feeling (probably Boromir).

There’s so many, Legolas grabs his bow from the deck, or the Phial of Galadriel to get Frodo OR sam more defense in a path. Or Gondor calls for aid in the red arrow, letting Rohan troops actually support them in battle! Aaah, for interest of time, let’s move onto the shadow.

And how else to say evil but Nazgûl! You have all nine Nazgûl ready to do Sauron’s bidding, each with different abilities to pester the free people, with the much stronger Witch King you’ll want to play. Nazgul have some sinister tricks, like a Mantle to not actually die in battle, or ways to just get victory points after running away in battle (Black Breath).

The other Shadow deck has wormtongue, who can eliminate himself to straight up kill Theoden holy moly that’s evil! Then you obviously you have Saruman and his Palantir to speed up their attack, by drawing 3 cards every turn, then keeping only 1, the others are discarded and eliminated.

Now that you have a good idea of the cool interactions, you’ll start feeling the weight of the interesting cycle system, where to play from hand, you discard something else too. Say you need to defend and play a Rohan army… but to pay for that, do you really want to lose out on this Mithril coat that hugely buffs Frodo or sam… look at the size of your deck left, are you likely to draw either of them? Will this mithril coat be overkill for any upcoming round?

There’s a Gandalf reliant Theoden, you can happily discard him if your realize both Gandalf cards are in your discard, and when your deck gets reset, then Gandalf and Theoden can hookup.

Or you can setup your hand to do a super efficient play to play Gimli, discarding his AXE… then Gimli snatches that dwarven axe back into your hand with his ability, its like playing Gimli was free! As you get better at the game, you’ll start evaluating which cards are worth cycling at which part of the game- like these cards aren’t gonna do anything for me just sitting in reserve just now, they’ll do better when I draw them later.

There’s fun progression of constantly re-evaluating your shrinking deck, as you can start to lose steam when strong cards, especially characters (Aragorn!), are gone. OR sometimes if you know that certain characters have been killed off from fighting, you don’t want to keep their complementary cards (Aragorn’s sword, his ghost army, Arwen, etc.) in the deck… so that’s where the Winnow action, to eliminate 2 to draw a card, is a nice addition to the game. It’s a quick way to manually fix your deck by losing some slight card advantage, but since you probably didn’t want those cards anyways, it makes rounds feel smoother. And there’s 1 really fun example that can happen if you fix your deck properly:

One game, we had the Saruman deck trim down to 15 cards, and we got to use Gollum multiple times a game, which by activating paths lets the shadow choose when to score them, and trigger shadow path abilities when the number favors them, since certain path numbers help certain teams.

Pros 2

We gotta put a focus on the asymmetry, where everyone’s unique deck is combined with the differing team play styles. So the Free people actually have control over the length of the game, since they have plenty of cards that can ‘activate the next path’ to get to the end of the path pile which is the game’s timer. And when activating all of those paths, you can defend with those hobbits that never seem to die and go on any path (Freaking Frodo!)

But then the Shadow get HUGELY rewarded for stacking up attacks on paths, because remember they get points there by how much they win. So you can totally just send in a bunch of Nazgul to get a ton of points… but don’t do this TOO early, because attackers always die, so you’ll have to evaluate WHEN to stack a bunch of Nazgul.

Shadow also straight up has a TON of more card draw, because they have a built in 1 more card draw every turn, but also Sauron has 2 “+1 Draw” cards every round. The Free People decks only have Aragorn, or Gandalf the White for a “+1 draw”, but they have to be careful in playing those because they’ll kill off strider or gandalf the grey, which have incredible once per game abilities.

It’s not surprising for Sauron to draw 6 cards a turn, while Free people players draw 3 cards- that’s half! Pair this increased card draw with all of these cards, locations and events (Ringwraiths, Day without Dawn, etc.), that let you draw MORE off the to the top of the deck, and Sauron can go through his deck incredibly fast! In one game, he already reset his deck by the time round 2 rolled around. This lets Sauron have a good idea of what’s left in his deck very early on, letting him plan long-term strategy clearer. And having more cards in hand just means way more actions to drop those armies.

Sauron also play this attrition control game, since they can KEEP forsaking FP cards, and even forcing opponent discards through Beguiler is an incredible Nazgul to spam to reduce FP action possibilities. Going from 4 cards to 3 cards is no joke because of the cost to play every card, and many Nazgul abilities don’t eliminate the Nazgul after using them from reserve. You can combo it with other Nazgul to keep spamming abilities!

Just like the lore, the other Shadow deck plays a teensy bit more of a supportive role in its ‘ragtag’ nature- but that doesn’t mean they still can’t launch huge attacks on Rohan places with Saruman and his Uruk Hai. Or play incredibly strong monstrous cards… but only on near where they would thematically be in middle earth. Then the Southerlings are poised to ‘activate one of the Gondor battlegrounds” to launch sneak attacks.

The Free People are a little more flexible with their characters, using stuff like the 3 Hunters to move those heroes to any battleground in the game, and there’s lots of teamwork as the elf deck plays lots of magic items to help the hobbitses.

When we put it all together, path 6 becomes a huge contention for both teams, because the Shadow wants to use Gollum to spam the Shadow favored effects, whereas Free People are trying to move the paths to 7 as fast as possible, which are all Free people favored, AND they can use this Gondor homie to start scoring them for free.

The next gameplay pro is the general passing structure working really well for 4 players. See, War of the Ring CG is really a careful tug of war over paths and strongholds- its filled with mind games of thinking of how much your opponent can play to a location before the round ends. After all, you can’t move things once you’ve put them down, so you have to be VERY sure about winning a combat before dedicating cards- and once you set something down to attack, it’s gone from the game right after that fight.

So, all 4 players are trying their hardest to temporarily pass to see what their opponents do, then reacting to that on their next turn. But to get your hand size low enough, you may have to play cards in reserve that you can’t move at all this round, so make sure they’re worth playing there!

Maybe its worth increasing your hand size, or carryover limit to pass earlier in rounds- each deck has a way to do this.

We cannot stress enough that a KEY occurrence of the game is your one of your opponents passing with just 2 cards in hand, then pretending they are ‘done’ for the round… but they’re really not- they’re waiting for their teammate to set up something for them… and maybe in they have the dreaded +3 attack cards remaining in their hand… or maybe they’ll use that ‘reserve’ ability soon to activate a stronghold to put MORE vp in contention this round.

Last little pro is a focus on the “re-activating” battlegrounds mechanic, because it can cause some nice swings late game: think of the already scored Minas Tirith as 3 points swinging from one side to the other. This means battlegrounds are rarely completely safe from being contested over again, keeping both teams on their feet. You have to gauge what strongholds you can afford to give up early, because maybe you don’t want to lose certain units now, or your opponent just has WAYY too many troops on them, and you plan to put them back into play later.

Then for logistics, the game has good replayability, especially if you’re playing it 2v2 with 4 actual people. That means you’ll have an entirely new deck to handle each game, where each deck is fairly deep in how you want to pace good character drops, interact with the other deck, and also forsake. There’s also 3 different paths for each number of 1-9, so the combinations in which they come out is gonna vary, and with their defending values and abilities, you’ll card play a bit differently. Same goes for the battlegrounds, which come out randomly from their decks of 7, so maybe one game Orthanc comes out on round 2 to grab Saruman from the deck and that’s a different game.

Final pro is that the theme meets gameplay quite well in this game- not everywhere, but where it does, its impressive for this just being cards. Like Hobbits constantly escape death on paths because they’re impossible to catch midgets, or the Mouth of Sauron cannot be sent to seek out Frodo on a path if there is a fight at his base. Or how Nazgûl’s really do feel like special generals that are ready to do the dark lord’s bidding with unique abilities to use again and again. When the time is right to strike with them late game, you’ll probably play them IN FORCE to a battleground or path.

Cons

Before getting into the technical stuff below, we got some visuals annoyances: stronghold names and text are way too small for a 4 player game, or how path defense and battleground defense icons look eerily similar. And while it didn’t seem like a big deal at first, NOT having a way to keep track of points scored was extremely annoying.

Mid-game there’s constantly asking of one another- “oh hey how many points do you have, let’s take a look at your stack of cards.”

And then the Shadow only getting points from paths via corruption tokens adds an extra step to counting up. To slightly aggravate this too, is that if one side has 10 more points than the other at a round end, they just win, so that’s something both sides are wary of. Not sure why they couldn’t just have added a VP tracker how War of the Ring did.

The last rulebook-ish con is why they decided to use the word ‘activate’ for TWO things, paths and battlegrounds. That’s pretty confusing, because activating does drastically different things here. Namely activating paths replaces them, and activating battlegrounds DO NOT replace, rather add another battleground. Not sure why they didn’t just use different names here.

So now onto gameplay cons, and we have to start with how randomness is handled. Now granted, this is a card game so there’s always going to be an element of randomness with card draws or card flips, but War of the Ring CG does this to a severe way in many areas. First are the battlegrounds, you know where you’re forced to fight, where since they’re flipped over randomly every round, it makes early-mid game combat pretty volatile and unfair feeling.

Like, you might have asked yourself, what if Minis Tirith gets flipped over round one? Well this THREE point battleground is gonna be pretty hard to Shadow to get with its defense and free people helping ability… and remember Free People don’t even have to commit troops there to necessarily win! the walls And if you do the math, Shadow needs between 2-3 troops to get over Minas Tirith’s base defense value AND the troops need to match the battleground type… this is a LOT to ask on the first turn, so the shadow HAS to essentially give it up, giving FP an early VP lead, putting the burden on the Shadow to later re-activate this place, spending their own resources.

Conversely, it is really quite good for Shadow if Orthanc gets flipped over round 2, and they can take Saruman from their deck to their hand. But if Saruman was in your hand already, this ability basically does nothing! Or Minas Morgul early to get a free Nazgul play to reserve is quite helpful… what if you get the witch king for super value? What if you get no card- then it’s like you had ZERO ability.

Basically, I’m saying that battlegrounds can make one side’s chances of winning definitely easier or harder based off their flips you have no control over in an on average 90-120 minute game. ‘Reactivating’ them doesn’t compensate for all of the variance there. Like if we look at paths, they’re not perfect either, some of them are definitely stronger within the same category with their abilities, but aren’t as swingy, and much easier to play around because you KNOW that only 1/3 cards will get flipped each round, not 1/7, or 1/5 as the battleground decks get smaller.

Then there’s some individual card randomness: some cards are just straight up always better to open with. Each faction has at least 1 character that provides a +1 draw, and you obviously just plop it in reserve round 1 to get that card advantage going early. If the other team both draws theirs and your team doesn’t, you’re behind on card advantage. It’s not like you can do any huge path play or attack just because your opponent played that in reserve, round 1 doesn’t see big plays because you just don’t have that much firepower, and these cards wouldn’t have affected early paths anyways.

Or if FP open Strider AND Gandalf the Grey in each team’s opening hand, they’re WELL on their way to advancing the path end, which is their main win condition, and you want to use these abilities asap before playing Aragorn or Gandalf the white which would remove them- you don’t want to eliminate cards in this game unless you really have to. And what the heck are up with these two characters’ path defense stats, that’s way too high considering defenders win ties.

And you know how to play any card, you must cycle another card? Well that’s card inflation, meaning you’re basically paying 2 cards to play 1, making certain ‘drawing cards ability’ not as healthy as you think. These 2 cards can be REALLY good, especially since you can +1 off of getting 2 cards, but what if you draw 0 of what you’re looking for? Then you just played 2 cards to get literally nothing, which feels absolutely terrible. This play alone won’t lose you the game, but its like you threw some part of your hand into mount doom. The two FP equivalents to these Shadow drawing events are Eomer and Theoden… but if you fail these, you still have a dude on the board with some upside, so not sure why these Shadow cards don’t just let you draw more so they don’t poop out.

Then, items are a very feast or famine type of card, where they can be good to AMAZING if you get to play them on a very specific character, but useless otherwise. If you lost the host card, whether through fault of your own or through a random forsake, then they’re utterly useless and really cut decision making. Feasting looks like: Frodo GETS mythril armor on a path, the one item that is equipped to him, adding TWO defense to a path where FP already win ties is amazing.

Or on the Shadow, there’s all these items and even an event that can ONLY be used with Saruman, (Palantir, Woven of All Colors, Saruman’s Staff, Threats & Promises) so make sure Saruman isn’t the bottom of your deck eh- and even tutoring him with Wormtongue is NOT an efficient or reliable play.

Here’s more non-items, the Great Gate or the Dead Men of Dunharrow… which of course is pretty much only good on Minas Tirith and next to Aragorn respectively. Or Shelob, who can ONLY be played on paths 7-8, so she’s probably discard fodder for most of the game.

I’m not saying that these are inherently bad cards to have in a game, they have really big thematic upside, but are just a double-edged sword of undercutting decision making if you draw them at the wrong time. In a game with hand draws between 3-5 cards on average, these can feel like dead weight, ESPECIALLY becoming discard fodder if their complement is removed from the game or is in a small discard pile.

This furthers the chance of bricking on locations like we said before- these specific items/events can really clog up your hand, so some rounds you can find you do 1 thing, then have to pass… this is much worse in 2v2 when you’re only controlling 1 deck. If your ENTIRE side has none of the right cards for areas, well your opponent just gets scores those locations then for free- really good for any defenders there.

What could help alleviate all this unhealthy randomness? Well, you could play with the next battleground flipped over, to let you at least plan for the next round. And for specific cards… we would have you draw 2 more cards on each round, then immediately cycle 2, which would help reduce bad hands AND give more agency every round. Yet this would run into the issue of making your deck reset faster, which might be too fast for what this game is going for, so maybe some number tweaking there is necessary, let me know if you try it.

Actually going off of that randomness, we have to talk about the Forsake mechanic. It’s really playing with fire in WHAT can get randomly removed from a deck, because FP are almost always going to Forsake off of top of deck. They do so because they’re already behind on card advantage and are trying to pressure Shadow early to end the game.

But then when Forsaking off a deck… well ANYTHING can kind of happen to these interdependent cards, and the game isn’t multi-faceted or long enough to recover well if you lose a REALLY key card early- like Shadowfax, or any fellowship hobbit. Obviously Shadow can’t see what gets forsaken, since that would be TOO strong, so they are some mind games here for FP to play, but FP just collapsing off of 3 really bad Forsakes in a game is upsetting.

This mechanic WORKS… but just steeped in randomness… like there ARE cards to peek before deck forsaking AND you have the option to Forsake not from your deck. Maybe for forsaking off the top of your deck, you draw 2 then forsake one?

CONS 2

Ok, now its time for the most fascinating con: War of the Ring Card Game does a poor job of setting up the correct expectations. So let’s start with Frodo’s marketed role in this game at the back of the box:

“Frodo will travel from Bag End to Mordor”…

Or the rulebook says: “The Shadow must try to slowly cuorrupt Frodo, burdening him with wounds toils, sorrow… blah blah blah.”

This is really a case of trying to sell the IP so hard, because Frodo Baggins is a single character card that you’ll see maybe on 4 paths a game if FP play very efficiently. Oh and no point is the actual 1 ring a mechanic during gameplay where Frodo himself is getting corrupted- corruption is just a generic VP for the Shadow. So yeah sorry WOTR fans, this game is just about maximizing VP on different locations flips before the game ends, not about going invisible, charting a proper path or anything like that.

Then the game also says “The Shadow must strike quickly and decisively”. And that makes sense: you probably think of masses of Shadow troops swarming around Middle Earth, using numbers as a strength. But War of the Ring CG cannot be approached like that: you have NO huge starting hordes of troops, and the Shadow has the same exact deck size as the good people. That means that there’s NOT that many more troops they have even though the burden is on them to attack on Round 1. It’s not uncommon to see an early Minas Tirith or Helm’s deep flip and get so initially confused on what you’re supposed to do- even if you luck into the RIGHT hand to take it, sending out a kamikaze squad early is what the Shadow ironically can’t afford to do.

Or how about when you see hobbits on a path- shouldn’t you be putting Nazgul on there to search for the ring- no actually you don’t want to do that in this game because Nazgul ALL DIE AFTER GOING ON PATHS, and Hobbits ALWAYS survive, don’t have the Nazgul tap themselves out too early from going on the hunt for the ring they’re thematically supposed to do…

It’s quite unintuitive, because Shadow is actually the underdog here- they’re behind on VP for most of the game, sometimes struggling with troop quantity because its their burden to do most of the suicide attacks… and defenders win ties. Its thematic in a way: the Shadow needs time to mobilize its armies, but they don’t even have that many army cards in this game, relying on their 3 attacks to actually break strong defenses.

Shadow isn’t weaker, but need careful playing and do not follow the rulebook’s marketing. If you’re a really careful gamer, this won’t be an issue. I won’t spoil the details of the strategy: but essentially you cannot get concerned that the FP are utterly destroying you in points- you just need to keep that a little below 10 until late game, where paths 8/9 are very shadow favored.

This can also make the replayability of the game not as high as initially thought with all the cool cards with this strategy- each side just becomes aware of the what the other is trying to do. Compare that to the board game, where while Frodo still needs to get to mount doom, there’s a bunch of paths to get there, and there’s a bunch of different areas of middle earth for the Shadow to CHOOSE to mobilize against, rather than spurned on by card flips.

The last gameplay con is the pure 2 player, that is the DUEL variant in the rulebook, where you mash up each side’s 2 decks together and basically play the same mode, but you draw less cards to start the game with… where before you drew 6 or 7 and discarded 2 cards. This is because you now have the ring to use EVERY round, and are treated as both of your team’s players for draw abilities. You’re still not drawing enough to double your hand though, which is where you could consistently place on all the location flips, and even if you did draw more, there’s a higher chance of randomness to go kaputt because its a single deck of 60. You know there’s a reason why the game was split up into 2 decks in the first place eh?

Nitpicks

The first nitpick is that there’s no card count for cards in the game, even in the rulebook! This sounds like it shouldn’t matter, but its really nice to know how many times you can get away with eliminating army cards, since you NEED army cards to interact with battlegrounds.

Then there’s the “1 Ring” that each player has, which is a VERY good ‘draw 2’ that basically everyone will always use, having it only worth 1 point come end game doesn’t make it worth saving. It works fine because players are playing around each other using the ring at any time, until eventually there comes a point where you don’t have to, and it feels like something is missing. Granted, this is probably kept this way to keep the game simple, but could there be a way to recharge it? Or just give at least 2-3 points end game for not using it?