Overview & How to Play

War of the Ring! It’s big, it’s epic, and it is best of all, its this entire trilogy in a freaking game!

There’s two sides: the Shadow, which are the big bad guys, and the Free People, those defending Middle Earth. The Shadow player wants to move his swarms of dudes to dominate Middle Earth, conquering the Free People’s settlements, including cities like Edoras, or strongholds like Minas Tirith. If the Shadow gets 10 victory points worth of these, they win the game. The Free Peoples are trying to maneuver their armies to hold off the Shadow long enough, buying Frodo enough time to hike all the way to Mordor, climb the crack of doom, and destroy the one ring.

To do all of this, players have 2 main things they’ll each have to keep track of: Action Dice and Event Cards. The Action Dice dictate which actions you take each turn, and the Event Cards can be played as an action, or to influence battles.

All you do on a turn is pick an Action Dice result and use it up. These let players move things on the map, recruit troops to their areas, or play Event Cards from their hand.

We can’t forget about Frodo though, who will be moving from Rivendell to Mount Doom throughout the game. To move the Fellowship, the Free Peoples player can use an Action Die face. This movement is hidden, and so in his attempt to find the ring, the Shadow will roll dice to see if he finds Frodo every time that Hobbit moves. If Frodo is found through this roll, he can get corrupted and revealed, which stalls him. When Frodo reaches 12 corruption, he becomes completely corrupted and the Shadow player immediately wins.

Pros

Let’s just jump into Middle Earth, shall we? This board will make any Tolkien fan drool, with mountains, streams, and names of all the major regions. It spans from the mines of Moria, the fortifications of Osgiliath, and even the far Dwarven Erebor. You also get a TON of miniatures for each faction, including Oliphants, Nazgul, mounted Rohan warriors, and each member of the Fellowship. It’s 205 miniatures in total!

War of the Ring is just ridiculously asymmetric. Let’s start with playing the Free People, which are the stubborn people of the land that are initially saying that, that growing darkness in Middle Earth is no big deal. In so, they actually do NOT want to fight at the beginning, and its up to the Free People’s player to goad their internal politics to eventually set them up to defend Middle Earth.

The Free People will have the benefit of playing defense though, where the Shadow always has to attack. The Shadow doesn’t really care about politics much in getting set up for war, and has gobs and gobs of troops to throw at the Free People’s strongholds. It certainly feels like a quantity becomes quality sort of thing, with event cards allowing the Shadow to constantly spawn buttloads of troops. Often times, the Shadow can use Nazgul to lead these into battle, which are unique units that can fly anywhere on the map.

But wait, the asymmetry doesn’t end there! The Hunt for the ring is going to ask for even more interesting management from the players. Remember, the Free People really need to accomplish the destruction of the ring before they run out of troops. And the Shadow has countless ways of slowing that down, including dedicating literal actions before a round even starts. So while both players will be waging a grand-scale war across Middle Earth, they’re also sweating over hurting or moving the Fellowship, which is a thematic and thoughtful process all the way through.

This isn’t even including the main characters of this story, with Gandalf! There’s Gandalf the Grey, then later he can transform into the White with a Shadowfax ability to zoom across the land, did we mention this game is thematic? The Free People have so many companions at their disposal, like Boromir who can shore up Gondor’s defenses, or Strider becoming Aragorn to lead possible offenses against the Shadow.

The Shadow have their own cast of characters, with Saruman unleashing Uruk-Hai across Isenguard, or have the Witch-King himself fighting in battles for Minas Tirith. Characters in general interact so well each other, with the Mouth of Saruman smelling the true king when Aragorn appears on the map. Or how Gandalf the White can negate all of the Shadow’s Nazgul in a fight.

When you pile this back onto the board that has all of the cites, choke points, and scope of Middle Earth, you really feel like you’re sucked into Tolkien’s world. The dynamic of the scrappy, defending Free People versus the scattered but numerous Shadow is a thrill that translates to every action each faction takes, and this war game is only part of the theme. There’s the critical side-story of Frodo with the ring, hiding and escaping the forces of evil while ALL of the combat is occurring. Essentially, War of the Ring’s gameplay ties insanely well with the source material that you can’t think of one without the other. Every action is going to change the original story of the Lord of the Rings bit by bit, with the entirety of Middle Earth giving an eagle’s eye view to the unraveling events.

Cons

Learning this game though… is also an epic experience in an unfortunate way. It’s really that whole: “One does not simply start playing War of the Ring”.

War of the Ring is really showing its age with its Mist Mountains-esq barrier to entry. After slogging through the rulebook, you gotta deal with a long setup, and then a long play time to account for. There’s a lot of reading required throughout the game in general too. The jumbo sized Event Cards are gonna prove to have a LOT of words in each, and then you got all the Minions and Companions stats and abilities to fuss over. This game, with its complex and huge board, demands attention to detail with adjacencies and region names. But don’t give up if this looks like your jam, because all of War of the Ring’s cons fall under the umbrella of the game being hard to start.

Final Thoughts

If you’re not much into Lord of the Rings, well, you can still certainly enjoy this game, because the mechanics are that good. While the rulebook doesn’t hold up to the test of time, the Action Die and Event Card system from War of the Ring’s original design in 2004 is marvelous to use today.

And because this game has a heck of a lot going on, don’t stress out too much about your first game’s results—you’re not gonna know the consequences of any of the event cards until you’ve actually played the game. Eventually, you’ll figure out how to play against cards like “Corsairs of Umbar”, which will feel really unfair to new players. Early on, it can be the most enjoyable to just immerse yourself in another world, constantly being able to take tons of actions even when behind, and marvel at the game feeling so faithful to the source material. Just enjoy the ride!