The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship is a co-operative game where players embark on the same quest as the characters from Tolkien’s famous novel: to destroy the ‘one ring’ in Mount Doom – and tick off a few other objectives as well.

The board shows the fictional Middle Earth, broken into regions and within those regions, locations and paths connecting them. Each player will control two characters (although the hobbits come as pairs: Frodo and Sam; Merry and Pippin) and the game itself will control the maleficent Sauron and his army of bad actors. The fellowship’s fate is decided through a series of turns where players can communicate about what they think is best, but ultimately the player whose turn it is gets to choose what they do: you get up to five actions that are divided between your two characters (4 actions for one, 1 action for the other) and must complete the actions of one character before they start on their second one. For example, if you control the Frodo/Sam combo and Gandalf, you could do four actions for Gandalf and then one for the hobbit pair.

The actions form the beats of the game, as they can be spent in various ways: travelling, attacking, capturing, mustering, preparing, or fellowship. Travelling and attacking are very simple: move about the place and take on Sauron’s nefarious armies in combat. As you move and attack, there are four friendly armies – Dwarves, Elves, Rohirrim and Gondor – that will freely march and attack with you (you can even move another player’s character, as long as they agree to it). Attacking will draw Sauron’s gaze to the region of combat, which is helpful in distracting him from Frodo… Mustering is the act of adding more of these friendly troops to the board, and capturing is the act of taking one of Sauron’s strongholds from him (he begins with six, but may gain more during play) and making it a Haven instead. Strongholds are beneficial for Sauron: Havens are beneficial for us, the good guys: if your character is in a haven, you can discard a card for a matching token – we’ll come to tokens and why they are helpful shortly. Your other possible action of fellowship is the exchange of cards between players, which you can only do when your characters are in the same location.

Why would you share cards? Because cards make up four helpful currencies in your quest: Friendship (used for mustering) Valor (used for capturing) Stealth (used to help Frodo move unseen – he needs to get the ring to Mount Doom, remember!) and Resistance, which can be spent to re-roll dice when you don’t like the results.

Dice? Yes, dice are used primarily for two things: when the good guys attack, when the bad guys search for Frodo. We won’t go through either sequence here but suffice to say both are critical moments of the game, and tactically the fellowship action can be used to morph the players’ planning and strategy from a set of individual problems to a team situation, where a bit of planning and forethought – and sharing of cards – can make a huge difference. But your hand size is limited to seven cards, and that’s where the preparing action (-trading cards for tokens of the same type) can be helpful, as there’s no limit to the number of tokens you can hold.

After each player’s turn, they will draw two new cards, and then the game forces you to flip over Shadow cards, which add or move Sauron’s troops on the board, send the flying Nazgul looking for Frodo, and generally make everything a little bit tougher for the Fellowship. Players need to be sure they keep fighting and removing Sauron’s forces from the board, because if a card instructs you to add a Shadow troop and there are none, the Fellowship is defeated. You lose! What’s more, the player cards themselves have some Skies Darken cards nestled in the deck, that a few times per game send the threat from Sauron a little higher and ratchet up the tension further. Sauron’s Threat level – tracked on the board – causes Shadows cards to flip each turn, and all of the bad news has a possibly detrimental effect on poor Frodo, whose Hope level is also tracked on the board – dramatic moments in the game may cause it to slump, and if it ever reaches zero, the players have lost!

On the other hand, if you can complete the four objectives the game gives you – one will always be destroying the ring – then the players win instead, and it’s all back to Isengard for a tankard of mead.