G3 Games Day

Last weekend, a friend and I had a trip down to Glasgow to attend a Glasgow Games Group gaming event; the Spencer Warner Memorial Gaming Day.  The G3 event commemorates a founder member of the group and lets those who knew him (and those, like me, who didn't) get together for some gaming, for some laughs and to raise some cash for charity.

There was a fair turnout with around ten tables on the go, as well as a huge bring and buy section (I later learned that this was mostly Spencer's collection they are selling off for charity - Man he had a lot of stuff!)  I took some pictures, apologies to all the participants, I didn't get names:

The view from the door.

A well balanced looking Flames of War table.

One of two Apocalypse Warhammer 40K games.  These tables were packed with figures.

A huge Battletech game using Hawk Wargames' terrain set.  I think this was the quick play version of the rules (Alpha Strike?) as it seemed to be playing very quickly for BT.

  

Our first game, Blood Bowl Team Manager.  A much better game with three people rather than two.  Four players would be better still.

The second 40K game.  Someone came over to us from this table for a blether - Apparently his army had been reduced to just three figures!

In addition to these, there were games of Saga, Chain of Command, Dystopian Wars and a couple miscellaneous games I couldn't see properly.  My loot from the day was pretty satisfying:

Cold War Commander - because I don't have enough projects and scales going on.

Imperium supplement for Crusader - for completness, the only one I don't have.

Gear Krieg - a complete impulse buy.

Khador paint set from PP - great price

Thragosh the Messiah for Horders - again, a bargain.

We'd also stopped earlier at Static Games in the city centre where I picked up the latest booster for Android Netrunner and an adventure pack for the Lord of the Rings card game.

Lord of the Rings: The Card Game - Gameplay

Today, I'd like to carry on talking about Lord of the Rings: the Card Game (LotR) and specifically the gameplay.  You can find my first post on the game here, where I've given an overview of the core box game and components.

Three Lore heroes from the starter box, a Threat cost of 30, about average. 

The core mechanic in the game is the concept of Threat, essentially, how serious or risky the situation for the heroes is.  This is used in all areas of the game, from setting the initial difficulty to deciding what enemies will attack you.  It is also, in essence, a resource to manage, if a players individual Threat level gets too high, that player is eliminated from the game.  During set up, each player sets their Threat counter to the total Threat of their three heroes.  In the example above, the player would set their Threat meter to 30 (10 + 12 + 8.)
 

Player area on the left, Staging area in the middle, Encounter deck on the right.  

The are three areas used in the game, the player area, the staging area and the quest/encounter area.  The object of the game is to move through the deck of quest cards, usually no more than three cards, by earning enough Quest points and meeting any conditions on those cards.  Trying to stop you is the Encounter deck, from which the various Enemy, Location and Treachery cards are drawn into play.  The player area is where the heroes are set out and where any further characters are placed.

LotR plays in a seven phase turn, which sounds long, but is very streamlined once you are familiar with the sequence.  The turn starts with the Resource, followed by the Planning phase.  The two are essentially one big phase, Resource starts with each hero getting one Resource token and each player drawing one additional card into their hand.  So far, so good.  Planning then lets players spend their hero's resource tokens to put cards from their hand into play.  As I mentioned last post, the cards you can play are either Allies, Attachments or Events.  A key choice you make here is whether or not to get more characters into play early in the game or to save your resource tokens for later to afford more expensive cards.

In this Planning phase, players would have to beat a score of 5 Threat

Following is the Planning phase where your heroes and characters make progress on the current quest.  They do this by Exhausting (placing the card on its side) and once all players have decided who to Commit or not, they total up the Wisdom of all these characters.  To make progress, this total has to exceed the Threat total of the Enemy and Location cards in the staging area.  Sounds straightforward right? Well kind of.  Before you calculate the final Threat total from the staging area, one card per player is drawn from the Encounter deck, possibly adding to the Threat total.  Either way, the total Wisdom and Threat is compared and any difference is converted into progress tokens on the quest (higher Wisdom) or added to each players Threat meter (higher Threat.)  Something to remember though is that characters who Quest will not be able to do anything else in the turn (such as attack or defend.)

The next two stages help players remove Threat from the staging area.  The Travel phase lets the players make a Location card the active area, removing its Threat from the staging area. The downside of this is that while there is an Active Location, players won't make any progress on the Quest until it is dealt with.

The Bight Patrol will engage Players with a Threat above 5, which
 would be almost everyone.  The Marsh Adder, Threat 40, will only attack
 the strongest players when things are very serious!
  

The Encounter phase firstly lets each player choose to Engage an Enemy card in the staging area.  The Enemy card is taken from there and moved to opposite the players area, again removing its Threat from the Planning phase.  Now the Enemy is up in the players face, it will attack in the next phase.  However, things aren't quite as straightforward as that. Each Enemy has an engagement Cost on their card, if a players Threat meter is equal or higher than any Enemy's cost, those enemies will Engage that player as well.

Ah, Faramir, one of my favourite cards.  Helps others Quest with his

ability, good at defending and can take a bit of a beating!

Next up is the Combat phase, where Enemy cards engaged with players will attack and then players can attack in return.  I'm not going into any detail here, as I'll do that in the future. Lastly is the Refresh phase, where all Exhausted cards are readied and each player increases their Threat rating by one.

So there's the game turn in a nutshell.  Hopefully I've conveyed that, above all else, LotR is a risk management game, where every decision you make has an unknown element to it. Have I dedicated enough characters to Quest this turn?  Do I go to this Location or try and progress the Quest?  Do I play lots of Ally cards to get more characters in play or do I play Attachment cards and have a small group of really powerful characters. Making the correct choices is fundamental to success.

There are lots of occasions, however, where you'll be faced with some awful luck, and draw the one card you had hoped to avoid.  One of the mechanics I enjoy most about LotR, is that each phase has a point where players can act, either by playing an Event card or making use of a special ability.  As a result, you always have the opportunity to act or react (assuming you have said card or ability) to an unexpected enemy or effect; too many enemies in play?  Play a snare card to stop them attacking.  Too many location cards? Play a scout character to help explore it.

Don't want to deal with a specific Location card?  Attach this to lower it's threat!

Of course, using these depend on having the correct combination of cards in your deck as much as it does luck, and this is the last core mechanic of the game: deck building.  Now this is a whole other area of the game to explore.  There are a couple of rules to follow in building a deck (max of three heroes, minimum of fifty cards and no more than three copies of each card,) but other than that, you're free to mix and match whatever combination of cards you have.  Of course, buying any of the expansion and adventure packs greatly increases the choice of cards you have available (and those things are like crack, addictive!) I'll talk more about this in the future, if there's any demand, as I am a complete novice when it comes to this kind of game.

Finally, a word or two on the difficulty level.  Common practice at the moment is for designers to make cooperative and solo games as difficult as they possibly can be.  The reasoning being, if difficulty is set too easy, gamers won't stick with the game long term. With LotR, you could be forgiven for thinking that the game is monstrously hard.  Now that is true to an extent, but to understand the game properly, we have to return to an earlier point I made.  The core box set is a great little game in it's own right, but it is, in essence, one long introduction to the full Lord of the Rings card game.  The aim of the core box is to teach you how the different spheres behave and point you in the right direction when building your own deck.

In case you haven't picked up on it yet, I love Lord of the Rings: the Card Game.  The designers have managed to get the balance of risk, choice and luck just right and I enjoy the mental exercise of trying out different combinations of cards.  Next time I'll try and put up a report on an actual playthrough of the game.  I'm trying to come up with a way of doing that without it simply being a long post with lots of pictures with cards.  Until then. . .

Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

For my birthday this year, I decided to treat myself to a new game and, after a lot of deliberation, I jumped for the Lord of the Rings: The Card Game by Fantasy Flight Games. This is a bit of a departure for me, not having played many card games in my time.  A couple months ago, Adam at the club ran me through the Game of Thrones card game and I really enjoyed the experience.  I was tempted to just get my own copy of that, but the fact that LotR can be played either co-op or solo swung the decision for me.

The game as it looks with one player.

There was a bit of a palavar actually getting the game.  Nowhere locally had the core box in stock, so I had to order if from Maelstrom Games (with a nice discount.) Suddenly, it was unavailable there too, leading me to get it from Amazon, but, as we were close to leaving on holiday, I ended up forking out for next day delivery!  Still, it arrived the day before we left, so it all worked out fine.

FFG market LotR as a Living Card Game.  The core box set has everything you need to play some enjoyable games and there is plenty of variation and replayability on offer.  The "living" part of the games comes from the model FFG use to expand the range.  After the core box comes a "cycle" of six adventure packs, each containing a fixed selection of cards to add to the original game.  After the first cycle, comes an expansion, then another cycle of six and so on.  From what I understand of other games, for instance, Magic: The Gathering, the difference here is that the contents of each pack are not random, so you're not at risk of dropping some cash only to get duplicate or useless rare cards.  Instead, you can pretty much choose if you want to buy a pack or not with no real detriment to your game.

The player area, complete with three heroes and two allies.

The game contains four starter player decks, one each from the four spheres of influence in the game.  Each sphere has its own strengths and drawbacks; for instance, the Tactics sphere has cards that excel in combat and dealing damage to enemies, but struggle when it comes completing quests.  Ultimately, LotR is a deck building game, and the real meat of the game in the long term involves building a set of cards that complement the heroes you've chosen and your preferred style of play.  Each adventure and expansion pack increases the amount of player cards you can choose from and you'll find there are lots of ways to go about creating your own decks.  Another quirk of this model is that FFG can add different mechanics to the game without requiring extensive rule changes.  The first cycle of adventure packs add "Song" cards that fit seamlessly into the game.  Quite appropriate, as in the books, you can't read five straight pages without someone bursting into song - it's worse than Glee (ok, not really.)

The Staging area with one active Location, two Enemies and another Location

FFG have made some interesting choices in where and when they have set the game.  Obviously the game is set in Tolkien's Middle Earth, but the game takes place in interegnum between the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring novels.  As a result, you are not slavishly following the plot of any one book (with all the continuity problems of getting a "wrong" outcome,) but charting a different journey with different heroes through the same Middle Earth.

Ally, Event and Attachment cards from the Player deck.

And ultimately you are on a journey.  The base box gives you three quests; Passage Through Mirkwood, Journey Down The Anduin & Escape From Dol Guldur, and each can be played individually or as one large linked quest.  The adventure pack cycles follow the same pattern with a range of thematically linked scenarios.  The first adventure pack cycle, Shadows of Mirkwood, sees a group of heroes trying to track and capture Gollum, on the way fighting Trolls, helping the odd eagle and getting lost in some eerie ruins, all very familiar.

Three of the twelve heroes in the core box.

So what do you get in the box?  Well its an FFG game, so you get two big sheets of tokens, a well written rulebook (decent index and an excellent reference page) and 226 playing cards.  The cards are divided into three general catagories; quest cards, player cards and encounter cards.  The quest cards give you details of what the quest you are on actually involves, how to complete it and any special rules or effects that take place.  Player cards include the heroes you play the game with, allies who assist them, attachments like weapons and armour you can give them and event cards that help them or hinder their enemies.  The encounter cards consist of enemies (including grunts and some named enemies,) locations the heroes need to explore and treachery cards that hinder the heroes progress.

Enemy, Location and Treachery cards from the Encounter deck.

As I've come to expect from FFG, production value is pretty high, the cards have a nice finish to them (although I'll probably buy some protective sleves) and the tokens are the made from the usual FFG card.  The text is very clear to read and the design and layout of the different card types is pretty logical. A word or two has to go to the artwork used in LotR, all original artwork (I think) and all very appropriate and characterful.  Most player cards also have a sentance or quote from one of Tolkien's novels, it's a little thing, but they are all apt for their card and add just a little extra flavour to the game (especially if you read the full text every time you play the card!)  I love all these little touches littered throughout the game, you can tell that the designers not only know their Middle Earth, but are genuine Tolkien fans.

Three of the named Enemies from the core box.

There's very little in the game I feel able to criticise, which is pretty unusual.  If pushed, I could mention that the sphere of influence logo on the player cards is on the wrong side for a right hander, making sorting through the cards a little awkward.  The wording on a couple cards could be clearer too, but I believe the FAQ covers all the ones I've noticed. All in all, this is a great purchase and I'm really glad I opted for something a bit different.

Having played about a dozen games or so, I'm comfortable enough with the game mechanics to start to see potential combinations and, ugh, synergies (I hate that word.)

Next time, I'll go on to talk about the actual gameplay and then I'll try and find a way of posting up a report on a game.  In the meantime, FFG have made a video overview of the game, complete with "American Voiceover Guy" check it out here.