The Lord of the Rings: Shadows

Overall score:

The Lord of the Rings CCG is in a strange state right now: the Tower Block convinced the world that it was a genuinely great game with a lot of variety, and then the first two sets of the King Block followed up with some fantastic cards and concepts. After that, though, interest began to wane—the third set of the King Block focused more on the movie’s falling action than on its exciting battles, which resulted in cards that nobody had a lot of interest in. The set after that, called Reflections, offered a couple of interesting ideas (such as new ringbearers), but very little else. Possibly because of two less-then spectacular sets, or possibly because the anticipation created by the movies has ended, or possibly because the online version of the game has drawn people away from the real version, very few people are playing the game at all these days. Go to a game store looking for opponents and you’re liable to get nothing but the confused question: “You still play Lord of the Rings?”

Despite many people’s assumption that the game would simply end after Return of the King, Decipher has always planned to support the game through at least three more blocks, over the course of three more years. Their answer to the waning interest has been to overhaul many aspects of the game and relaunch it with an improved system. With all three movies out and over ten hours of film to take ideas and images from, their new sets have more freedom and more possibilities than ever before, so we can hope for great things. Their first set of the new era, Shadows, takes a few right steps, a few weird steps, and one incredible leap: I’ve complained about it for ten sets now, and they’ve finally made the site path work.

The site path has always been the most restrictive element of the LotR game engine: you pick nine sites, numbered one through nine, and place them in an adventure deck that sits to the side. If you go first you play your own site one, but each time you move to a new site your opponent plays his version of the next site in line. The trouble is, your adventure deck is set and unchangeable, so there’s no strategy involved in playing sites—only in building your adventure deck. When your opponent moves to site five you only have one site five to play on him, regardless of how the board is set up and whether or not that site will give you an advantage in that situation. The sites are also a little too restrictive on allies, virtually nullifying most of them as each new block rotated in, and it made some types of strategies very difficult to play—the Watcher in the Water, for example, had enough cards to support a whole deck concept, but he could only be played at a Marsh and there was only one Marsh (maybe two) available in the first several sets.

The new site path makes the simple change of removing all site numbers, thus allowing you to play any site at any point in the game. While this doesn’t make quite as much thematic sense (you can, for example, start in Helm’s Deep and travel to the Prancing Pony, which is a strange way to go if you want to destroy the One Ring), it opens up a huge amount of strategic options. Every time you lay down a site you have the freedom to pick and choose which one will help you—or hurt your opponent—the most at that moment. Characters that let you play or replace sites become far more useful, and going first, while still a good idea, becomes a much bigger risk. Best of all, a numberless site path that spans all of Middle Earth will completely avoid the problem of block rotation—all the sites in Shadows will continue to be playable nine sets from now, allowing the game to expand and helping to keep allies potent for more than one or two sets.

There are other aspects of the new site path that don’t work very well. The old numbered system allowed for an easy way to add pressure and danger the further the game progressed—site nine gives the shadow players a lot more twilight tokens (to play monsters with) than site two does. The old site path also clearly showed which sites were sanctuaries and which minions were roaming. All of those elements, once nice and explicit, are now replaced by assumption, memory, and mathematical calculation. The game is still playable, but much harder for beginners to learn; a simple playmat stuffed into the starter decks could have helped solve this problem, but no such luck. It’s too bad that Decipher didn’t try a little harder to smooth out these problems before releasing the set, especially if they’re trying to revive the game by attracting new players.

The other major innovation in the game is to give every character a Resistance number. Resistance is the little black circle on the bottom of Frodo’s card—he starts with ten, but each burden pushes him lower and lower, and when he gets to zero he becomes corrupted by the ring. Now that all characters have resistance (replacing the old signets, which weren’t especially interesting anyway), burdens on Frodo reduce the Resistance of your entire party; this is a nice way of illustrating the fear, worry, weariness, and temptation that helped break up the Fellowship in the first place. Only the ringbearer becomes corrupted at zero, but many of the new game effects and minions use resistance for different things, and an overburdened party will have a lot more trouble than a fresh one. There have always been a handful of cards that used burdens for one thing or another, but they’ve still been primarily an all-or-nothing proposition—you either got ten and corrupted the ringbearer, or you got 0 through 9 and nothing happened. Under the new system every burden is important, and even simple things like bidding for turn order become more dangerous and more interesting than before. Is it worth going first if it gives half your enemies strength bonuses?

The new Resistance rule, like the new site path, requires a bit of wiggling to make it work. All past characters without a Resistance number are assumed to have a resistance of six, so you can still play old cards with the new ones. Ironically, this makes Sam uncharacteristically weak since his older versions all had a Resistance of five. That is balanced out by the fact that the new versions of Sam, with much higher resistance, don’t have the automatic replacement ability of taking the ring when Frodo dies.

The third major change to the game is that the dozen or so minion cultures have been chopped up and recombined into four basic groups (five, counting Gollum). For example, Sauron Orcs, Moria Orcs, Mordor Orcs and Isengard Orcs were all formerly part of separate cultures, and are now compressed into a single culture called, simply, Orcs. The other three groups are Evil Men, Wraiths, and Uruk-Hai. Each new culture also gets a new symbol, proudly displayed and ridiculously bad. The symbol for Evil Men is so poorly done it makes me embarrassed to look at it, and I didn’t even make it. Contrasted with the existing symbols the new ones are abysmally bad, which is too bad because art direction is usually an area where Decipher shines.

Artistic issues aside, the new cultures are awkward because they don’t combine well with older cards—a Shadows only game won’t have to worry about it, but an Open game will have trouble mixing minions. Decipher’s system of “spotting” allows you to play more powerful cards only if you can spot certain prerequisites first, and the majority of these want you to spot culture symbols. Older cards designed to be used with Moria Orcs, for example, are incompatible with the current Moria Orcs because they have different culture symbols. Some cards actually name a race instead of a symbol, so they can still be used—and the Ringwraith symbol hasn’t changed for the new Wraith culture, so that will still work too—but a lot of cards, new and old, are less usable because of the shift in cultures.

I imagine that they did this on purpose, as a way of “resetting” the environment and allowing them to design new cards without worrying too much about unwanted interactions with old cards. That’s understandable, but cutting the number of cultures so drastically seems like taking the idea too far. It’s kind of nice, in a way, that the many different strategies of the Orc subcultures can now be used together in new ways—but too much blending and the subcultures lose their flavor. How can you design Orcs freely when you know that any Orc you make has access to swarm tactics that can power it out for cheap? It will be difficult to give each subculture its own distinct style of play, but they’ve done similar things before (with Raiders, for example), so we’ll have to wait and see what future sets produce. For now, the limited cultures have very few options to work with.

Still—when you’re talking about four different shadow cultures, with Gollum as back-up, even one or two main focuses of each gives you a lot of deckbuilding room. All of the fellowhip cultures are back as well (with the exception of Ents), and each gets a nice selection of characters to make sure that you can build your fellowship however you want.

The changes to the basic game have the potential to be great; the new site path rules, by themselves, make me more excited to play than I’ve been in a long time. I almost wish that they’d taken it a step further, though—if everyone has resistance, just remove the restriction that Frodo has to be the ringbearer, and let people go crazy. Or why not remove the ring altogether, and make it a simple game of adventuring through Middle Earth? If they’ve finally removed the limit of the linear site path, why not remove the last vestige of the storyline and use the setting to its full potential? I don’t know how such a thing would work, but it would be nice to see.

If you used to play Lord of the Rings and drifted away (as many seem to have done), Shadows is a great time to get back in. If you’re looking for a new game to play, Shadows has a stiff learning curve but a lot of potential—it's fun, it's well-supported, and thanks to the new site path it has more strategy than ever.

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Written by Fellfrosch on December 09th, 2004