Duelling with Destiny
When Peter Jackson announced the Lord of the Rings films it was seen as a Herculean task. It was called impossible. Folk thought it ludicrous to even try. How can you capture the fantastical tales of Tolkien in such a limited format as a film? Of course Jackson made compromises. There is no way to be 100% faithful to the books, and I would argue that no adaptation should try. That is not the job of adaptation. The job of adaption is to interpret and represent those stories as you see them. The latest interpreation of those tales comes from Bruno Cathala and Antoine Bauza in Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth.
Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth is a bit of a mouthful of a title so let’s abbreviate it to LotR Duel for the rest of this review. The game builds on the mechanisms that Bauza and Cathala explored in 7 Wonders Duel where they distilled the drafting of 7 wonders into a two player experience. The phenomenal art is by Vincent Dutrait who brings a real sense of the scale of the stories and the personalities of the sides to the illustrations.
As you might expect one player takes on the role of the Fellowship and the other that of Sauron. Your objective is to either get the Ring to Mount Doom/ capture the ring bear, conquer middle earth, or gather the support of the 6 races represented in the game.
All of this is achieved through a pseudo-drafting mechanism that is lifted directly from 7 Wonders Duel. A pattern of cards is dealt out, a different shape for each of the 3 rounds. The initial round is a simple pyramid starting with 2 face up cards at the summit, then 3 face down, 4 face up, 5 down, 6 up. These rows are overlaid so that when you take a card from one you’ll give access to others above. Every turn you’ll be taking a card from these patterns, well most turns.
The cards move you towards the 3 objectives or give you the resources to access bigger and better options later. Some cards have a skill requirement which costs you a coin for each one you don’t have in your tableau. Of course some cards give you money, others give you skills. In a pinch you can ditch a card from the display to fill your coffers. These are the important but mundane choices.
Green cards represent the races of Middle Earth. Taking them not only moves you towards a victory condition, but can also gain you extra powers along the way. Bring together two of the same race and you get to draft a couple of powers from that faction and choose one. Gather three different races and once per game you can draft from each of those factions and choose one. Each race’s powers are spelt out on one of the cheat sheets for the game. This allows you to go in with eyes open as the options you are likely to get. Importantly you reveal these powers when drafting so both players can see them. When you are done they go back on top of their stacks giving everyone information they didn’t have before.
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Red cards have you battling over the regions of middle earth to establish a troop presence in each. Manage all 7 and you win the game. Battles are simple abstractions. If you place a troop where an enemy is present both your troop and one of the enemies are removed from the region. This gives each region the feeling of a tug of war. Even if you do establish a dominating force in one region, all is not lost for your opponent.
Instead of taking a card from the pattern you can take a landmark tile. These have high skill requirements, cost you money as you build more of them, but give you access to powers and allow you to build fortresses. A fortress counts as presence for you in that region and they are very hard to remove. Taking the landmark tiles at the right moment can threaten dominance, boost your powers, and temporarily prevent you from taking a card from the pattern this turn. In a nice piece of theming the only race power that can take down a Fortress comes from the Ents.
The other way to eliminate fortresses is the Quest for the Ring. This brings us to your final objective, and one of my favourite components in a board game. You assemble a Quest for the Ring track that is a long cardboard piece with a clear plastic slide rule on top. In the middle of this plastic ruler are Sam and Frodo depicted just leaving the Shire on their journey. As the fellowship take blue cards the hobbits race towards Mount Doom. Of course they are not alone. At the left of the track a Ring Wraith in pursuit is shown. This is on a separate transparent tile that can move along the inner part of the slide rule. As the Sauron player takes blue cards, they narrow the distance between the hobbits and their pursuers.
The really clever bit of this component is that as the hobbits move the wraith always stays the same distance behind. The distance between them never increases, it can only decrease. It makes you feel constantly under pressure as the Fellowship. Every step towards the hobbits as Sauron feels like a true threat.
The Quest and the conquering of Middle Earth feel like the most direct ways to win, and I suspect most games will come down to those. The tug of war for each region extends between these aspects: they distract from each other. Try and rush the quest and you could lose the war. Turn to warmongering, and the quest could fail. Balancing these two really feels like you are reinterpreting the story as you choose how to balance your priorities.
The third victory condition, bringing together the races, feels almost impossible. The Ents and Wizards, 2 of the factions you need, only exist in the third set of cards and you may not even have them in the selection available to you.
The game’s tie breaker if none of the victory conditions are met is control of the regions. This makes the war a more significant component of the game than the other two. The cards also get more war focused as you advance through the rounds. Purple cards appear in round 3, allowing you to start moving troops around the map. Soldiers on both sides pour from their strongholds, wrestling control from their enemies.
LotR Duel feels like an evolution of the systems in 7 Wonders Duel. It takes those ideas and mixes in one of the most famous stories in the world. The result is a well baked game that captures the feel of the story without fussing over the minutiae. To manage that in a game that really only takes about 30 minutes is nothing short of miraculous.
