Of the few new board games I had time to sit and play at UK Games Expo 2025, Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship stands out as my most memorable experience. That’s partly because it’s a surprisingly story powered, well executed transition of the Pandemic system into Middle-earth that’ll give Tolkien fans extremely good eatin’ – and partly because I got to play it with Pandemic creator himself, Matt Leacock. There’s a lot to look forward to here, so read on for my first impressions, including a brief video clip showing the game and its proud papa.
Don’t get me wrong, Star Wars: Battle of Hoth also gave my tummy the fuzzies. But I’d pick Lord of the Rings over Star Wars in a ‘would you rather’ any day, and – even as a big fan of all the board games built on Pandemic’s high pressure, action economy driven co-op experience – this particular ‘Pandemic System’ creation excites me way more than any of the six that came before it. This teeny tiny video clip from my UK Games Expo playthrough gives a decent (if cockeyed) glimpse of the game’s components, as well as designer Matt Leacock explaining some of the rules.
The premise needs no introduction, really. The grand tale of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is about a handful of individuals outmaneuvering vast powers intent on killing them, and surviving a race against time and insurmountable odds, thanks to their unique abilities and heroic destinies.
Leacock isn’t the first to spot how perfect that is for an asymmetric board game, of course. Francesco Nepitello, Roberto Di Meglio, and Marco Maggi’s classic wargame War of the Ring did it in 2004, and remains to this day one of the best war board games ever made.
But that doesn’t stop a Pandemic spinoff set in Middle-earth from being an inspired idea – not just because it’s built on one of the best board games of all time, but because it plays in an hour and a half, compared to the two to three days (sorry, I mean hours) that a WotR playthrough will take you. So I came to UK Games Expo excited to try this one, and those feelings only increased when I saw the game’s luscious map, cards, and flying Nazgûl minis – and the friendly face of Pandemic’s rockstar designer Matt Leacock grinning up at me and pointing to a chair.
So, Fate of the Fellowship. If you’ve played Pandemic (and let’s face it, you have) you’ll recognize the bones of this cooperative, 1-5 player game. Each player controls two of 13 possible characters (the full Fellowship plus a few), each with its own unique abilities. On your turn, you’ll get to take up to four actions with one of their heroes, and one with the other. As ever, coordinating these carefully between all the players is vital for success.
Evil forces (Sauron’s this time, rather than diseases) are arrayed against you from the start, and will menace the Fellowship every single turn, gradually forcing down your shared ‘Hope’ tracker, which forces an instant loss if the Fellowship’s rising Despair drags it down to zero. Like OG Pandemic, collecting sets of certain cards is important, and you’ll often need to trade them between characters in the same board location, forcing you to plan out your movements.
Each turn, after taking your actions, you’ll you’ll draw cards from a deck that could be crucial resources and Events that’ll help you, or could be one of the inevitable ‘Skies Darken’ cards, which knock you back and permanently increase the threat level from Sauron’s forces – just as regular Pandemic’s Epidemic cards each take you one step closer to annihilation.
At the end of every turn, you’ll flip Shadow Cards from an ‘AI’ deck to determine where the Dark Lord’s followers move to – just like randomly spreading the diseases each turn in the original – and the higher that overall threat level gets, the more cards you’ll flip, accelerating the pace of your demise.
So far, so Pandemic – and even if it stopped there, as a mere reskin, it’d be worth it for Tolkien mega-fans at least – but it goes so much further. Publisher Z-Man Games proudly trumpets FotF as “Matt Leacock’s most mechanically-rich Pandemic System design to date”, and it’s not overstating the case.
Most importantly, on top of that solid foundation, FotF adds an Objective Cards system that means your victory conditions will be a bit different every time you play. Instead of one singular mission each time, your playthrough will always have three randomly selected extra objectives to complete before proceeding to the fixed endgame: Frodo and Sam reaching Mount Doom with five Ring symbols, and chucking the Precious in the fire.
In our demo game, for example, we had to assemble all our characters in Rivendell for the Council of Elrond (nominally simple, but remember, every action comes at the cost of another) and re-enact Aragorn’s last stand before the Black Gate by raising a big, varied army and getting it to Ithilien intact.
Knowing you have to reconstruct these familiar story beats while also guiding Frodo and Sam to Orodruin might sound stilted, but in my experience it was both flavorsome in itself, and a really neat way to tie together the story’s two intertwined paths: the Hobbits’ quest, and the wider War of the Ring. There are 24 of them in the box, too, including several that’ll take your game away from the canonical events of the story in interesting ways – something some hate, but I can’t wait to try.
Next, the Nine are abroad here, in a big way. Of the nine Nazgûl miniatures, four start the game in Mordor and the other five spread across Middle-earth – but from that point on, they will mercilessly hunt Frodo and the ring he carries.
They can (and must) be escaped, outmaneuvered, and occasionally, with difficulty, defeated in battle – something that’s easier if you’ve got Eowyn in play. But whatever you do about them, they add a wonderful sense of tangibility to the creeping dread and threat of Sauron that – just like the implacable spread of diseases in Pandemic – drives the game’s energy and tension.
Where the original feels like frantically building a boat out of beach flotsam while an inevitable, faceless tsunami approaches, this game feels – appropriately – like you’re being actively hunted, and must use every kind of stealth, distraction, and subterfuge to survive.
To whit: Frodo and Sam need to spend resources constantly in order to move secretly, or else trigger a Search: a roll of some Very Bad Dice, any of which could drive that critical Hope tracker down towards defeat. Every Shadow troop meeple and every Nazgûl present in young Baggins’ location when you make the roll makes it even worse. And every turn, the Shadow Cards have a good chance to send the Eye of Sauron marker to Frodo’s location, and/or send more Nazgûl directly to the Eye marker, stacking the odds against the halflings.
In short, almost all the enemy operations revolve around finding Frodo, burying him in Orcs and Ringwraiths, forcing repeated Search rolls, and bleeding out your hope – so the Frodo player must play deadly cat and mouse the whole game. It’s stressful, it’s a little complicated, and it’s absolutely perfect.
Oh, and it’s kind of a wargame too, did I mention? New armies of adorable, tiny orc meeples spawn and reinforce constantly from the Shadow cards, and tour the board on predetermined, colored circuits looking for the hobbitses.
So, while you’re desperately sneaking Frodo from safe haven to safe haven on the way to Mount Doom, your other characters will need to be mustering their own armies of Rohirrim, Gondorians, Elves, and Dwarves, taking out orc armies, capturing strongholds to turn them into safe Havens, and – more often than not – completing some of those victory objectives too.
Dice driven combats are basic, simple, and unobtrusive – exactly what’s needed in a game that already felt like it had more layers to delve into than Khazad-dûm. Honestly, there are lots more interrelated strategic wrinkles to explore and master here – way more than I got my head around in a single game in a sweaty convention hall, and way more than fit into my already stretched word count. The ever diligent Watch It Played has the full rules breakdown in the video below.
Suffice it to say: the first 30 minutes of my playthrough of Fate of the Fellowship had me bamboozled. I quickly started feeling that this game, however lore-rich and easy on the eye, was too bloated and multi-layered to function anywhere near as effectively as Pandemic’s original, well oiled machine.
From minute 31 to minute 90, however, things began to change. The extra layers gradually fell into place, I started to appreciate the concert of interlocking systems supporting its dual pillars – Frodo’s journey and the war that makes it possible – and my overall opinion did a 180. As always, I reserve judgement until I’m able to properly review the game – but based on my preview, I’m pretty sure that for my tastes, Fate of the Fellowship is even better than Pandemic.
Variable objective cards as well as variable character choices allow the game to tell more different stories, and aid replayability by changing not just your strategic toolkit, but the mission itself. The several moving parts around Sauron’s eye, the Nazgûl, Frodo, and the Searches make the system’s immutable core theme – survival – crunchier, scarier, and more personal. Playing more characters at once, and needing to pursue different but linked objectives with all of them, makes the challenge more interesting without bluntly ramping up the difficulty.
And, ultimately, all these things feed into a satisfying, arguably essential, component that’s lacking in many Lord of the Rings board games: a coherent ludonarrative that genuinely matches the books in both substance and feel. It’s a game about the weak triumphing over the strong through guile and dedication, where war is present and important, but only as a necessary supporting act. I love that, and I cannot wait to play it again when it comes out on August 31, 2025.
While we’re waiting, if you’re excited for this one too, come chat with us about it in the Wargamer Discord community. Lord of the Rings trivia competitions are encouraged, although games of riddles are banned (we know where those lead, don’t we).
Source: Wargamer
