Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship review – SO much more than Pandemic with orcs

If you squint just a little, it’s not hard to see the bones of Pandemic poking out underneath Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship. Designer Matt Leacock has built upon the foundations of his old classic to create a fun and faithful Lord of the Rings adventure, which also happens to be one of the best cooperative board games I have ever played.

Anyone who’s experienced Pandemic (not to be confused with ‘the Pandemic’) will be familiar with the very basic structure of Fate of the Fellowship. Each turn, one player takes a series of actions to try and help the team stave off disaster. You then reveal cards from a deck which tells you how and where everything goes wrong. You all panic a little, and then it’s the next player’s turn. Rinse and repeat!

But in Fate of the Fellowship this core gameplay loop is transformed, and dare I say improved (I do. I do dare) by some major rules deviations, greater variety in the players’ goals, and lashings of sweet, sweet LotR theming, drizzled on top like a caramel sauce.

Some of that theming oozes in before you even start moving pieces around. The Fate of the Fellowship’s board is a work of art, a Middle Earth map that wouldn’t be out of place on any geek’s wall. It’s just covered in little details.

Then there’s that dark tower dice tower, a thing of beauty, though I am anxious I’m going to break it every time I pack it away in the box. Fate of the Fellowship comes with teardown instructions, incidentally, which is a good QoL feature – though I’ve found some components still have to be squished in to really fit.

One big upgrade over regular Pandemic is that each player controls two characters, choosing each turn which will take four actions and which will have just one. This is a great choice, as it means your team can spread a wide net and handle multiple threats and objectives at once. Relatively seldom will you spend an entire go just trying to move to the right place where the most important action is happening.

More importantly, it helps to fix an issue of one player feeling overpowered, while another with more situationally useful abilities is left all but twiddling their thumbs for turns. I imagine most groups will just let players pick out their favorite characters, but if you’re experienced with the game, and judicious about how you hand them out, you can ensure everyone has one piece that’ll always be useful, alongside another that’s perhaps a little more niche.

There’s a whopping thirteen possible characters to play, nice character illustrations printed on chunky wooden pieces, and there’s a good variety among them. Some are complicated, others very simple. Some are good at particular actions or areas of gameplay (or on particular parts of the map) others are more generically useful.

To unpack the gameplay, we’ll start with that devilish deck, as this is what drives much of the action, and all of the anguish. When you draw a ‘shadow card’, you’ll follow its instructions. Your aim is to hold back the forces of darkness. These orcs, goblins, and horrid humans all spawn in preexisting shadow locations, and then the shadow cards set them moving from place to place, marching ever closer to your friendly havens: Moria, Erebor, Helm’s Deep, and the Shire. If these locations are overrun and turned into shadow strongholds, you’ll lose a lot of Hope, and if this hope tracker ever hits zero, you lose the game.

Luckily, you can muster forces of your own to fight the bad guys. Rather than culling cubes, you actually have to create and shuttle tiny troop meeples to the right locations to battle the red menace in a simple dice combat system. Approach the tower! If you’re doing really well you can even take the fight to the enemy, clearing out a shadow stronghold like Moria or Isengard, and transforming it into a haven.

This means, you can end up with situations where a shadow card has no negative effect, either because you’ve already cleared all the troops along its line (it’s hard not to think of the colored arrows across the board as little orcish metro lines), or because you’ve captured a spawn point. That’s a great reward for clever play!

A simple but genius change is that each shadow card has two possible effects; the one that triggers is determined by the back of the card underneath it. Like Pandemic, Fate of the Fellowship has the equivalent of ‘Epidemics’, horrible ‘Skies Darken’ cards that (among other unpleasantness) make you restack the same shadow cards on top, so the same bad effects can trigger again. But because the card order will be different, there’s actually only a 50% chance you’ll get exactly the same event, making the actions of the enemy far less predictable, and less same-y.

All of this makes pushing back the bad guys more dynamic, involved, and purposeful than simple crisis management, but it’s still basic enough that it doesn’t overshadow the entire game. Winning the War of the Ring is not your objective here. The forces of darkness must be held at bay until the One Ring can be destroyed.

Plunging the ring into the fires of Mount Doom is always your final, game-winning objective, and the game does a good job of making the hobbit’s journey feel epic, and span its entire duration. While everyone else can move around at will, Sam & Frodo (who are one character, I should note, and someone must play them) have to burn a stealth resource when moving, or else roll a search die for each Nazgul in the area and each enemy troop in the destination.

About half of the faces on the search dice involve losing Hope, so while you can take a few minor, calculated risks, roll these dice often and you’ll lose. Other characters can aid you in the journey, distracting Nazgul or Sauron’s Eye, handing you stealth, or otherwise helping you move unseen.

There are nine of these Nazgul – of course – imposing black plastic pieces on clear stands, and they’re a neverending nuisance. A sizable chunk of the shadow deck’s effects involve moving the Eye of Sauron to Frodo’s region (if it’s already there you instantly lose Hope), and after that the Nazgul are drawn to it like moths to a flame. Battles move the eye to their region, a key point where these two major mechanics intersect.

Though destroying it is your final quest, you have to beat three others before you can deal with the ring. There are 24 quest cards in total, which means a ton of variety and replay value. Perhaps you need to build a particular set of resources (we’ve not touched on these but there are four of them, and they’re required for certain actions), or clear troops from a particular region. Perhaps you must take back Isengard, or bring elves and men to the Black Gate to draw out Mordor’s forces.

Each character also has an associated quest which you can choose to select, and these can be the most fun and thematic. Legolas just wants to shoot a bunch of bad guys with his special ability, but Gandalf actually disappears for a while if you do the Balrog quest, then comes back stronger when you beat the next one. Boromir’s quest gives you a useful boon, then he straight up dies and is replaced by another piece. Er, sorry if these are spoilers for anyone.

The whole game is packed with similarly flavorful moments that feel almost cinematic. It’s great fun to combine the game’s systems, cards, and character abilities to create your own incredible story moments, and your enjoyment will be heightened if you’re a fan of this world and its characters.

In one playthrough, the Nazgul surrounded the Shire much earlier than expected, and Gollum had to go and sneak the hobbits out. In another, Gimli managed to lure the Nazgul into the mountains, then Éowyn swooped in on an eagle (using an event card) to take out first one and then another. Bam. Bam. We lost that particular game, because we’d gotten too distracted by the Nazgul hunting, but I don’t think anyone cared.

A joyous note that I simply must include: if you use the eagles card to fly Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom, every single one of the Nazgul follow you and then you roll a horrifying, almost definitely game-losing search. So that settles an age-old debate!

There are very few things I dislike here, in all honesty. If you hate the idea that you could lose through bad luck you might not enjoy all the dice rolls and card turning. But the strategy is in positioning things so these dice land in your favor, or so when disaster inevitably strikes, it doesn’t finish you off. For certain characters, your early actions can be constrained by bad draws, but it’s far less of an issue here than in Pandemic.

While the game looks great and the production value is high, I have minor gripes about some of the components. For instance, the meeples are tiny and fiddly enough that I kind of wish they had just stuck with cubes, and although the Nazgul are glorious, they come off their stands easily, and can be hard to fit onto the board without obscuring detail.

It’s also worth noting that there’s a lot of set up to do. Five illustrated pages of the rulebook are entirely dedicated to this step in fact, so you probably want to get the board ready before your players arrive. Please. At least make a start.

These are small concerns, though, and easily ignored. Overall, Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship is far more than a rather complicated Pandemic. It doesn’t just add more good systems on top, it improves upon the old formula in numerous ways, adding more variety and giving you greater control.

The fact that a game about fighting diseases in the modern day was turned into a Lord of the Rings board game and yet it still feels like such a perfect fit, is a testament to what a labor of love Fate of the Fellowship clearly was. A lot of thought went into packing it with evocative systems and abilities, and it has paid off tremendously.

Source: Wargamer