Certain themes are dime-a-dozen in board games. Trains. Space. Dune (which I guess also counts as Space). The Lord of the Rings also has a place on that list, especially in recent years. It feels like Asmodee and its subsidiaries have pumped out a new journey through Middle-earth every month of the 2020s.
And guess what? It’s not done yet. This year’s Gen Con showed off multiple upcoming Lord of the Rings board games, each finding different ways to chuck a ring into a volcano. For me, the most unique by far was The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict.
Releasing in November 2026, this is Office Dog’s next Middle-earth adventure. After it published the absolute slammer that is The Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking Game, my hopes were high. Now I’ve demoed Circle of Conflict myself, my hopes are even higher.
This might be the first Lord of the Rings board game where you play as both the Free Peoples and the Shadow. Your Free Peoples battle the Shadow of the opponent on your left, while your Shadow tackles the Free Peoples of the player on your right. This is, after all, a Circle of Conflict.
This mishmash of priorities gives you four possible ways to win. Your Free Peoples want to get the Ring to Mordor by moving the Fellowship across its map. Meanwhile, the Shadow can win by corrupting the Fellowship completely before this happens. Either side can also win by besting their enemy in two battles.
Already, there are a lot of crunchy moving pieces to chew on. Your web of choices gets even broader when you look at how these wins are achieved.
Circle of Conflict is a roll-and-write. This is a genre I usually associate with simple, solitary, soothing gameplay. Circle of Conflict is none of these things. Instead, it’s tense and tactical, with huge diversity in decisions.
Each round begins with the ‘roll’ part of roll-and-write. Two white dice are rolled, and all players must pick one to assign to their Free Peoples and one for their Shadow. The icons on the dice decide what symbols you can mark on the respective halves of your board.
Before you get drawing, though, a little Smeagol meeple (a Smeaple?) might move around a track. Rolling rings sets him off, and when he passes certain thresholds, players get to add resources to one of their teams. These are ‘Hunt’ or ‘Resolve’.
After that tricksy little segment, players mark their newly-acquired resource icons and decide what public and secret actions they’ll take. The main secret action you’ll take is for your Free Peoples, and it’s Move the Fellowship. Spend Resolve by erasing it from your board, and you can mark a new location on your board’s leftmost map of Middle-Earth. There are several routes you can take to get the Ring to Mordor, but choose carefully – because the hunt is on.
Hunting the Fellowship is a public action that’s unique to the Shadow. You spend Hunt to activate it, and the number of Hunt erased must equal the value of a location on your map. This is the location that you’ll declare as your target – the one you think your opponent’s Fellowship is currently hiding at.
Guess incorrectly, and your opponent must tell you how many spaces away (by the shortest route) their Fellowship is. Guess right, and you can spend additional Hunt to erase that much Resolve from your opponent’s board. If their Resolve is already at zero, you mark two spaces on your Corruption track.
Here lies the push-and-pull part of Circle of Conflict. You’re watching your opponents like a hawk, trying to zone in on their Fellowship while concealing your own. Racing to Mount Doom (to take the ‘Destroy the Ring’ action and win) is no good if someone guesses that you took the shortest, most obvious path. But maybe a double-bluff will win you the day? Or maybe Corruption is the more efficient route.
That’s just half of the game’s strategy. The rest lies in your remaining public actions, which are shared by both sides.
Firstly, you can Activate a Nation when you’ve filled in enough squares on its track. This unlocks their die, which is rolled in future rounds, with its resources available only to those who activated said nation. Advance that same track even further, and you can Motivate a Nation to gain double value from the icons on its die.
Activating and motivating nations also gives you immediate resources to spend, which can be used to advance character tracks or muster certain troops. Characters with complete tracks can lend a hand in battles through actions (or reactions), but they have uses elsewhere too. Gandalf, for example, makes your Fellowship harder to detect and corrupt.
As for Mustering, this is a public action you’ll want to do plenty of. Once a troop’s track is filled, you can take the Muster action to add to your army strength. Army strength is how you win one of those two crucial battles.
To battle, you’ll take the March action, declaring your intended battlefield. This must be done three times, with an actual fight taking place once the third March track space is marked. Your battle is worth a base one victory point, unless you previously took the Commitment action to raise its value to two or three VP.
The player that takes the March action is the attacker, and the Defender gets a +3 bonus to their army strength straight away. That strength is mainly determined by your mustered forces, plus any character actions you wish to take during battle.
Fight two battles, and the game’s winner is whoever has the most victory points. Note that you also get end-game points for every 10 army strength you have in a battle space, even if it is never resolved.
With only two shots at victory, battles are a cautious, calculated thing. Your decisions are made even more impactful by all those tracks you’re marking on your player board. While some resources can be spent and regained at will, your most powerful actions are single-use. Knowing when to deploy them to clinch the win is crucial – and challenging.
Circle of Conflict is one of those games I’ll need repeat plays to fully master. For now, all I’ll say is this: I’m yet to feel fatigued by Lord of the Rings board games. This timeless story keeps managing to be interesting on the tabletop.
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Source: Wargamer
