War of the Ring: The Card Game

I've played several games 2v2. I've also played solo with the Against the Shadow expansion. War of the Ring Board game is one of my all-time favorites and the card game doesn't dissappoint. Very tight and challenging play with some luck involved. Replayability is great with each game being very different even with various player counts. Theme is spot-on, components are top-notch and card art is fantastic.

We've never played the original War of the Ring, but this has quickly become one of our favorites.

A great new edition of War of the Ring that is easier to get to the table.

I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with Ares games and their lord of the rings adaptations. I felt very lukewarm towards hunt for the ring and battle of 5 armies, and will probably never touch them again, but war of the ring the board game is my favorite board game of all time. It captures the epic, sweeping scale of the books and movies and really engrossed me and my friends and we still play it regularly. I was a bit skeptical when I heard about war of the ring the card game, because I wasn't sure there was anything to improve on war of the ring. In my opinion it was very near perfect. I'm happy to say that war of the ring the card game stands tall on its own, and very much sets itself apart from the board game. To be clear, it shares very little with the board game besides the theme and the name. It is far simpler to teach and to learn, and once you've played it can be MUCH quicker to set up and play through. The mechanics are interesting, especially the way you have to cycle a card to play a card (this leads to some agonizing and tremendously fun decision making). My favorite aspect of the game however is the way it makes use of different player counts. War of the ring the board game is an incredible two player game that CAN be played with 3 or 4 players, but for a noticeably less fun experience in my opinion. War of the ring the card game is very fun with two players, and absolutely SHINES with four players! It may have become our go to four player game at this point (I have yet to try it at three players but I imagine it will also be quite good). There is no deck building, which is a good thing for me but may be a downside for others. There are, however, scenarios that make use of different combinations of cards to speed up and change gameplay around. This is WONDERFUL for keeping things fresh and only needing a core set and no expansions. One final thing which I really like but others may not, is this game uses a fair bit of luck with its card draws. There is always ample room for strategy in my experience, but there is enough luck involved that a more skilled player is not always guaranteed to win, and this is something I really enjoy and keeps repeated playthroughs with the same group fun and exciting for my friends and I. I already have the upcoming solo/coop expansion preordered and I'm very excited for it! Definitely a game I recommend!

I love the artwork. It's the same artwork you'll see in other games that use LOTR theme. The game isn't difficult to play, however you can end up with enough cards in your reserve (play area) that you may easily miss an effect or action that could greatly benefit you. The cards are straight forward and easy to understand, but you are going to find yourself making a lot of nail-biting decisions since in order to play a card, you basically have to discard a card. There are plenty of game effects that may make you remove a card from play or from your hand, which is going to leave you with very few cards to work with and you'll feel like you don't have enough cards on any given turn. Even though there are plenty of cards for each players' deck, it doesn't actually feel like a lot of cards. Especially since some cards synergize with another card that only appears once in the deck, so once it's been removed (which can happen easily), then your initial card's effect will pretty much be useless. So you're definitely going to get this feeling of sacrificing for the greater good of your faction. It's definitely fun and two hours flew by fast for my session. I like how the theme has been integrated with the cards' effects and you can easily see those effects cascade in a way that will cause more than one battleground appear or more characters appear, and that's such a good feeling. This is a good game, definitely an alternative to setting out a bunch of minis from its bigger game version, but if you want to feel cards in your hand and see the battle unfold quicker and see those characters in your hands being controlled right away, this card game will suffice. It'll scratch your itch if you want a compact war game.

This is the card game version of the much larger board game, and as such retains the feeling of the original while changing up the mechanics quite a lot. It is fairly easy to learn but hard to master, and comes with a 2 vs. 2 co-op mode standard, something that was not in the original game.