Weighing the Upsides: A LotR: Fate of the Fellowship Review

A co-op with a lot of great decisions that fairly drips with theme, it successfully escapes its past but maybe tries too hard in doing so.

I detest Pandemic. Detest. It. Oh, sure, back in the day, I tried it when it first came out and even enjoyed it for a while. There were exciting moments and occasional frustration when things didn't go our way, as any good co-op should have. But then, reality set in. Not only did I discover that it was essentially an active jigsaw puzzle but also, like all jigsaws, you could only do it and actually have fun a couple times. Every time after that, it was the same, old thing. This definitely has something to do with my general distaste for co-ops, but I've found that to be less of a concern in recent years, as designers have found a way to make it less about solving a puzzle and more about telling a story; the latter of which has always been my favorite type of game (e.g. more Ameritrash than mechanisms.) And I tried with Pandemic. After I got rid of my copy of the original, I tried a couple of the variations. There was even a moment just a few years ago when someone suggested playing Pandemic: Rome. I appreciated that there were variations within the scenarios and the game was more tied to history than the random (and mechanical) progression of diseases and I'll try anything Rome because Rome. But by turn 2, I just wanted it to be over. So, when I heard that someone had basically taken the Pandemic model and put an LotR game into it, I was completely disinterested. Not only have I played enough LotR games, but the concept of adapting it to Pandemic made me physically recoil. But then people started raving about it, including voices that I implicitly trust, like Charlie Theel. So, finally, I gave in and picked up a copy and, largely, they were right. The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship feels like it should be a pretty good game. But I'm not sure that it's everything that it attempts to be.

As noted, I'm big on story. From games to films to books, tell me a good story and I'll usually be along for the ride. It doesn't have to have brilliant mechanisms or great acting or elaborate use of language. If I'm interested in what you're saying and where you're going, I'll usually be able to overlook the other stuff that I might not find up to par. FotF is immersed in the most well-known fantasy epic of the modern era, so it's already a "good" story by many estimations. (I have my issues with it, but that's another article.) And, despite being based on the mechanical approach of Pandemic, it has enough sound design apart from that basic framework to make it genuinely appealing on both the gameplay and storytelling levels. First off, all of the characters are not only actual characters from LotR, but they also have more depth and gameplay than any of Pandemic's "roles." These aren't the faceless Scientist and Researcher. They are Aragorn and Gandalf and Legolas and Frodo. That, alone, brings in more than the original game provided. You have an identity that's not just Special Power X or Special Power Y. You're Boromir, first son of the Steward of Gondor. Along with that, each character brings multiple abilities that mesh in much more complex ways than the aforementioned roles used to. Several of them are similar (Four of them can Muster without having to spend Friendship, for example, but each of a different type of Free Peoples.) but all of them have unique talents that identify them as unique contributors that will change the way your game is played. A further enhancement of player interaction is that each player will be controlling two different characters. There usually won't be the common problem with the Pandemic system in that some roles were either too narrow generally or too narrow in many circumstances, such that some players' turns were left feeling empty because their special power wasn't so special in the situation that you found yourself. FotF doesn't completely escape that, but it generally feels better than older versions of the system.

Similarly, instead of having the one focus being "Stop the disease" or "Stop the barbarian hordes" or whatever, in FotF you have different objectives for each time you play. One of them will always be to destroy the One Ring because obvsly, but the other three are drawn from a deck of 24, so you shouldn't usually be running into the same combination of goals without a serious number of plays. All of them inspire vivid memories of points of the story of The Lord of the Rings, so there was some real care taken to implement these. The fact that one of the suggested "starter" tasks seems to be among the most difficult in the whole pile is unfortunate, but we'll get to that. Along those same lines, although the Shadow ("disease") deck follows the general model that we're all familiar with (Shadow troops gather in certain spots, expand from those spots, and then cards drawn from the player deck (The Skies Darken) shuffle those and put them back on top of the deck, to keep the pressure on those same spots/paths), there's a wrinkle added that makes it more interesting. A common tactic in Pandemic was to identify the loci of the initial outbreaks and simply station players near those points to act as breakwaters, thus neutering the threat of the disease until it could be exterminated. The Shadow deck veers around that by making each card have two halves, one of which is triggered by the back of the next card sitting on top of the deck. So, yes, one can be aware that there's a great threat coming from Umbar and Dol Guldur, but it may just be gathering there or it may suddenly strike out and threaten the surrounding lands with a larger force than expected. That system at least creates some question and, consequently, some story about how it needs to be handled.

Add on top of all of that the amazing production of the whole package, from the beautiful rendition of the map of Middle-Earth that makes the board to the excellent artwork on the Shadow cards to the OTT production of the Ringwraith minis to the absolute crowner: the dice tower that looks like the Barad-dûr. Not only is it an eye-catcher, it's also made out of punchboard and has only a tiny bit of disassembly to fit perfectly in the box along with everything else. It's just spectacular and well worth the purchase price and that goes without mentioning little things like how the basic setup is presented in the rulebook and also printed on the board for ease of startup (unlike, say, War of the Ring...) or that the characters are all color-coded so that their meeples (which are usually pretty easy to figure out) share the same color as their card. Everything about it is positive, except... well... It strikes me that it's just a little overtuned and subject to a couple basic strategies that are inescapable in their function. First off, I've played with groups of two, three, and four and, oddly for a co-op, 4 was by far the worst in terms of function or at least in terms of results. With more people, you're obviously drawing more Shadow cards and I wonder if that turned out as planned. There are, of course, more characters on the board to expend more actions against the greater pace and greater number of Shadow troops, but there are so many paths and threats to be assessed at any given moment that it seems like you need a very narrow set of circumstances to go your way in order to make everything work. Adding more players adds more randomness and, since you're already dealing with dice for both battles and the Searches for Frodo, more randomness is probably not the best thing to add, although it does add replayability that its original system model often lacks.

But, unlike Pandemic, I feel pretty safe in declaring this to be a "gamer's game" and not something you'd drag out for the fam at holiday gatherings unless they're serious LotR fans. I've had regular "gamerz" get paralyzed by the number of options such that the game outstays its welcome by a good hour and others who refuse to take risks because they're turned off by the presence of a few bad rolls of those dice (or the potential of them.) War of the Ring is a great game. Middle-Earth Quest is a great game. Part of the reason that both of those are great is their immersion in and ability to convey that fantasy classic which is the story of Frodo and the Ring. This game is no different in that respect. But it's also not one that I would put in front of non-LotR fans and expect them to really enjoy, even though I'm sufficiently self-aware to realize that it may just be my lingering detachment from the underlying system that may be driving that feeling. Part of it also may come from the fact that, like with that underlying system, there are essential tactics, such as making sure that the Eye of Sauron is never around Frodo when he's moving. What that ends up resulting in is that some players are taking trivial actions to enable that essential tactic to be successful, which is usually doing suicide attacks on much larger enemy forces. Remember that Mustering without needing to spend Friendship cards or tokens? Yeah. At least one of those characters will be engaging in that sandbagging quite a bit which, on the one hand, is just part of any player's turn, but also begins to feel like the daily chores, rather than exciting gameplay. Are trivial actions better than not having useful ones?

That variation in objectives, while an overwhelming positive, also comes into some question because of the wildly varying difficulty of said tasks. The three suggested to start (along with Destroy the One Ring, as always) are Favor of the Elves, Your Staff is Broken, Saruman!, and Challenging Sauron. The first is almost always casually achieved. The second swings broadly between an utter walk (no Isengard cards in the initial draw) to a significant hurdle (three or more Isengard cards in that initial draw.) The third has been the major stumbling block every time we've played and becomes even more challenging with fewer players, since it becomes that much more difficult for fewer characters to be able to Muster three different kinds of troops and bring them to one spot while still being engaged in the regular task of keeping the Eye distracted. I'm loathe to use the modern buzzword of "balance", but if one of the suggested tasks for new players is vastly easier at four players than at two, I think there may be an issue. Perhaps the answer for me and my groups is simply to not use that objective. Even regular gamer that I am (and most of the people I play with are, as well), maybe I and the six different people I've played with somehow have a blind spot on that aspect of the game. But I don't think so, despite being "reassured" by others on the forum of this very site that there are two kinds of people: those that think the game is hard and those that keep the Eye moving, implying that the first group are, of course, idiots for not being able to win the game, one supposes. Maybe that explains why the very well-presented rulebook threw us for a loop, as well, since the presentation of the Search mechanism in the book is significantly more confusing about how to count Nazgûl than it is on the excellent hint cards given to each player, which may have accounted for some of our problems in the first couple games we played.

In the mirror image of my feelings about Pandemic, I want to like this game. I really do. Its presentation, visual and mechanical, and overall feel are excellent. My kneejerk reaction is that this is a Z-Man triumph, like days of old. But the lingering aftertaste of not only its underlying model but what feels like an overtuned version of it doesn't encourage me to play again anytime soon. It only took us a couple games to "solve" Pandemic and a couple more to get tired of it. We've played Fate of the Fellowship four times now and have yet to win, which could be a mark in its favor for the challenge it presents. Or it could be that it's just not my/our type of game and I should move it on for something that I'd actually feel like playing on a regular basis. As much as I want to like it, at the moment I'm afraid that I should have listened to my early instincts and saved the money.