Southern Bread

Me and a friend have been playing the Lord of the Rings TCG(Trading Card Game) for a few years now and it’s a great game. If you are or were a fan of TCG’s or CCG’s you should really check it out. It’s different from most TCG’s because it’s not purely a head-to-head battle type game where you both lay down a foe and then duke it out. It’s more like a board game with cards. Each player has a token that represents them as they go through the game. As the game progresses, your token moves down what is called the “site path” or “adventure path”. That’s just a sequence of “site” cards that are revealed with each progressive turn. The first player to make it through site #9 without having their Frodo card killed wins.

Here is the board layout:

You can see the adventure path on the left side. Each player has a fellowship that includes one copy of Frodo bearing a One Ring card and up to 9 other companion cards. The object is to get your fellowship down the adventure path all the way to site 9 without Frodo being killed. When the game starts, whoever goes first is the “free-peoples” player, and it’s up to them to get their fellowship down the path. When their turn is over, it becomes the other persons turn to move their fellowship. Whoever is not currently the free-peoples player, is playing as the enemy. It’s up to them to play enemy(or “shadow”) cards to slow down or kill the free-peoples player’s fellowship cards.

Here is an example of a free-peoples card and a shadow card:

The main mechanic in the game that makes it all work is this notion of “twilight points”. For almost every action the fellowship performs, the free-peoples player has to put in a number of twilight tokens into the twilight pool. The shadow player then takes out twilight tokens to fund his actions. In other words, the more actions the free-peoples player takes, the more ammo the enemy has to stop him. It’s a great game mechanic, and it matches the actual Lord of the Rings story so well. The smaller the fellowship got and the less noise they made, it became harder for Sauron to find and fight them.

There is also an online version of the game that makes it easier to hook up with other players for a quick match. All in all, if you are into card games or MMORPG’s, you should really check it out.