The playable races are Elf, Man and Hobbit and based on which you choose, you will be able to play as either a Champion, Guardian, Minstrel, Captain, Burglar, Hunter or Lore-Master. There is also monster-play available once you reach level 10. The lore-master and minstrel classes are the closest thing to magic users you will find in the game. This may seem odd for an RPG, but the books never had much magic in them, so it’s appropriate to use it only sparingly in the game as well. The initial level cap will be 50. This is certain to be raised with future expansion packs though. The first expansion has already been announced, so it appears that all the pre-release hype has been encouraging enough to the developers to push on with more content.

As far as gameplay goes, it has all the things you would expect from a modern MMORPG. Questing, grinding, chat, auction system, emotes, crafting, etc. It also has a vast deed system that will reward you with new skills and traits based on various deeds you complete during routine play. For example, you will be rewarded with the title of “Orc-Hewer”, a skill and XP for killing a certain number of orcs in the Lone-Lands part of the map. That helps to keep grinding from being so tedious. I’ll posts some pictures later. For now, just go pick up a copy. I promise you’ll like it.

The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar

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.

Here is a pic: