Went to Cheryl and Mike's last night for gaming/ nominal celebration of Chinese New Year (with Indian food and snacks of many nations)/ general merriment & beer. We played Settlers (I won!) and Lord of the Rings (we all lost!). It was our first time playing LotR, and I did a little searching after the fact to see what other players thought of the game mechanics, difficulty level, and recommended strategies.
(Along the way, I found Defective Yeti's rave for Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, a two-player game from Fantasy Flight Games that:
[…] has a third of the rules of the bigger game, plays in a fraction of the time and sells for half the price. But the two games do share one thing in common: they are both amongst the best in my collection. […]So that sounds like a potential gift idea for next year.)
Due to link rot, it seems that the Yeti's review for the original LotR game is only available as a Google cache, but it's recommended reading nonetheless. He confirmed that the game is really hard (they had to play it five times before they won), but that it is possible to win. His obvious love of the game convinced me that I need to try it at least a few more times before writing it off completely.
Posted by rv at February 5, 2006 03:41 PM to gameLoTR game is very good. I've probably played it ten or so times. We won maybe 30% of the time. It's been a long time, so I don't remember the strategies we ended up using most often. One key though, is to cooperate; at least until the last board. (If you are a fully cooperative group, the game is much easier. My group needed to have an ultimate winner...)
I agree with Yeti's review's points also.
Posted by: poz at February 6, 2006 08:17 PMOur group (Cheryl, Mike, chrism, me) was, for the most part, very cooperative. Everyone "took one for the team" at one point or another, and there was definitely a sense of wanting to keep the great Evil from overtaking the world. (The kids watched us as we played, and there was much consternation and shouting if we advanced even one square toward the dark. "You're becoming evil!")
At one point (in Helm's Deep), Mike opted not to advance along the track that would have enabled me to end the scenario on my turn. (He was running very low on cards and wanted to draw 2 instead.) In retrospect, this may have been the point at which things started to go pear-shaped. Several sundial cards got flipped, and those events pretty much kicked the bejeezus out of us.
We pressed on and made it as far as Shelob's Lair, where I was the first to be eliminated. We did everything that we could to keep our ringbearer (Sam) alive.
Afterward, upon re-reading the rules, we realized that the ringbearer is supposed to get 2 cards upon receiving the ring. So those cards might have helped us to make a difference too, since I was ringbearer at one point, and Cheryl was at the endgame. I don't know what game you're playing, but…
Posted by: rv at February 6, 2006 10:21 PM