Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth

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Hello All!

To kick off our Board Game Blogs Page I thought I'd create a post one of my recent game nights: Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth. This is one of my favourite games; if you haven't tried it, consider it to be similar to Mansions of Madness but without the dice and playing through a campaign instead of individual scenarios (app required).

How does the game play?

Journeys in Middle-Earth a 1-5 player cooperative game set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Characters can take two actions in a turn to either, move, interact or attack, with the latter two options the players will input into the app which then provides instructions and story driven elements.

The narrative is written in a clever way that can be suggestive of which of the six attributes may be needed, for example, a search token on the board will suggest by climbing a tree that the party can get a better view of the landscape. Out of the six, typically this would be agility (but not always!). The app will ask you to test by turning over cards from you deck looking for success symbols, or leaf symbols that can be converted using inspiration tokens, then the players would select either pass or fail if a number is required, or to input the number of successes if asked for. The app will then apply the narrative according to the results.

While the app does a lot of the in-game bookkeeping, at the end of each chapter lore and experience can be spent to upgrade character items and buy new cards for your decks, sometimes there are multiple options but once chosen a simple click in the app registers the choices made.

Campaigns & Replay-ability

Each chapter of a campaign provides choice and results that will differ if players chose to play again, while the story will ultimately be the same, the game provide a large variety of characters that can choose different items and roles within the party. The base game comes with one campaign and currently has 5 others available to play which are dependent on owning expansions and DLC content, the length of campaigns can vary from 8-15 chapters some of which is dependent of choices made within the game.

Components

The game components meet Fantasy Flight typical high standards, well sculpted miniatures, good quality artwork on the cards and thick cardboard tiles and tokens. Over time though, I've replaced the cardboard tokens with 3-D printed pieces and painted them and the original miniatures.

Our Game Night

Without giving too many spoilers, the scenario we played is from the Poison Promise campaign (DLC required) creating the setting of the Entwash Inn, this is played on a battle map where our 5 person party have been tasked with searching for clues as to the disappearance of the owner and local patrons. On this occasion Gimli, Dis, Elena, Arwen & Calaminth Took were unsuccessful despite defeating all of the enemies but ran out of time on the threat counter to complete our final objective. However, we are now well kitted out for future chapters!

If you have any questions or if you've already played this game share with us in the comments!

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