Gimli is a good fighter, and even if you don’t have a sword to give him, you have a strong opening without needing to worry about drawing a one-cost minion on your first turn. You’re not out of luck.
“That’s something that was important to us. We wanted to reduce the concept of cards rotting in your hand in general. Within the tabletop game, each hero generates resources within their own pool. If you wanted to pay for a leadership card, you would have to use the resource from Aragorn. I couldn’t use a tactics resource to pay for a leadership ally. You just get three resources at the start of your turn in this version,” Walaszek said.
The two objectives on the board have numbers, too. The 6 under each equals the amount of Willpower you need to accomplish it. Running a hero with 2 Willpower pings off two, leaving you with four more before you accomplish it. In this map, we could resolve the objective in three turns with Aragorn alone, since he has 2 willpower.
But there’s the rub. Every time an enemy attacks, it exhausts your heroes and units, leaving them without an action. So a fast-acting foe could exhaust Aragorn before he even gets a chance to swing his 2 willpower at an objective. And in Middle-earth, Sauron always has the initiative.
One of the aspects of this living card game I appreciate is time — you don’t have a timer, so you can take as long as you need to make your decisions.
We deal with the first board of beasts and orcs and accomplish the objective of following the stream in Mirkwood to our next encounter, where Sauron’s forces kill us.
Shuffling it up
Our deck might need some help. Now, in a collectible card game, I could buy more packs in the hopes I could find new cards to make my deck better. But oftentimes, you get a bunch of commons and a rare or two, nothing special enough to add some shine to your Shinola. Here, you could end up adding some valor cards you bought with in-game currency, or a new deck with better cards, and know you have a better shot.
“That’s how we imagine people would play the game. In order to facilitate that, we have this feature here. Once I encounter cards—I believe it’s not integrated in this build here today, but once I encounter cards within Sauron’s deck, it starts to populate and show me what I’ve got. OK, there’s the [Goblin Sniper] that’s been giving me a lot of trouble. Maybe I can take some ranged characters that can pick them off on their own, or some way to deal with stealth, or something,” Walazsek said.
And in the tabletop version, you get to see all the cards in Sauron’s deck, giving you a chance to tailor your own to countering it. The feature Walazsek just mentioned was requested on a community stream showing off the game.
“We were like, you know what, that’s actually a really good idea. That’s something that people who play the tabletop—they definitely have access to looking through Sauron’s deck. But being that you only get it as you continue to play, it incentivizes you to go in blind once at least,” he said.
This is also part of the culture of tabletop gaming. When you teach somebody a game, you might show them your deck. I’ve done that with my own son: Here’s my deck and this is what it’s going to look like, here are the threats, but you don’t know what order they’re going to come in. It’s not just a nice quality of life thing. It keeps with the culture of tabletop.
“[And] that’s something else that is very important to us, something that honestly I think Early Access facilitates, too — making sure those communities stay close-knit. People on the stream have already started—I found the Google sheet they made of all the cards they’ve seen on stream that they’re doing for spoilers. That’s everywhere. People are already looking at it,” Walaszek said.
A test
Fantasy Flight Games carries some of the my favorite tabletop experiences, like the X-Wing Miniatures Game, a turn-based affair in which starfighters and other ships from Star Wars battle in space. And Fantasy Flight has released apps for some of their board games, like for Star Wars: Imperial Assault, a co-op tactics board game. The app handles one side, enabling either solo play or a group of friends taking on the A.I.
“The experience we were having was that the person who bought Imperial Assault bought it for themselves thinking, I can’t wait to play this with my friends. Then they sat down and every time they had to play the imperials, in order to make sure that their friends kept wanting to play,” Walaszek said.
And the community that’s Walaszek is building for The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game is asking about Fantasy Flight’s other franchises, if the video game side might be taking them on in the future.
“I would say the most vocal things I’ve heard [from the community]—people are really vocal about Netrunner, really vocal about the Arkham Horror card game, and they’re really vocal about X-Wing and some of the other miniatures games that we do,” he said.
It’s natural to think about what’s after The Lord of the Rings thanks to the board game boom. Boxes that once were just in hobby shops, like Settlers of Catan and even Boss Monster, are in Target. What does that say about the state of people who play board games, and what does that bode for Fantasy Flight in the video game realm?
“I think the community is widening. That’s true in video games too. There are—it’s not necessarily being seen as an insular thing, where only people who hang out in comic shops are welcome to play these games,” Walaszek said. “The expansion of it means that people are thinking about it, and there’s convergence there. Video game players are starting to play board games. Board game players are starting to play video games. Within our community, I’ve seen people I know from The Lord of the Rings card game Facebook group populating on Steam for the first time. That warms my heart. They’re asking questions like, I don’t know how to navigate my wishlist! People are helping them. And then there’s people in the Facebook group coming from video games who are like, oh, I saw the trailer for this, I’m interested in trying this game out. People are facilitating and welcoming that. I think as long as board game players continue to talk to one another like that, communicate like that, it doesn’t matter how complicated the games are going to be. It doesn’t matter what they look like or how you get your hands on them, whether it’s through Amazon or small retailers or Target.
“People are going to keep playing these games and the audience is going to continue to grow.”
Especially if those games are available on their PCs and tablets as well as their living room tables.