The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship

I have a well-documented weakness for anything with Middle-earth stamped on the box, and an equally well-documented allergy to most licensed games that trade on the setting without doing anything interesting with it. This one earns the benefit of the doubt fast. Matt Leacock taking the Pandemic engine and reskinning the spreading infection as Sauron’s growing influence across the map is one of those design ideas that sounds almost too neat on paper and then actually works at the table.

I got mine to the table early through a prototype run, and what struck me first is how well the cooperative structure maps onto the source material without feeling like a reskin done for marketing reasons. You and your fellow players are racing the corruption spreading outward from Mordor the same way Pandemic racers race outbreaks, and the fellowship’s journey gives that abstract system an emotional throughline that the disease-control version never quite had. It’s Pandemic with somewhere to be, instead of Pandemic with nowhere to be.

The corpus of opinion on this one is still thin, it’s a new enough release that most of what’s out there is preorder hype rather than considered critique, so take my rating as an early read rather than a settled one. What I can say with confidence: this dodges the trap a lot of Tolkien games fall into, where the mythology becomes a wall between newcomers and the actual gameplay. You don’t need the appendices memorized to play this, the system carries the theme instead of demanding you already love the theme to enjoy the system, and for someone who’s sat out a few LOTR games over exactly that gatekeeping problem, that’s the thing that sold me. I want to see how it holds up past a first honeymoon run before I go higher than a four, but as debuts go this is a strong one.