This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: War of the Ring – Second Edition
Designer: Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi & Francesco Nepitello
Year: 2011
Country: Italy
Publisher: Ares Games
War of the Ring is a big, sprawling two-player strategy game in which one player controls the Free Peoples and the other the Shadow Armies. It seeks to explore the story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and not just the possibilities for strategy play inherent in Middle-Earth.
The game operates on two levels. Most of the big board is occupied by the map of Middle-Earth, broken down into various regions, and populated by the dozens of miniatures depicting the various armies of the elves and the dwarves, of Isengard and Sauron. You can move troops, vanquish enemy forces and conquer strongholds.
Beyond this, there’s also the Fellowship of the Ring and its journey to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring. As Sauron searches for the ringbearers, they try to make it to their destination without succumbing to corruption.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the game is that it’s asymmetrical. The play experience of the Free Peoples and the Shadow Armies is very different, to the degree that I sometimes felt that we were playing different games. This felt very thematically appropriate as the viewpoint of Sauron and the Free Peoples are indeed radically at odds with each other.
I played the Shadow Armies and I was more focused on the strategic side of the game, moving around troops and taking advantage of my superior numbers. I had more action dice at my disposal, being able to simply do more each turn, as befits the vast reach of Sauron.
In our game, the Free Peoples player put all his energies into the journey of the Fellowship of the Ring, playing the strategy side of the game purely defensively. This led to victory although for much of the game the armies at my control seemed overwhelming.
The Lord of the Rings theme was present very strongly. I managed to capture Minas Tirinth and burn the Shire, and both accomplishments felt like they meant something because I had the context of the story to draw from. Both players have cards decks which provide various thematically appropriate events, but much of the narrative experience emerged from the way the systems interacted. The reason I attacked the Shire was that I had a card which gave me troops in the vicinity of Angmar, far from the major battlefields. I figured I’d use them to get a few stray victory points by attacking west. The Free Peoples’ player didn’t mount more than a cursory defense because the decisive events happened in Lorien, Rohan and Gondor.
The politics of Middle-Earth were also part of the story, modeled on a politics track. The various peoples are not at war in the beginning. The Free Peoples player can move the Fellowship to various strongholds to argue for mobilization. An attack from the Shadow Armies also moves the target towards a military posture. We breezed through this portion of the game pretty quickly due to choice and random chance, and it felt like there was more to explore there on future playthroughs.