We played the Lord of the Rings Living Card Game this evening, or whatever it's called. My friend Tim has been enthusing about this for a while and has clearly spent about a zillion pounds on expansions and boosters for it, so we thought we'd give it a go for a bit of a change.
Despite my general distaste for Lord of the Rings, I found the game rather enjoyable, if quite similar to the Warhammer Quest card game I picked up a while back. It's a good co-op game, and I can see how it would work well as a solo affair, too, which is typically how Tim has played it in the past.
Mechanically it's reasonably simple. Each quest is split into three distinct phases, during which you have to attain a certain amount of "progress points" in order to clear the phase. Standing in your way are a series of locations and enemies, each of which have an associated "threat" value, which acts as a buffer against your attempts to make progress. Defeating the enemies and "exploring" the locations allows you to remove this threat and make it easier to progress; conversely, you can, in some cases, just leave them be if you think you're in a position to be able to brute-force your way through.
Each round of the game is split into several parts. Firstly, each player in turn spends the resources that their "hero" cards generate on purchasing new cards from their hand and putting them into play. The various cards can either be allies (who fight alongside your initial three heroes), attachments (which affix to a hero or ally in order to boost their capabilities in some way) or events (which have an immediate effect) and can either affect you or the other players around the table — this is a cooperative game, so there's no "backstabbing" involved here.
After that, each player takes it in turn to assign heroes and allies to making progress on the quest. If they do this, they are "exhausted", so are unable to participate in combat except under certain specific circumstances. What you're aiming for as a team is to attain enough progress points to clear the phase of the scenario plus any additional accumulated threat from enemies and locations; the trouble is that you don't know exactly how much additional threat you'll need to contend with, because it's not until after everyone has committed heroes and allies that additional "encounter" cards are drawn.
Following this, there's combat. There are some rules that determine whether or not enemies who have appeared attack specific players that I won't get into now, but mostly this is a numbers game: attacker's attack power minus defender's defense power equals damage taken. Enemies attack first, then your heroes and allies get to attack.
After that, the round resolves, exhausted cards are refreshed (except under certain specific circumstances, such as the spider web Gimli was caught in for pretty much the entire adventure) and you continue like this until either everyone is dead or the scenario is clear.
I'm sure part of the fun of the game comes from building decks to challenge the various adventures, but Tim had built us some good decks so we could just play this evening. They worked well, and I don't really understand how to build a "good" deck in games like this anyway, so I was happy to have that particular responsibility taken away from me!
So yeah. I had a good time; the Lord of the Rings subject matter really didn't matter all that much — it doesn't offend me or anything, it just bores me a bit — and there was a mechanically solid, interesting game at its core. I don't know if we'll be playing it again as a group — there are lots of other things we want to play, including continuing our Pandemic Legacy campaign — but I certainly wouldn't object if we were to give it another shot.