A Familiar Ring

On several occasions, I've written about (or mentioned) The Crew -- a pair of cooperative trick-taking games. Those two games (especially Mission Deep Sea) have probably given my play group more hours of fun than any other new games of the past several years. Which is why we're open to other games in a similar space, and how we came to try out the ponderously titled The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game.

The game follows the plot of the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's famous fantasy trilogy. Each chapter of the book becomes a scenario in a cooperative trick-taking game. Each player chooses by draft to take on the role of particular character, each one with a specific goal to fulfill during one deal of the cards. Characters change depending on the chapter, and so certain goals persist from hand to hand, while others swing in for just a chapter or two before going away again. That, along with a number of other setup changes to accentuate story, results in a series of 20-ish scenarios for you and your friends to work through.

Any cooperative game based on taking tricks is going to have to contend with the existence of The Crew. But one of the more intriguing aspects of The Fellowship of the Ring is how it demonstrates that even small tweaks to a game system can have a major impact on the strategy of playing it. Designer Bryan Bornmueller has chosen just the right tweaks for maximum effect.

The deck of The Fellowship of the Ring is quite similar to that of The Crew: there are five suits in all -- though one has fewer cards in it than the other four. (That one being Rings, compared to Hills, Mountains, Forests, and Shadow.) But unlike The Crew, where that short suit is also the "trump suit" that beats all others, The Fellowship of the Rings has no trump suit -- just a single card, the One Ring (literally, the 1 of Rings) that can optionally win any trick into which it's played. Enthusiasts of Bridge, who have played their share of "No Trump" hands over the years, will understand the implications of this. But if you've been brought up on Hearts, Spades, Euchre, and their like, you'll quickly find that the absence of a trump suit radically changes the strategic landscape of the game.

The persistence of characters and their goals from one "chapter" to the next also makes for an interesting change from The Crew. Even when characters recur, this "up to four player" game can have more than four characters to choose from. Newly appearing characters are always required to be taken in the draft. That in turn causes repeating characters to take on new strategic ramifications. (For example: Legolas' goal to win a Forest card of a particular rank plays differently when more Elves with other Forest interactions appear on the scene.)

This game also foregoes the big innovation that made The Crew's premise of cooperative trick-taking really work in the first place: the concept of "communication." In The Crew, players had a method to signal to everyone else key information about a single card in their hand. To take the place of that concept in The Fellowship of the Ring -- thus greasing the gears for cooperation -- players are allowed to "exchange" cards before each hand. Loosely, this is bringing in the concept of passing cards (from Hearts), that was never part of The Crew. But in practice, it's a story-motivated way of helping players tailor their hands for the challenges they've drafted. Gimli always gets to exchange one card with Legolas before each hand (and vice versa). Boromir can exchange a card with any player other than Frodo. And so on.

Together, these changes -- along with some inspired ways of capturing narrative elements from Tolkien's book -- make for an experience that felt quite new and distinct to my group, which has played hundreds (if not thousands) of hands of The Crew. But is it a "Crew killer," as the gamers would say -- a game that makes you never want to play The Crew again? I'd say no. We dutifully worked our way through a chapter or two of The Fellowship of the Ring at the end of every single game night we gathered for over the course of a few months, until we finished. But now that we have? I feel we're not super likely -- at least right away -- to go back and play through the whole game again. (Whereas we've played both The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea each multiple times through all scenarios.)

But... would we be there immediately for the seemingly telegraphed release of a The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game? (And later, The Return of the King?) You'd better believe it. Not many games give you as much bang for your buck as this one, and I'd certainly recommend it to fans of card games or cooperative games. (Or both.) I think it's a solid B+.