john_amend_all

My girlfriend recently came into possession of 'The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game' (latest super duper revised edition!) and we've spent a few evenings struggling through the example quest.

My main reaction to it is bemusement: not so much that there are people who enjoy playing games like this (after all, people like all sorts of weird stuff) but that there are enough such people to make it a profitable proposition for the manufacturer. Clearly I'm about 30 years too old for the target demographic; if nothing else, the small print on the cards wasn't intended for someone whose presbyopia is coming on by leaps and bounds. But even in my teenage years, I don't think this would have been in the running for my pocket money. When we played Tunnels and Trolls in lunch breaks at school, that needed no equipment beyond a sourcebook and a handful of 6-sided dice.

So. There are several decks of cards — roughly, one for each player and one representing their quest. Some of the cards have names of LoTR characters or OCs invented by the manufacturer on them. Others represent weapons, or events, or locations, or enemies. And each round is played in seven phases, where you are allocated resource tokens, then choose some of your heroes and allies to participate in this stage of the quest, add up their ❂ points and measure them against the cards in play representing locations or enemies...

... And it was at this point, before we even get into the questionable delights of combat, that I started thinking 'This game has a mind of metal and wheels.' Obviously any rules-based simulation is constrained by the very fact of it being a rules-based simulation, but in this so-called Living Card Game the mechanistic / bureaucratic aspects of it really came to the fore. I was certainly soon wishing for a computer to take on the grunt work of keeping track of who had what attack score, who was allowed to attack whom, and so on. Even the Sinclair Spectrum that was my primary computer when I was in the game's target demographic would have been amply equipped to shoulder that burden.

(My first hypothesis was that making it a computer game would have restricted the scope of what was possible, because a computer game is limited by the original programmer's assumptions whereas an expansion pack in a card game is limited only by the English language. But apparently there is a computer game adaptation, so there must be enough people who actually prefer shuffling physical cards and totting up the stats by hand to having it done for them.)

My unfamiliarity with this style of gaming also told against the game in a few places where the glossy instruction books didn't make the sequence of events clear ('The Orcs have killed Legolas. Now what? Do they attack another character, or does another character attack them, or does the round end?'). Doubtless to somebody who knows how card games of this type work, the answer to such questions would have been obvious and therefore there was no need to mention it in the instructions. For my part, I came out by the same door as in I went. Catch-22.

I daresay that, given time and practice, I'd become familiar enough with the game mechanisms that they might not be quite so obtrusive. I don't think I'd ever be able to suspend my disbelief to the point where I thought that slapping a picture, a Gimli namebadge and a quote on a data structure containing four integers and one numerical rule would result in any connection to the character that Tolkien wrote.

On its own terms as a simulation, the game didn't succeed in evoking the world of Tolkien's creation for me. The example quest is to get from one side of Mirkwood to the other (or, as happened to us, get wiped out by the Orcs and giant spiders). So in the middle of Mirkwood, I was able to spend resource points to add spearmen from Gondor to my party or equip my Dwarves with axes. This, in my mind's eye, equated to the spearmen or equipment popping into existence in the middle of a forest glade. Not something that tends to happen even in fantasy novels.

Will we play it again? I don't know, but if we do I don't think the suggestion would come from me.