I love the LotR:LCG and it is easily one of my favorite coop games. There is a lot you can buy for it though. My recommendation is to budget for the core set and the first six adventure packs. This will give you a lot of quests and some really good deck building options and enough cards to realistically build 2 decks for coop. At that point I would say you have a really good complete game and any further purchases would really just be based on how much you like the game and want to keep expanding it out.
The core set is good, but only really has enough cards to build one useful deck after you have played your first game or two through the intro scenario. But it is possible to build a pretty decent deck with just the one core set, but you don’t have a lot of options to build loads of different types of decks. Part of the fun is playing games and iterating on your decks, and with just a core set there just aren’t a ton of options for that. Still I would generally say that a core set is enough to get a feel for the game and see if you like it.
The game is OK single player, especially if you build a strong deck, but it is really designed and balanced for two. There are a lot of ways to synergize with the other player and I think that adds a lot to the game. Plus almost every game is better with a friend (with the possible exception of Mage Knight).
As for 3-4 players, I’m not sure how well that works with multiple players off 2 core sets, but I doubt it would be very good given that I would say the core set is enough cards for building one deck not two. That said if you just wanted to use the pre-made single sphere decks for a game you could probably get 4 people playing off one core set.
There are no real persistent upgrades to heroes other than building a better deck…kinda. In the Hobbit Saga expansions there are “treasure” cards that you can carry through the adventure in campaign mode, though honestly it’s not that cool. I think the new Black Riders set might have something similar but I’m not sure.
Basically I would say this about the game: it’s a really fun coop Magic-style deck builder but with no blind buy card chasing. If you like that type of deck building, coop and LotR, and are willing to invest in a card pool of some sort you will have a blast. If any of those things are a turn off I would say skip it.
Also I am curious as to how many people you are trying to provide cards for?
Tom_Mc
6282
I think this is the only part I can help you with right now. I like Eldritch there is a cleaner turn structure and combat system compared to Arkham Horror. The story is a little more tailored to the ‘big bad’ with unique quests, encounters, and sometimes monsters. The downside is maybe a lack of content. I can see that, especially when compared to Arkham. There are only four bad guys and fewer locations with potentially small encounter decks. I’m in the It’s worth it camp and think the system adjustments are great. I’ve been assuming you know about Arkham Horror, please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll also be happy to answer specific questions you might have.
In short, it’s a good Pulp Cthulhu story telling experience across globe. It plays in 2-3 hours I’d say; quicker than Arkham but not a short game.
Tom M
Gedd
6283
For most of the games I’m buying, I’m primarily looking at providing a good two-player experience so my wife and I can play. Solo is kind of gravy. However beyond that I’m also trying to judge suitability for my board gaming meetup that I go to. That group doesn’t tend to play games that support much lower than 4 players. I rarely see anyone playing with just 2 players, so I was curious about LotR’s support since I’d seen it mentioned that you could play up to 4 (although I see FFG’s site says 1-2).
That certainly doesn’t rule it out, but it’s more likely I’ll look into it later as my wife and I are playing other stuff now.
Thanks for your impressions though!
I actually don’t know much about Arkham Horror other than that it’s closer to 6 hours (which is way too long for me), and it’s a relative of Elder Sign (which I’ve watched played). I don’t know much about the mechanics themselves. I did watch the sort of intro video that FFG did for Eldritch Horror though, just didn’t get a feel for how much fun it would be, and I haven’t seen a review come though my usual channels yet. Thanks for your thoughts as well Tom.
Yeah, this is definitely not a games group game where you can just show up with a box and everyone gets to play, unless you want to buy a TON of cards and build up decks for everyone. That’s probably not a great option though since a large part of the fun is building your decks together and finding good combo’s and having it be YOUR deck. I think for it to work in a games group everyone would need to be willing to invest and start building decks, which while fun might be a tough sell.
That said I think it would a good option for a game with the wife, especially if you think she would get into building decks with you. I know I have had a lot of fun with my friend just sitting together building our decks and trying to find great ways to get them to compliment each other. The way the game is designed this can lead to really fun play with a lot of cooperative thinking as you shore up each others weaknesses and compliment each others strengths.
The core set alone is probably enough to get you started and see if you like it. You can do some limited deck building for two off a core, but if you get bit by the bug be prepared to quickly invest in the first cycle or at least a second core set. A second core is actually nice to have for two people since a lot of the best cards in the core don’t come in three’s like they do in the expansions. That means that as you build decks you can swap out cards with each other from the two cores to have a better ability to adjust the odds of drawing the combo’s you want.
Hope that gives you a decent idea of what the game is like.
Chaplin
6285
Like Prankster I really like LotR:LCG. In fact I bought it for and found it to be a great couple game that we could play together (cooperatively) and it works very well in that. My main issue with the game was the monetary commitment to catch up and keep up as we also started late. Plus the amount of non-game time needed with building and tweaking decks. While I could get over the money hurdle, the time one was a killer and LotR gets a lot less time than it deserves. If you are into the meta-deck building game that may take just as much or more time than the in game time, and like magic like card mechanics, then this is a great couple purchase that works fine solo “as gravy”.
If the time thing is an issue for you too, check out Sentinels of the Multiverse. While not the same, it is very similar in what it does (a bit less mechanical, but a bit higher on story telling) without the deck tweaking time sink.
And I gotta say, I love Watch It Played! I am so grateful that Rodney is doing what he is doing rather than a review site/channel.
I would not call Arkham Horror a six hour game if you keep it to four players or less (it technically supports eight but is a dreadfully slow slog with five and up) and have the rules down (which admittedly takes some time). Playing with people who were experienced with the game and reasonably decisive usually didn’t take more than 3 hours or so in my experience and sometimes a fair bit less. If you arrange some sort of very structured storage system for it you could probably cut that even more by shrinking the setup/teardown time that’s an unfortunate part of its length. Unfortunately I haven’t played Eldritch Horror yet myself so I can’t comment on that. I’m leery because to me a lot of the richness of the Arkham Horror experience comes from the sheer scope of the game’s systems and content and many of the people I’ve read saying it’s better think it’s better because it’s shorter and more streamlined (and also hate Arkham Horror). Also, Elder Sign was the last game pitched to me as “Arkham Lite” and it doesn’t deliver any of the things that I enjoy about Arkham, so I worry.
As someone who owns every Arkham Horror expansion and played it many, many times, Eldritch Horror does so many things right that I wish I could take them and apply them to Arkham Horror (come on 3rd edition!). Arkham Horror is a beast of a game and you play it for that fact, but it’s a big investment in both time and money on top of what is now clearly a dated and finicky rule system. Eldritch Horror simply feels like a breath of fresh air; it can play in 30 minutes, setup time and tear down time is minimal, the rules are easy to learn and keep track of, and it can really give you an ass whupping.
Undead Viking over at BGG rated AH as his favorite game of all time, but Eldritch Horror stole that honor as he (bitterly) admitted in his hour and a half review of it.
ioticus
6288
I pre-ordered Eldritch Horror but I’m a bit worried after reading this review: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1082875/eldritch-horror-a-review. Anyone have an opinion on her thoughts that Eldritch horror is more luck dependent and has less meaningful decisions than Arkham Horror?
Agreed. I think that to get the most out of LotR you need to enjoy sitting and building decks together pretty much as much as simply playing the game. It’s a lot of “Oh, if you take that card from that sphere and I am playing this sphere with these cards that’s gonna be awesome together”. I think the game will really loose a lot if it’s just one person building the decks and then having others play. Like Magic, building the decks here is an important piece and if you simply view it as a waste of time this is probably not the game for you.
Yep, Arkham Horror is a glorious mess and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love the heaps and heaps of stuff and it’s part of what makes Arkham so much fun. I do agree that set up and take down are kinda the biggest bummers of AH, but even with that time it’s about a 3 hour game or so with 3-4 people as long as a few of you know the rules and you don’t have any AP or particularly slow players (which can make any game a 7 hour slog). I would also second the recommendation to NEVER exceed 4 players with Arkham, and frankly I think 3 players is the magic number (based on the mechanics).
I’m a bit leery of another “Arkham Lite” since I thought Elder Sign was total crap and basically just Cthulhu themed Yahtzee…blegh. Still, I would certainly give Eldritch Horror a play, but I think it’s too close to Arkham to make my purchase list.
I don’t actually own Arkham Horror (because I just started having my own boardgame collection earlier this year as I had not until then had the facilities to play boardgames where I live, and assembling a fully laden Arkham Horror set is horrifyingly expensive and storage-intensive), so if Eldritch Horror can deliver a similar but distinct experience that I can get into on the ground floor, I’m down with that. But I’d like to play it first, ideally where I was playing Arkham Horror until people decided that they preferred 30 minute eurogames. The host is a big Arkham fan, notionally, at least, and -probably- has gotten Eldritch Horror by now, or will have by the time I can actually get over there again (i.e. probably next year). But I can’t be sure.
So I finally sat down to learn how to play Race for the Galaxy today after owning it for a couple years now. I have to say it is a pretty fantastic little game. I played 3 games and am just kinda getting a hang of it, but I was impressed at how deep and strategic such a fast playing game could be. Definitely a winner in my back and I am glad a sucked it up to figure out all those Hieroglyphics. Really the game was a lot smoother and simpler (at least at a basic mechanical level) than it appears to be at first blush.
I’ve never been a fan of deckbuilders a la Dominion, so I am glad to have found a fast engine building card game that I seem to really enjoy.
Whenever I teach it to new folks, I always tell them it’s like learning a new language, but that it’s a well-designed language so once it clicks it clicks. I’ve gotten more out of Race than just about any other game besides Shadow Hunters. I think we finally burned out on it a couple of years ago (and one of my friends seems to win every time–I don’t care about winning, but it starts to seem ridiculous after awhile). But, boy, it’s really just a stellar piece of work, that game. Remembering back to when it was fresh and new and I can tell you you have a lot of good times in your future.
Gedd
6294
Thanks again to you and Chaplin for the further LotR impressions. I wasn’t aware that the game had a lot of deck building going on (thought instead it would mainly be playing with fixed/suggested decks). I might enjoy the deck building a little bit, but I doubt my wife would care much for it unless the deck building happened as part of the game play (sort of like Pathfinder has been so far). Most of the enjoyment for me would be in the game play as well, as I have a hard time sitting around sifting through a bunch of cards trying to figure out what works well together. If the Hearthstone beta is any indication, I don’t get anywhere near as much out of putting together a great deck as I do from playing the game itself. I tend to feel that any failings in the game are then because of my errors in building the deck, and it feels like a real uphill climb.
Still, I will probably put it on the “some day” list because of the theme and the possibility for some of the game play fun. I’ll just be more cautious about it for sure.
I have several people at the game group who own this, but it seems like someone starts playing right after I get into a different game. I’m definitely hoping to try it at some point.
And I gotta say, I love Watch It Played! I am so grateful that Rodney is doing what he is doing rather than a review site/channel.
Me too. I definitely appreciate some of the reviewers out there, but there seem to be very few people doing Watch It Played style shows, and even fewer who do it really well.
So I finally sat down to learn how to play Race for the Galaxy today after owning it for a couple years now.
Someone taught this a couple months back at our game group and, while I felt kind of lost at first, after a few turns it became a lot clearer. It helped that the cards I was getting really made it clear what my strategy would be (military expansion). I actually won my first (and so far only) time because I was able to take advantage of that strategy and I got a few multipliers for the military cards that made up for the mistakes I made early on. I like that there’s a lot of different ways that you can apparently win.
Are you guys playing Race for the Galaxy playing just straight-up vanilla Race for the Galaxy? Or are you using any of the add-ons? I only have the base set, but it always seemed to me that there were a whole mess of hooks waiting for more content in that game. How much are the add-ons a part of your enjoyment?
-Tom
Gedd
6296
I think I was playing vanilla, but it’s been a long time so I don’t recall. I’m also probably the least experienced of the last few posters so it’s probably less important.
Race for the Galaxy changes quite a bit as you add expansion cards. There are hooks there in the base game, but some strategies that work with the base deck fade out as the additional cards come in. In particular Blue engines centered around produce / consume become a lot less practical.
In retrospect, I think it would probably have worked better if they’d gone more with a Magic or Ascension approach to additional decks: that is, while you can play with all decks in print, you’re encouraged to play with just the last 2. The issue is that there are some cards that name specific cards rather than keywords, and unless you add additional copies of the named cards, that becomes a problem as the total number of cards increases.
Personally, I like expansion 1 (The Gathering Storm) and 2 (Rebel vs. Imperium), and don’t like expansion 3 (The Brink of War). Military strategies become more viable as you add the expansions. You can see the deck bloat being a problem with expansion 3 since it adds a once-per-game action for each player of searching the deck for specific card types.
I have found it generally works that I build a deck pretty quickly and then start playing it. I end up tweaking the deck between games as I see what is working well and what needs adjusting. It’s not a static thing and building the deck is linked to the play. So it’s not so much about trying to have the “perfect” deck built, but rather developing a deck iteratively over time through playing the game.
I love that since I used to play Magic as kid and it’s fun for me to be building decks again (minus the outrageously expensive card chase). But if that doesn’t sound fun to you I would suggest passing on LotR since that’s just part of how the game works.
I haven’t played Sentinels of the Multiverse (mostly since I kinda refuse the buy a game that I don’t like the art for), but from what I have seen it might be more what you are looking for.
magnet
6299
The first expansion, The Gathering Storm, introduces goal tiles. These are like little mini-achievements within the game for either being the firstest (“Place a 6-cost development”) or the bestest (“Strongest military”). They are randomized each game, and I think they add a lot of variety to the base game.
The second expansion, Rebels vs Imperium, introduces military takeovers. This adds an element of direct interaction, since you can steal or blow up your opponents’ planets. In the right group, this might be a lot of fun. But I think military takeovers are very hard to pull off, so you’re more likely to see Cold War-style bluff and counterbluff rather than actual fireworks.
The third expansion, The Brink of War, introduces prestige. Prestige tokens are basically special victory point tokens, but whoever has the most gets substantial advantages. In effect, I think it’s like adding a new super-achievement that’s almost impossible to ignore. With everything else that’s competing for your attention, I think it might be best set aside until you really need something new.
All three expansions are options in Keldon’s AI version of RFTG, so you can always start that up again and see which ones work best for you.
I was playing the base game with the first expansion, but I was not using the goals, just the added cards.
