Two things that seem to have been eternally popular since their inception are The Lord of the Rings and cooperative card games. Now, Tolkein’s legions of fans can enjoy both at once by playing their way through the first book of his trilogy, working together, in The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game.
The traditional set of playing card rules used in trick-taking has a lot of weight to carry on its narrative backbone to support Tolkein’s storytelling, but this sturdy little box tries its best to bear the burden.
What’s in the Box
While The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game comes in a small box, as befits a card game, it has immediate appeal with its stained-glass style art and shiny, gilded box-front ring. Opening the trove reveals more treasures: the box is divided into three compartments, each with a chapter ribbon, two of which start out sealed while the third contains the cards and counters you’ll need for your initial plays.
The cards themselves are a delight, featuring a rich art style reminiscent of stained glass that doesn’t feel like an immediate fit for Tolkien’s universe, but which grew on me over time. This combination gives the game its own distinctive style, while still managing to conjure beloved characters from the LotR novel.
Rules and How It Plays
This is a trick-taking game, so it riffs on classic playing card folk games like Whist and Bridge. For those unfamiliar, this means the first player plays a card, and following players have to play a card of the same suit, if possible, with the highest-value card of the initial suit winning the hand. Rather than the familiar suits of a standard playing card deck, these cards are divided into forest, hill, mountain, and shadow, which run from one to eight, and rings, which run from one to five. Many games have a trump suit which will beat the initial suit if played, but here there’s only a single trump card, which appropriately enough is the one of rings.
The other major departure from the trick-taking formula is the fact that this game is cooperative, so you’re working together to achieve a set of goals rather than trying to beat the other players. The game is broken down into chapters, which reflect important sequences from Tolkien’s masterwork, and each player takes the role of a character from that chapter, who has their own goals. Frodo is almost always one of the characters, his goal is always to win ring cards, and whoever is dealt the one of rings has to play as him. Other players get to choose their characters from the selection available for the chapter. As you go through the game you’ll encounter other members of the fellowship alongside more minor characters from the book like Farmer Maggot.
All the character powers and goals have a vague connection to the source material, but given the abstract nature of translating an adventure narrative into a trick-taking game, these are often pretty tenuous. Gildor the elf, for example, shows his elvishness by having to play a forest card in the final trick of the game while Pippin, whose card is delightfully sub-titled as “fool”, has to win the fewest tricks. But for many other characters, such as Gandalf and Bilbo, the goal is wholly divorced from their role in the story, often equating to winning a particular number of tricks.
Initially, working together to win particular tricks for particular players can feel odd, especially if you’re used to the rhythm of traditional, competitive trick-taking games. There’s also a rule forbidding players from talking about what’s in their hands – the game would be too easy otherwise – which might take a bit of getting used to. But after a few tries you should be able to establish the basic tactics needed and the game will begin to unfold. It’s a nice balance of strategy and luck: there are occasions where the deal will just not give players the cards required, but the ability to choose your character, and the ability many characters have to exchange cards with others, gives you extra levers to increase your chance of success.
Just as you think you’ve gotten comfortable with the way the game works, it throws you a curveball by adding in some new rule concepts and character goals. There are eighteen chapters in total and the game keeps coming up with creative and surprising ways to modify its mechanics to keep you on your toes. Many of them manage a better tie-in with the story than the character cards. It would be a shame to spoil too many but the barrow downs chapter, for example, recreates the omnipresent fog of that dreadful place through the simple expedient of removing a slew of random cards from the deck to confuse things. Other villains that put in an appearance include Old Man Willow, the Ringwraiths, and the Balrog.
Veteran gamers may, by this point, have realized that The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game shared quite a lot of DNA with another cooperative trick-taking game, the excellent The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (Amazon), a perennial in our list of the best board games for families. And indeed the flow and feel of both games are broadly similar, with trick-taking being adapted into a group goal by giving each player certain objectives in the tricks that they win. However, the Tolkein adaptation has several slender advantages over its older relation.
Most notably, while the theming of the game might be weak, the story is so familiar – and indeed the fact there’s a story at all – gives the game a better sense of progression than The Crew’s vague march through difficulty levels. It’s still a slow climb through various challenges, of course, but the familiarity of the tale and the lovely artwork make that progress come alive in a way that The Crew just can’t manage. There are also some little mechanical flourishes, too: the single trump of the one of rings is more interesting than the standard trump suit in The Crew, and the objectives are more varied and thematic.
Surprisingly for a trick-taking game there’s also a solo mode and, even more surprisingly, it works pretty well. You play four characters at once, but you only start with about half the cards dealt, with replacements coming at random off the deck as you choose which cards to play. This is an effective stand-in for the uncertainty of not knowing what’s in other player’s hands, and even when you know what cards are available, trying to coordinate your character’s goals across four different hands at once is a stiff challenge.
