Category: Video Games

Fate of the Fellowship recounts the struggle of the Fellowship trying to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, with 1 to 5 players taking up the cloaks of various members of the Fellowship and their allies. Turns are spent maneuvering friendly forces and characters around Middle-earth, completing missions, halting the forces of Sauron, and inching Frodo and Sam closer to Mount Doom.

Before the game begins, players choose two characters to control from the impressive roster of 10 possible heroes, including the likes of the King himself, Argorn, the rest of the Fellowship, and elves Eowyn or Arwen. Each character comes with their own player card detailing their special abilities and starting location, where you place the screen-printed wooden meeples.

Some characters help more with movement, such as Gandalf being able to move double the spaces when traveling alone. Others, like Eowyn, are better suited to being hurled into combat, letting her permanently remove Nazghul from the game board. Being able to play to each of the available heroes’ strengths is a big factor in determining if you manage to chuck that annoying piece of metal into the volcano or not.

The players’ goal is to complete three randomly assigned objectives before finally getting Frodo to Mt. Doom to destroy the ring – a pretty straightforward goal. In order to avoid defeat, everyone has to work together to keep Frodo hidden, and to stop the dark forces from overtaking too many safe havens around Middle-earth, like Rivendell.

You lose when the Hope track hits zero. A number of situations cause your hope to lower, including havens falling to shadow, Frodo being spotted, or when you need to draw a player card but there aren’t any left. There are ways to gain Hope, but those opportunities are far fewer, including capturing a shadow stronghold and some objective rewards. This tug-of-war is always present and sometimes requires you to make hard decisions, such as drawing the eye away from the region Frodo is in at the cost of risking friendly army units in an encounter skewed in favor of the shadow.

When it comes to taking actions, Fate adds some additional elements and requirements that can limit what you can do on your turn. You can take four actions with a character. These include preparatory actions like Travel (moving your character), Muster (adding friendly army units), Fellowship (giving or taking a card from another player), and Prepare (exchanging one of your cards for its associated resource – more on this in a moment). You can also Attack (engage enemies with friendly army units), or Capture (take over/retake a stronghold of an enemy).

Since each player controls two characters, in a pretty creative move, everyone is able to take a single action as their other character, too, in addition to their primary character for that turn, who can take up to four. There are some restrictions present, such as not being able to split up your turns (i.e. take two actions with your main character, your single action with your secondary, and finish with the remaining two actions with your primary) but I do enjoy how this lets you have your hand in two places anywhere on the board at once. And you choose which of your characters is the primary each turn, so you are never locked in either.

While in the original Pandemic game, you have to turn in a set of similar colored cards to cure a virus, this concept of using resources to conduct an action has been expanded in Fate, with many of your actions requiring, at least in part, one of four different resources to do. Player cards feature one of these icons and can be played as that resource’s cost, such as Friendship being spent to Muster new forces or Valor for Attack.

Debatably, the most important of these resources are the Stealth and Resistance ones that have a more direct hand in whether or not you will fail or succeed in the game. Spending Stealth cards allows Frodo’s player to move him without causing a search by Sauron and removing the risk of losing hope. The Resistance resource not only lets you re-roll dice, but you MUST spend five of these even to attempt to throw the ring into Mt. Doom to win.

My feelings on these added action requirements are split. While I appreciate the added strategy and thematic component they bring to Fate of the Fellowship, it also shifts the game more into the realm of randomness. When you have what you need or can get it on your turn, pulling off big plays feels awesome. However, if you don’t, it can lead to some pretty lackluster turns, especially when I or my friends have little we can do to impact our odds of winning. Moments like these just didn’t feel good, since regardless of how much or how little you manage to do on your turn, you still need to draw from the Darkness deck, which could make things worse for the good guys instead. Thankfully, though, I would say that these sorts of turns only come about every so often, and I felt far more productive most of the time, and that my decisions made a difference.

My plays of Fate of the Fellowship were full of tense moments, dramatic victories, and risky plays that sometimes paid off in spades and other times brought about cataclysmic failure. When the countdown begins closing out 2025, I have little doubt that Fate of the Fellowship will have delivered one of the best gaming moments of my year.

As a hail-mary, last-ditch attempt at victory, we flew Frodo straight to Mt. Doom on the backs of the giant eagles using a special event card one of us had drawn. Doing so not only caused every Nazgul to rush back along with the Eye of Sauron directly on him, but we also needed to roll 14 dice and cross our fingers our hope track could withstand it. The first roll of seven dice put us dangerously close to losing all hope, and all that stood between the Fellowship and seven more dice.

Unfortunately, the results of those seven dice resulted in an outcome that dropped our hope to zero. Or at least it would have, had Tom Bombadil (or at least his event card) not come in to save the day. After slamming it down, I was able to re-roll three of the search dice, with a brand new result keeping our hope alive. The Fellowship and free peoples of Middle-earth had done it! The hype we felt at that moment was real.

17 years separate the original Pandemic and Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, and this latest adaptation of Matt Leacock’s system proves that its bones are still solid. Fate of the Fellowship expands and grows what has already proven to work, delivering a challenging yet rewarding cooperative experience.

It isn’t a title that I want to recommend for people looking to get into board games, thanks to the added mechanisms and heavier reliance on chance compared to Pandemic. Plus there’s the occasional turn where you are left just waiting and hoping to get what you need. Still, it’s a game I would quickly bring to the table with players who enjoy Pandemic already and are more receptive to heavier board games. The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship is hands-down one of the best Lord of the Rings and Pandemic games on the market right now, and proves that Gandalf meant to literally fly to Mt. Doom when he said “Fly, you fools!”.