The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship (Z-Man Games, 2025)

My history with The Lord of the Rings goes back to middle school when my Tolkien-obsessed math teacher decided to end every day of class with a reading from The Hobbit. Then we watched the animated movie at the end of the year. I dived into The Lord of the Rings over winter break that year and reread the books every year until the movies came out and then the movies became my yearly ritual. When I met my wife, it became our shared winter ritual and one of the many things that bind us together. We went to New Zealand and toured Hobbiton, Weta, and various filming locations. It's incredibly special to us.

I've bought numerous Lord of the Rings board games over the years, hoping that one of them would capture the same warm feelings. The War of the Ring (Ares Games) is probably the best and most accurate Middle-Earth game, but it's very fiddly, rules-intensive, and very focused on the war, obviously. I had hoped Journeys in Middle-Earth (Fantasy Flight Games) would give us a rollicking adventure in the world, but it was both stale and too punishing to be fun. I love the recent Trick-Taking Games (Office Dog Games), but they are really 3 or 4 player games and more focused on mechanics than story. Enter Fate of the Fellowship.

To talk about Fate of the Fellowship is to first talk about Pandemic, the stalwart game by Matt Leacock with one of the most enduring mechanics in board games. The short version is that a deck of cards manages where "bad stuff" happens and every once in a while, the discard pile gets shuffled and put back on top of that deck to be drawn again. This makes bad stuff happen in the same places more often. I've played a lot of Pandemic, because I played all three of the Pandemic Legacy games and I'm quite familiar with this exploding deck (argh that deck!). It's brilliant, frustrating, and dynamic.

When I first read about Fate of the Fellowship, I was a bit apprehensive about how the central Pandemic mechanic would work in Middle-Earth. My understanding is that there are some Pandemic versions that play with the bad stuff being armies but I haven't played those. In Fate of the Fellowship, the forces of Sauron are the bad stuff and it works really well. Instead of antidotes, you are putting out friendly armies. The deck keeps piling on orcs. The extra little bit of brilliance here is that that deck also represents the shifting priorities of Sauron's armies. Armies will start moving towards one location, but then a turn later shift to another route. This feels pretty thematic as the Fellowship became an effective distraction at various point in the books. They are going to Rivendell! Rohan is the threat! No, Gondor is the threat! Quick, get guys to the Black Gate!

The other major thematic tweak to the mechanics is that you play two characters at a time, no matter the player count. For awhile, one of my board game gripes was that a game would say it played 2-5 players, but when you looked at the rules, the 2 player version was "each player controls two characters." That's normally way too much to manage and makes the game tougher to immerse yourself in. Fate of the Fellowship has you controlling two characters but with crucial guardrails: you do four actions with one and one action with the other, and all your cards and tokens are shared between the characters. Not only does this make the management easy, it also fits very nicely into the entire idea of "fellowship." Your characters help each other, share resources, and demonstrate the benefits of the many vs going it alone. I love this, it's one of the first Tolkien games to mechanically represent this central theme of the books.

Another export from the Pandemic Legacy games are the objective cards that effectively are the scenario for each play of Fate of the Fellowship. I've only played the four objectives recommended for the introductory game, but there is a huge stack of them to provide ongoing variety. From what I've experienced, they are very thematic and you can tie them directly to the narrative. First you need to make contact with the Elves at Rivendell, then you need to rally Rohan, then you mobilize the armies to distract Sauron. Once Sauron moves all his troops to the Black Gate, you sneak Frodo and Sam in around the back way and throw that hunk of gold in the fire. While you can play these in an anachronistic order, it makes gameplay sense to follow the narrative. The mechanics of the game are driving the story this way, which is brilliant to experience.

I used to think War of the Ring was the most thematic Tolkien game possible, but the way that the characters support each other and the game engine supports the story in Fate of the Fellowship is making me rethink that. In the parlance of game discourse, does it "fire" War of the Ring? Of course not! For one thing, War of the Ring is a war game and delivers an epic 1v1 contest vs a cooperative one. But further, Tolkien's story is so enduring and rich, it deserves to be looked at in new and exciting ways that live alongside previous ways. I love looking at the story from a cooperative lens and how that emphasizes the Fellowship instead of the epic tactics of the war. I can't wait to experience all the characters, all the events, all the objectives, and get to see the myriad ways in which a story I know so well can play out differently...ohh that's what the title means!