Ares Games War of the Ring 2nd Edition Board Game

Product Information

The base of War of the Ring is a solid, challenging and not over complex, two player area control strategic war game. On this alone War of the Ring is a seriously good game. Add to this the lovely presentation and components, how well it brings to life the events and characters in Lord of the Rings and immerses the players into Middle Earth, it really is a winner.

The predominantly verdant land with its dark green woods and now much more strongly contrasting region of Mordor seems a more accurate depiction. The mountainsstand out more and the various regions are better delineated and so easier to spot during game play. My only wish is that Mordor had been made even grimmer and louring in its shading! War of the Ring is the greatest board game based on THE LORD OF THE RINGS™ ever created! WAR OF THE RING is a grand strategy board game that allows its players to immerse themselves in the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien and experience its epic action, dramatic conflict, and memorable characters. The second aspect is moving the Fellowship/ringbearers around the board secretly to move them slowly and safely into Mordor. This added a whole new dynamic to an area of control game I hadn’t gotten to play before. As evil, I constantly had to make the decision on how many dice I wanted to commit to the hunt for the ring, limiting my recruitment and moves during the action phase. The good player gets to declare where the fellowship is each turn if needed then removes the token from the board keeping me guessing on which paths, they would take to Mordor. Starting positions on the board. Let the war begin!The very first thing I want to point out is that this is an area control game somewhat akin to Risk. There are strongholds and cities that help with defense but at its core, it is area control with “dudes on a map” sort of gameplay. You will spend most of your turn deciding on how to allocate the dice you rolled and what areas will need more units to take over enemy territory. This is critically important as it helps with both a conquest victory and provides safety (or danger) to the fellowship.

Lord of the Rings” is one of the biggest franchises from here to the Misty Mountains, with five significantly sized books, six even more significantly sized movies, an upcoming television series that is sure to be some amount of significance, and multiple generations of influence in the world of “high fantasy”. When I heard there was a board game described as “Tolkien-in-a-box,” I knew it had some pretty big hobbit-sized shoes to fill. (If hobbits wore shoes, that is.) Does War of the Ring soar like the Great Eagles and capture the epic struggle between good and evil? Does it crash and burn in the fires of Mount Doom? Or does it land somewhere in the middle-earth? Read on for our review of War of the Ring, 2nd Edition. Action Resolution: This is the meat of the game. Players take turns activating dice to do the action listed on that die face. While the game is certainly a challenge when it comes to setting up and initially learning the rules, there is a lot to recommend here. For fans of epic wargames or The Lord of the Rings, this game allows you to re-live the struggle between the free people and the shadow time and time again. While it’s unlikely to make any fans of casual gamers, it’s worth your time for any hardcore fans who think they could do it better than Sauron did. That said, there’s no shame if the sheer table space and number of miniatures included makes you dry heave a little in panic. This game won’t be for everyone. Should I Buy War of the Ring: Second Edition? The game can be won by a military victory, if Sauron conquers a certain number of Free People cities and strongholds or vice versa. But the true hope of the Free Peoples lies with the quest of the Ringbearer: while the armies clash across Middle Earth, the Fellowship of the Ring is trying to get secretly to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring. Sauron is not aware of the real intention of his enemies but is looking across Middle Earth for the precious Ring, so that the Fellowship is going to face numerous dangers, represented by the rules of The Hunt for the Ring. But the Companions can spur the Free Peoples to the fight against Sauron, so the Free People player must balance the need to protect the Ringbearer from harm, against the attempt to raise a proper defense against the armies of the Shadow, so that they do not overrun Middle Earth before the Ringbearer completes his quest.War of the Ring is a game for two to four players, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings™. War of War of the Ring is an asymmetrical 2-player game where one person controls the evil forces of Sauron, called the Shadow, while the other plays the Free Peoples – the “good side” narratively speaking. While there are technically rules for multiplayer, like challenging a cave troll to an arm-wrestling contest, I highly recommend against it. How to Win: War vs Will Overall, War of the Ring is quite simply a masterpiece. The choices are deliciously agonizing, the battles memorable, and the card play clever. It is equally gratifying playing as the Shadow Player or the Free Peoples. This is a fantastically designed game that is as rich as Smaug in theme. Every card and character ability make sense thematically. Gandalf can lead the Fellowship through the mines of Moria, Strider can leave the Fellowship to go level up and become Aragorn, Boromir can be heroically sacrificed to save the hobbits from taking damage. Everything that you would want to do in a Lord of the Rings game, short of finding out what was in that pipeweed, you can do. The only minor quibble I would have with the game is regarding some production quality issues. The miniatures aren’t the highest quality and some of the tokens can be difficult to decipher at a glance, but even this is easily forgivable considering the incredible scope and size of the game as a whole. What Ares did was to keep the changes to a minimum. Improve the areas that fans and critics didn’t like, and leave the rest intact. After all, the game has been out of print for a few years now, so there is a whole new segment of Tolkien fans that do not have copies of the game.

Face the evil minions of Sauron on the field of battle in a desperate attempt to delay their onslaught, while you lead the Fellowship of the Ring in the Quest for Mount Doom. Definitely! I’m no stranger to big war games after having played regular games of Twilight Imperium, dabbling in old classics like Warrior Knights, and loving an epic miniatures game when you have a free day. And with all that said, this has got to be one of the best out there. The mechanics used for your actions are the classic dice roll, requiring different symbols to be revealed to allow them to be spent as those actions. Sauron’s side start with more dice as they are more prepared to take the world by force. The Fellowship have an extra symbol on their dice that allows it to be spent as any other symbol, giving them more flexibility to react to impending doom! Ares also announced that it has plans to release the first expansion for the Lord of the Rings hidden movement game Hunt for the Ring, Light and Shadow, this year, following the game’s release in 2017. Following Frodo’s journey from the Shire to Rivendell as he’s chased by the Nazgul at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, the two-chapter game can be played as a prologue to War of the Ring, with specific gameplay implications. The WAR OF THE RING is a grand strategy board game that allows its players to immerse themselves in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS™and experience its epic action, dramatic conflict, and memorable characters. Along with the bigger is better motif, the cards are much larger. They are at least twice the size of the FFG cards, more like the size of Tarot cards, if you know what those are like. They are also much more readable, and have room to make everything bigger, so that you can see all of the icons without a magnifying glass. Some cards have been modified to improve their usefulness, and the abilities of the characters themselves have been changed as well. Pippen and Merri might actually be useful for something more than just fodder to prevent corruption to the ring bearers.

Review Summary

It has been awhile since I’ve played the FFG version, so I had to go through and relearn the specifics for this one all over again. As I mentioned, it is not a simple game. There are many rules and little things to remember. There are two player aids, but you will still find yourself paging through the rules for the first few games. You can rely on common sense for the most part. For example, you can’t recruit troops into a stronghold that is under siege, duh! I have been discussing War of the Ring second edition, obviously there was a previous edition but you’ll not see it in many shops. There is also the Anniversary Edition which comes with painted figures, it’s beautiful, hard to find and if found will come at a very hefty price. At the start of the game, each player will determine whether they will control the good or evil side. If there are more than two players, the factions are further divided for easier handling. WOTR is as thematic a game you will find based on the Lord of the Rings. Gandalf the Grey can become Gandalf the White, Strider can become King Aragorn. The cards do much to add events from the books, but you always have the difficult decision whether or not to use the event on the card, or the combat bonus on the card. Once they are used, they are out of the game. One of the most significant factors at play in War of the Ring: Second Edition is its sheer scope. The map covers most of Middle-Earth, including regions some fans won’t be familiar with. You also have various factions at play on both sides of the battle, and these factions are represented by over 200 hundred miniatures. As you can probably imagine, this means that both setting the game up and learning all of the rules and mechanics that govern it is quite an undertaking. It can take upwards of an hour to set the game up when you first attempt it, which isn’t aided by how similar some of the miniatures can look. Trying to find enough space to actually run the game is going to be your first challenge.

What we are talking about here is the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy of books by JRR Tolkien, transferred into a boardgame. As a Free Peoples player your goal is to either have Sam and Frodo throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom, or for the armies of the peoples to overcome the Shadow on the field of battle by amassing 4 victory points. As the Shadow player your goal is to either corrupt the Ring Bearers to the point where they turn to the Shadow, or to defeat the armies of the Free Peoples by amassing 10 victory points. It takes more victory points for the Shadow, but they have the benefit of unlimited reinforcements. Once a Free Peoples unit is destroyed, it is gone forever. In the event any translated versions of the Anniversary Release are announced to become available, customers can choose to switch from the English version to another version free of charge.

War of the Ring: Pre-orders for Kings of Middle-earth expansion are open

The players take part in the struggle of the armies of the Free Peoples and the heroic Companions of the Fellowship of the Ring against the dark host of the Shadow and the powerful Minions of the Dark Lord. The board is a beautiful depiction of Middle Earth. The character and event cards really bring the theme of the game to life, the figures are solid if nothing special, and the action dice mechanic forces players to constantly make decisions based on what actions are possible. Controlled by the Free Peoples player, the Fellowship is his true chance of winning, as the military forces of the Shadow will be vanquished together with their master if the Ring is undone. But the Quest is fraught with ever greater perils, as the Darkness falls over Middle-earth… The artwork is the same, it is just bigger so that you can see it better, the figures are the same for the most part, the Nazgul have changed so that they don’t fall over all the time like they tended to do in the FFG version, and a few others are different, but not many. The dwarves setup has been changed a wee bit (ha! wee bit). The combat sequence has been modified to be easier to follow, and so has the hunt sequence. Plus the fellowship can enter Mordor now even if it is not hidden. If the Fellowship succeeds in destroying the Ring before this happens, or the armies of the Free Peoples succeed in turning the tide and conquering the enemy’s strongholds themselves, the fall of the Dark Lord is at hand…