One Game To Rule Them All?: War of the Ring

I gave my brother War of the Ring for Christmas.  He likes Risk-like games (see Shogun, it's fabulous), and Lord of the Rings, and this game has great reviews as being the quintessential LOTR game and a great 2 players game.  Seems legit.

In the game, one side plays Sauron's forces, the other side plays the humans, elves, dwarves and the Fellowship of the Ring.

The game board is actually 2 boards.  And setting up the board the first time took about an hour.  And another hour to read the rules.  This isn't for the light-hearted.  It's a pretty epic game, as could be expected of epic fantasy.

The good guys win if they take over enough enemy strongholds, or if the Fellowship can get the ring to Mount Doom.
The bad guys win if the ring-bearers get corrupted by the ring, or if they take over enough strongholds.

While the plastic units are kinda tacky, the rest of the board and pieces are really sweet.

Panda-orama View.

Sweet dice.

The game is mostly a move troops, roll dice kind of game, but with a number of more euro-y elements.  You rolls dice at the beginning of your turn to take actions with them.  These include moving troops, recruiting troops, drawing or playing special cards, and other things.  There are a lot of things to do.
Each side has their own cards. They do things, either during main turn actions or during combat.  Very often the titles and resulting effects tie in thematically with the LOTR storyline. (Like "Here Come the Eagles"  or "Awaken the Ents" or something).
The bad guy cards seem to be more troop recruiting and fighting oriented.

 

Each side also has character cards, which show special abilities, movement, and combat abilities if these characters are around.

 

 

The Fellowship gets a lot of characters.  They can travel together, in which case you can use them as "Guides" which is a special power for leading the fellowship, or they sacrifice their lives to help prevent the ring-bearers from being corrupted.  They can also split off from the Fellowship to help in battles elsewhere or recruit armies to the war effort.

Fellowship Characters

By the way, if you split everyone off from the Fellowship, Gollum becomes your guide.  He helps you sneakses into Mordor.  Yessssss...  Helps the master...

GOLLUM!

 The Fellowship starts in Rivendell.  Very thematic.

The game also has a bunch of tracks, very euro-like in that regard I suppose.

Military Victory Point Track

The military point track shows one way to win.  If the bad guys get enough strongholds (10 points worth) they win.  The good guys only need like 5 or something.  I don't quite remember.  There are a lot of rules in this game.  And the good guys basically don't have a chance at winning this way anyway.  Once good guy units die, they are gone forever, but bad guy units have endless numbers of reinforcements.

The Political Track

The political track designates where individual nations stand in terms of getting involved in the war.  The bad guys all start out "active" meaning they can move along the track towards war.  Once a nation is at war, it can cross enemy borders and also attack enemy units.
The good guys all start out inactive, meaning they can't move towards war.  Cards can activate them, as can their units being attacked, as can certain Fellowship members visiting their countries and rallying them!
Getting to war fast is important militarily.

The Corruption Track

The Corruption Track shows how close the ring-bearers are to being corrupted by the evil evil nasty power of the ring.  It also shows the movement of the Fellowship.
The Fellowship can move using die roll actions.  When this happens, they don't move on the board.  They move a space on the track, because they are hidden.  Basically, they only show up on the map where they were last spotted by the enemy.  If they get revealed in the hunt for the ring (another action at the beginning of the turn), then they are forced to move, and also take corruption damage. 
12 corruption, Fellowship loses.

Combat is pretty straightforward mostly.  Roll die.  High numbers (5,6) are hits that kill units.  Cards played precombat can modify these rules.  The other complication is units can retreat into strongholds which makes only rolled 6's count as hits, but then they can't retreat.

I played with my brother, starting off as the bad guys.  I overran him really quickly and he didn't know what to do with the Fellowship, who seems more complicated to play, especially since I was teaching the rules so I had a better idea of what to do.  We scrapped that game, and I switched to the Fellowship to let him play the more straightforward military heavy bad dudes.

He immediately recruited up Saruman who built a ridiculous Isengard army.  I dedicated resources to moving troops up to defend borders.  A huge standoff ensued.

At one point, Legolas went to help out Rohan, because he could.  He added some leadership bonuses, which allow die rerolls for combat.  Ultimately, though, we had to retreat into Helm's Deep, where we were overrun by Mordor troops and Legolas took a rusty sword to the gut.  Dead forever.

ORLANDO BLOOM WAS OVERRATED ANYWAY!

Aragorn came to help out Gondor.  They held the border well.

I really focused on not dying, while rushing the ring to Mordor as fast as possible.  I ditched the Fellowship and picked up Gollum and got into Mordor quickly.
Turns out that's not the best idea.  You really need to heal up as much corruption as possible before going in there.  Having no Fellowship members to sacrifice to the corruption was bad too, maybe. The Mordor track is brutal and hits you hard, involving drawing tiles which are bound to give you corruption damage to move along the track.

The Crack of Doom: Sauron's Plumber's Crack?  LOL!!!!

I got corrupted and Game Over.

Overall the game was fun.  I don't feel like it's a super duper deep thinking strategy game.
But have a beer, take an afternoon, play the game, watch Legolas die.  I think it's a pretty fun time.

Mozzie thought the dice were sweet.

Also, I got this toy called an OzoBot.  It moves along and recognizes color codes as commands.  There were a lot of colors and lines on the board, so he took a stroll. 
Took out some units, then headed Into The West. 

I thought it was pretty funny.