War of the Ring - BUT CARDSS

[Music] foreign War of the ring but cards War of the Ring the card game designed by Ian Brody and kindly provided by Aries games is a card game for two to four players in which you'll be fighting battles over castles and walls and bridges and rocks but meanwhile you'll also have to support or irritate the ongoing Adventures of Lil sweet bobber boy Frodo dragons all of that which is these cards yeah games winning these battles will earn you points and while the goody characters just want to survive their journey across Middle Earth each horrible step at a time as their Baddie you are really trying to make sure that you're going to ruin that little boy's life you win by either having more points after the ninth final round is complete or if at any stage one team has 10 points more than the other one which is kind of a concrete formalization of a house rule I tend to have in anything I play of the gay men's whenever anybody's just had enough I won't teach you the whole game because I'm not your mother but effectively you have a hand of cards and you're going to play them to these two locations where icons on the cards dictate the power they'll offer in defending or harassing team Gandalf on the road trip or in the two different flavors of doing War swords for girls shields for boys for each battle the two teams will take it in turns to be an offense or defense and you can also just play cards to the reserve where characters can encourage your efforts from the sidelines and armies can sit and wait until you sub them in is this football but the horrible core warbling away at the center of this game's design is that every time you play a card you also have to cycle a card putting it away into a discard pile well that's fine because at the start of each round both of the teams or each player gets between four to six car that's not many cards that's not very many cards hello yes your ears do not deceive you I did say teams just like in the original full fat War of the Ring there are internal factions but it's still basically blue plastic versus red plastic even though in this edition of the game the plastic only exists inside of your mind Lord of the Rings colon War of the Ring colon not a card game just the normal board game Edition well that was a messy asymmetric hunk of a game that was too fiddly too big and the first time I played it I honestly thought that I might hate it and yet it burrowed attaching itself firmly to my heart like a piece of jewelry that I didn't want to get rid of and this reworking of that design takes up a fraction of the space I mean you could probably fit this entire game into a standardized set of human trouser Pockets large packets large carpets can something so minimal truly reflect the full glory of the king or will it be like when you're playing GameCube in the bath and you set up a series of mirrors and you've got a wave bird controller and it is it is a clear reflection but it's very small I'm honestly not sure that this was worth all that time and effort crucially though I want this to be the real deal because I don't own War of the Ring after I finish reviewing it with Quinn's he said after all why shouldn't I keep it and then he spent like 100 years in a cave turning into a little Goblin guy and that little Goblin guy is now called Tom spoilers but I don't have it is the thing and arguably it's too large for me to sensibly have as part of my collection but I once it I mean that's why we checked out the Five Armies game not long ago I thought oh maybe this is a box that can fit that same shape in my broken holy heart it's like gouda it's like a big old block of cheese just plug them up please [Music] and I say all of this while still feeling that there's perhaps a slight ugliness at the heart of games collecting within our hobby that was some b-roll of Thomas board game collection not mine because I currently don't have a permanent house and I'm not nagging Tom sorry Tom that's so rude it's rude isn't it yeah at times I wonder if we're trying too hard to boil down this joyously Collective social hobby into something that we can individually definitively own like not everyone can own every board game for various different reasons and I think that that's sort of wonderful there's a texture to that of seeing other people's Collections and having little moments of Sparkle and surprise and pop oh you've got this that's cool and it does mean that yeah if you really want to play something and it's not available you just have to find someone else who's got it and ask if you can play it with them I think that's beautiful but also on the other hand I won't say it's so here we are War of the Ring the card game can this replace in my heart this gigantic experience get this little set of cards do that for me could it be is this the Sean beans in my burrito of needs well no I mean it doesn't even have any plastic horses and yet oh maybe this honestly is something a little bit tasty each player manages a hand of cards that represent events or factions or characters in the conflict and in the quick start let's go two-player variant you smush up all the cards into red and blue Mega decks and have a ton more control over everything you do but in the three player or four player variants you're going to be splitting up these decks into separate factions giving each player their own set of unique about problems you're mostly going to fixate on the problems now if you're sir Kenneth big brain you can also do this with just two players treating each faction as individual and managing two hands of cards in isolation although that does raise some questions about the rule in the manual about not showing your cards to other players and all table talk being open presumably you either have to be a constant stream of Consciousness whilst playing or between rounds just hitting yourself in the head with a large cartoon hammer and the asymmetry here is tasty but that's something we're going to return to a little bit later yes not right now I will be back though and I will return with horses foreign obviously we don't have this great big map to explore and roam around but we do have this deck of numbered cards which form something I'm going to coin a geographical Adventure tube and that's almost a map each round you'll randomly select one of three locations with the earlier rounds feeling more Hobbit holiday or worst case scenario remember that weird night at the pub while as the game progresses things get gradually rockier until you really are on the precipice of the big hot bin in full fat table swamping War of the ring you had a whole hidden movement element running alongside the traditional Orcs on a map war game giving you two distinct wind conditions that pushed and pulled against each other in a really pleasing way that left plenty of space for bluffing and faints now there's none of that here but we do still have a division between the two types of areas as I mentioned earlier if you don't look after the fellowship on their little journey then the evil team really is going to have a big old points party and while the alternating blue and red decks of these battle locations doesn't offer the the Pomp and drama of a big table Battlefield war game it does still leave you feeling constantly having to prioritize one side of the game over the other a lot of cards have multiple uses and some uses are just straight up better than others the nasgul are great for attacking the fellowship but they might serve you better as a lingering threat each has an ability that can be triggered from the reserve we're doing so cycling that card rather than straight up removing it that threat on the horizon well it's gone for now a hobbit is useless in a battle just pointless but when eliminated by evil forces on the path well actually no they weren't they're they're fine they're just fine Hobbits won't die Sarah man just lingering around hanging about is so powerful and with the right combination of cards and planning he can crash into battle disappear they come back again into another fight and then he's dead but then he's not he's back because he has a special cloak but sometimes you'll just send him into a fight because you've got nothing else to do and he's dead but I guess he stopped that elf and I've talked quite a lot about when cards get cycled but as you've probably started to work out by now that's tactically quite useful just put it in my little temporary bin come back for me later and sometimes you really want to play that last card in hand but you don't have another card to cycle well you can but you have to forsake a card in order to play either from your reserves or just by randomly losing one of the top of your deck and it's this ceaseless chiseling away at your options that carves out that war of the ring magic every round every play has to go just right so you can set up that moment tactical hand management means if I use this then we can change this location to that location and then I can murder you with the biggest spider and meanwhile the rest of your opportunities and options are just slowly fizzling away you find the magical weapon for the hero that I think he died actually a few months ago with this card oh there's a chance I might be able to swing things back back around and the decks you play with aren't these unknowable depths there are a lot of cards if you're playing with all of the good cards or all of the U cards but you'll still see them all within one game and by the second game you'll go into it with a real sense of what you're doing and what you can do the same thing is true in full fat War of the ring but with that game for obvious reasons that's a much bigger ask and so yes this is deceptively diminutive there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye and also it's a lot more fun to just play with while you're still grocking it I don't really know what's going on but I'm having fun you know it's classic story Boy Meets Girl girl kills boy boy doesn't die because he's a bloody Hobbit why won't these breakfast deviant children men die let me tell you about a bit of this game's design I think is really clever these two objective types that you fight over each round the geographical Adventure tube and the far more randomized battle locations deck as a pair they're texturally really quite interesting when it comes to these heroic or anti-heroic magical moments a lot of the cars are really specific about how and when you can use them this card only works in a single location or numbers on the bottom of many cards dictate the only rounds in which you can play that card to the fellowship path now there are rare ways that you can break the whole framework of this game swapping out one of the locations for another one of the same tier often resolving it immediately causing much unrest and uproar and also there's ways in which you can have two different battle locations or more happening at the same time but mostly you just hold on to a card for a while and think if we end up at that place in round five then oh I'll be laughing and this is where the Simplicity of only having three choices per location is a choice that just feels right as a fan it kind of feels like you want more imagine if there were all these different types of things you could go along but actually in this instance three is just right and clever and I'm going to teach you why by going to the number Zone a flat 25 chance it might not even be Whole Earth holding on to the card you bin it and then you need it later and you just feel bad about the whole situation 50 chance that's just annoying I mean you're winning maybe winning the game on a source of a coin and nobody has a good time and everyone I just feel sick and I want to go 33 with loads of the recurring bits oh the odds aren't in your favor no no no which means if it doesn't play out well what do you expect but if it does oh as things just got spicy thanks for joining thanks for joining the numbers and see you next time keep it numbered and while each round has you rolling on the same odds on what the next hero location will be with the battle locations as you go through the game those decks get diminished and you get more and more reliable information about what the next battles might be and these two different Lanes of luck work wonderfully in tandem as the game reaches a conclusion you have increasingly knowable information that basically you could have and should have been planning for but you've still got that one in three Randomness each round that chance that you might get the perfect location and again this wouldn't work if the game wasn't so brutal about making you choose cards each and every card you play requires that a second different one gets cycled and that's fine because maybe that card will come back again but maybe it won't earlier in the game these choices about what to cycle feel terrible maybe not initially but a few rounds later when you realize that those giant elephants that you put in the back of the shed you really do need them right now well they will come back at some point but not immediately it might be too late and this decision space gets sharpened into a point as the game progresses those orc flavored Army cards you've been hoarding well looking through the battlefields remaining there's a two in three chance that they'll be useful next round these bad Lads though now that window's closed binzo binzo benzo Baggins the narrowing of options as you go through the game helps stop that weird Frozen paralysis that can often occur when you get to that point where everyone's like yes but I want to win more importantly it shows that this is a really good strategy game how things pan out at the end of the game is all to do with how well you've aligned your plans and played things as well as you can to set yourself up for the finale and sometimes you've done all the work and Luck's not on your side and it all goes horribly wrong anyway that's life and when talking about the shape of a game I mean the way things feel at the start and the end and in the middle and a lot of great game designs we do see this funneling off because in games you do things exponentially in the first round you've got three Sheep by the end you've got six thousand you're gonna need to ensure that players have a lot fewer things they can do with sheep at that point in the game mostly gangs aren't even wrapping themselves up into a neat final point they're just trying to maintain a consistent form while the game's designs push out threatening to explode into some sort of infinite jelly and I mean that's fun of games is brushing up against the edges of these possibilities pushing at the walls of silliness that's just outside but the shape of War of the Ring like a lot of other War Games felt very different it wasn't this kind of smooth line it was lumpy and the shape of this card game is outright lumpy too and that means that yeah you're not having a smooth experience some rounds you will just be incredibly powerful people will fear you other rounds sorry I got nothing it's just not a great time for the Orcs right now this ebb and flow feels really notable in the full fat Team game four player variant this give and take feeling useless and Powerful or preparing for the next round it keeps the drama of the game pumping and feeling juicy and it also allows for The Narrative of the source material to spike its way through out of the game into your minds as players initially it just feels like there's a certain coldness to seeing a few numbers printed on a nazgul's bottom but then it Dawns on you of course they can't do anything useful in the middle of the game or the hobbit's gone into a big bloody cave and that constant thinning down of options allows familiar stories to emerge I'm sorry these armies can't be here to help you at this current time please leave a message after the dwarf Gandalf was defeated but then we never came back I'm sure he's sure he's gonna come back this obviously doesn't have the oh my gosh I need to play this energy of the biggest table you've ever seen transformed into the biggest map but it is amazing the extent to which they have squidged the soul of that game into this much smaller package and it doesn't scratch the same itch for me unfortunately it doesn't replace my strange internal desire to own the original but I can easily recommend it if you like me are a big fan of those bloody Rings honestly I think Hobbits could save an awful lot of time if they just call the giant eagles eating them and then sold the ring on Etsy right but hey can we please just have a pause and a small amount of gentleman's Applause a gentleman's Applause I said gentlemen to pause very good it's a Cooperative team-based card game team-based games are really cool there aren't enough of them this is an asymmetric Team game and his knee I really like that and that's why it gets the official gentleman's Applause award from no but maybe you don't want this or you can't get this for reasons to be Illustrated earlier we've got a collective problem haven't we we're all just weirdos here are some alternative things I want to mention etin now this game wasn't as good as I wanted it to be it's a team-based card battler that was almost brilliant if you're playing with the most complicated decks you do some really wacky stuff in terms of passing cards between players and having these factions intermingle but a lot of the basic easy factions are a bit boring so close to being an absolute gem it's worth a look and I want more in that vein please whoever made that I could I know who made that but I've said the line now next shot Star Wars rebellion I don't like this game we didn't really like this game but people love it and if you do play it multiple times you get a sense of the shape of it in the same way it's true of this game listen I'm just putting it out there because everyone's always like what about Star Wars rebellion and they love it so maybe you'll love it too fill your boots finally a special mention for something we reviewed really recently a head-to-head Team game called guards of Atlantis 2 that we didn't like it that much we thought it was good but not amazing but hey again lots of people loved it check out the video it might be your flavor of sauce and that's it thank you for watching I've got to go now unfortunately that's right it's time to pack all of this up because I have to get back to being a constant part of Tom's board game collection [Music] remember if you can't find this game because it's not available don't despair we are a community and yeah just find someone else who's got it find someone anyone nearby got this game I'd love to play it let's meet up and play it right let's imagine Tom let's imagine yeah uh you own this game and I don't own this game hey Tom do you want to play your copy of watering card game with me I'll come around we could play the game no thank you I've got

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 200,376

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Tom Brewster, Matt Lees, War of the Ring, War of the Ring The Card Game, Card Games, Lord of the Rings, LOTR, Sean Bean, Magic The Gathering, mtg lotr

Id: xM3vbJbulZ8

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023