If the expansion works, it should add some very welcome depth to the game; if not, it'll make an attractively simple game overly fiddly and complicated. The only way to find out is to try it!
John Howe: Corsairs, no year given
**
Last time, we tried a three-player game where I played as Saruman, but the hobbit terrorists managed to destroy the Ring. This time, I represented the Free Peoples against two players sharing Shadow duties. The game itself was another narrowly run thing; the Shadow reached 11 victory points when Lórien fell, with the Fellowship two steps away from the Cracks of Doom. So at least the expansion hasn't seemed to change the balance of the game dramatically!
Crucially, we did get to deploy several factions: the Eagles helped out the Free Peoples by chasing the Nazgûl and contributing to the defense of the Woodland Realm, while the Dunlendings stormed Helm's Deep, the Corsairs landed at Dol Amroth and a spider ate Faramir at Pelargir.
Above, background: Eagles chase the Nazgûl away from the Fellowship; foreground: the Uruk-hai and their Dunlending allies take Helm's Deep.
The way factions work is that each of them has an activation condition: the Eagles and spiders, for example, can be brought into play with a Muster die as soon as the Fellowship is no longer in Rivendell. As soon as at least one faction is in play, that side rolls a Faction die with its Action dice, which lets you play or draw Faction cards, or recruit more figures or new factions. Faction cards are a new kind of Event card that you draw and hold in hand separately from the other Event cards. These offer some ways to get factions into battle, but the most important way is Call to Battle cards, which you can add to your hand and play as combat cards to involve factions.
This all feels a bit fiddly at first, but once you work it out, it begins to proceed quite smoothly. The Faction card deck is probably, for our money, the least succesful part of the expansion: especially as the lone Free Peoples player, you keep drawing cards that affect factions that aren't in play at all yet, and even when they do, the effects aren't usually that powerful, so they start getting overlooked in favor of the much more impactful Character and Strategy cards. Some abilities are also contingent on managing to draw the right Faction card: if you want your army in Umbar to make an amphibious descent somewhere, you're basically stuck until you manage to find a copy of Ships of Great Draught in the Faction deck. So this isn't a great mechanic. Sadly, this tends to make factions a bit of an afterthought in actual play, with the Faction die almost invariably the last one to be used in a turn.
Having said that, though, even if factions very much play second fiddle to each player's main forces, it certainly doesn't mean they don't add anything to the game. Of the Shadow factions, the Dunlendings were particularly succesful: they can be recruited to join Saruman's armies and used as cannon fodder in the assault on Rohan, which is pretty much spot on thematically and worked well in the game. The Corsairs were held back by the lack of an appropriate Faction card, but as soon as it showed up, they made a dramatic descent on Dol Amroth and captured it. The spiders mostly served as auxiliaries to the armies of Sauron, but their ability to specifically attack leaders and Companions is actually surprisingly nasty!
On the Free Peoples side, the only faction that saw play this time were the Eagles, but they were excellent. They helped whittle down the army besieging the Woodland Realm, chased away some Nazgûl and bought a little more time for Lórien by negating the Witch-king's leadership in a crucial battle. Their home base at Eagles' Eyrie lets them help out from Erebor to Lórien. It'd be a strange set of circumstances if the Free Peoples player didn't find it worth their time to use a Muster result to get the Eagles in play.
**
If I have one complaint to make about the base game, it comes down to the action dice. One aspect of War of the Ring that we quite enjoy is that at the beginning of the game, the event cards you draw serve to direct the game in a way that you can never fully anticipate. As an extreme example, if as the Free Peoples player you were to draw The Western Way and Fear, Fire, Foes as your first cards, you'd be highly tempted to have the Fellowship head west! Even though the starting setup is always the same, the event cards, and to a lesser extent the action dice, create a random element that strongly enhances gameplay.
At the end of the game, though, the inherent randomness of the action dice can really hamstring the Free Peoples. In our first game with the Warriors expansion, for instance, I arguably lost the game due to a string of Hunt tiles with the Reveal icon on the Mordor track, combined with dismal rolls of nearly all Muster and Event. I was using an Elven-ring per turn just to be able to move the Fellowship even once, while the Muster and Event results were damn near useless at that point in the game. I've similarly had an attempt at a Free Peoples military victory founder on a lack of Army or Character results, leaving my armies sitting on their hands outside crucial Shadow strongholds. To add insult to irony, there's a late-game character who can change Muster dice into Army dice: the Mouth of Sauron. The Free Peoples could really use some kind of parallel ability.
**
To sum up, though: we liked Warriors of Middle-earth, and we'll be using it in our future games of War of the Ring. While the factions can sometimes feel like a bit of an afterthought, on the whole they're a positive addition to the game and they don't overencumber it.
Now if I could just find a copy of Lords of Middle-earth somewhere...
No comments:
Post a Comment