Origins

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship has been a long time coming. Its roots can be found in my earliest attempts at game design and my love of Tolkien.

My Uncle Pat introduced me to the works of Tolkien when I was a young teenager. This was the same uncle who designed games in his spare time, inspiring me, at a young age, to do the same (1). He gave me a tattered edition of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings along, with a dog-eared copy of Robert Foster’s A Guide to Middle-earth and his copy of Middle-earth Role Playing. I never played the role-playing game, but devoured everything.

Later as a teen, I played Howard Barasch and Richard Berg’s War of the Ring (1977) over Christmas break with my dad. We woke up, had a quick breakfast, then spent the rest of the day playing it, not stopping to eat or even change out of our pajamas. I lost on what was essentially a coin toss at Mount Doom around dinner time. (Then, if I recall correctly, threw a bit of a fit.) We played only the “character game,” not the full war game. The full version was too complex for me at the time, and likely still is. Before War of the Ring, my war game experience was limited to Avalon Hill’s Tactics II (1958), the The Battle of the Bulge (1965), and Midway (1964). They didn’t resonate with me at the time: I was neither interested in the stories they told nor their history, and lost to my dad every time, often in a state of frustration.

I made an early attempt to create my own fantasy war game, one that was more accessible to me, when I was about 15 years old. I named it Quest of the Nine Orbs. It was highly derivative of War of the Ring, both mechanically and thematically, but I’d left out all the bits that I found frustrating or fiddly. My uncle Pat provided the illustrations. I played the game with friends a few times and then packed it away for nearly 40 years. (2)

The game’s plot was pretty thin: the Good player needed to recover the majority of magical orbs and bring them to their capital while the Evil player tried to do the same. The game’s “Cloaked Nornaz,” “Mark of Razum,” and “Men of Dalen” were clearly derived from the Nazgûl, Rohirrim, and Men of Dale. There was even a Gollum-like character who could switch his allegiance. But I had a lot of fun making my own world nonetheless, and took great pleasure in drawing its map.

In the mid-2000s, I tried to play Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi, and Francesco Nepitello’s War of the Ring (2004, first edition). I found it difficult to get into, I couldn’t read the tiny type on the cards, and never completed a game.

In October of 2021 (35 years after Quest of the Nine Orbs!) things started to come together in my mind. I had both an idea for how I could make a new game based on the story of the War of the Ring along with an opportunity to bring it to market.

The opportunity came before the idea. I had discussed a number of different licenses with Z-Man for future Pandemic System games and The Lord of the Rings was an early favorite. The trouble was, I really didn’t have any concept of how I’d pull it off, nor did I have the time or stamina that I figured such a project would require at the time. But a few years after the release and success of Fall of Rome (2018), the ideas started to come together. Fall of Rome featured barbarians migrating across a map of the Roman Empire and includes a dice-based battle system. Perhaps I could modify those mechanisms as a starting point for a game set in Middle-earth?

I figured the resulting game might be a good “war game for non-wargamers” since it would be based on a familiar system (Pandemic). And I enjoyed the fun symmetry to all of this: Pandemic itself was influenced by many games, most notably Reiner Knizia’s cooperative game, The Lord of the Rings (2000). It felt like things could come full circle.

Starting Points

Pandemic System games can be broken down into two major parts: the puzzle the players are trying to solve and the threat that is working against them.

At the beginning of development, I kept the puzzle simple. Frodo would need to collect 5 ring cards with the help of the other players, travel to Mordor, and discard them to destroy The Ring. This was similar in a sense to melding 5 cards of the same color to cure a disease at a research station in Pandemic. I put this simple puzzle in place quickly and moved on to work on the threat system.

a “Simplest possible experiment.” I find that I get the best results if I quickly try out something simple and build out from there. This early notebook page has the order of play, actions menu, and shadow card behavior, and the attributes of each location.

For the threat, I needed to find some way to model the forces of Sauron, most notably shadow troops marching across Middle-earth and the Nazgûl, flying overhead. Using a simple point-to-point map, I started by playing around with wooden cubes and simple threat cards. While I liked the way characters could move troops around in Fall of Rome and engage enemy forces, I didn’t think the barbarian migration behaviors from that game were suitable for the forces of Sauron. I wanted to see distinct armies of orcs moving across the board that would threaten Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep – not endless, unbroken streams of troops emanating from Mordor.

First pencil sketch of the board from 12 October 2021.

An early board undergoing a playtest. The battle lines were a foundational concept.

A prototype shadow card. If the top card of the draw pile shows a flag, all the armies on the pictured battle line (from Umbar to Helm’s Deep) advance. If the top card shows a banner, then the army in Umbar is reinforced.

I came upon a mechanism I really liked: by using shadow cards with two different behaviors, “reinforce” or “advance,” armies could accumulate troops before they marched out into battle. The shadow cards each showed both behaviors (reinforce and advance) and the top card of the shadow deck would indicate which of the two behaviors triggered with each card draw. This idea hooked me right away and became the core of the threat engine. I spent over two years refining it.

By interweaving the lines the troops used to advance on the board, I found that these armies could have behaviors that could be anticipated but not wholly predicted. Troops from Núrn typically march forth to attack Minas Tirith, but depending on the specific order the shadow cards were drawn, they might instead march on Helm’s Deep, The Woodland Realm, Erebor, Lórien, Dol Amroth, or in rarer combinations, locations as far away as The Grey Havens or even The Shire or Rivendell.

I brought a bare bones prototype to The Gathering of Friends, a game convention that I attend each year. Despite how raw the game was, playtesters liked what they saw so far and encouraged me to keep at it. On arriving home and learning that I’d been exposed to COVID at The Gathering, I sequestered myself in a back bedroom and spent two days in isolation, working on the game nonstop using all the data and ideas I’d collected at the convention.

Solo tests of the early game during isolation.

Major Problems to Solve

Traversing Middle-earth

The first major problem I had to solve was figuring out how to make movement across Middle-earth interesting and viable. You fly around the board in Pandemic, take trains across Iberia, and can sail across the Mediterranean in Fall of Rome, all letting you cover a lot of ground quickly. The residents of Middle-earth (with the exception of some travel on horseback and the occasional eagle) are largely crossing their large world fairly slowly, on foot.

Early on in development, I gave each player two characters to play instead of one. This made the game feel much better since The Lord of the Rings features such a large ensemble of characters. (For example, in a two-player game, having a Fellowship made up of only two characters, one being Frodo, felt really wrong.) But having a larger cast also meant that more of the board would be easily reachable with more characters in more places.

To make movement faster and more interesting, I let characters move along with each other. This was appropriate thematically: The Fellowship traveled together, after all. But it also meant that their effective range of movement could be much greater if needed. Aragorn could, for example, lead Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin to from Bree to Rivendell to join Gandalf on his turn. Then Gandalf could lead the group further south to the Fords of Isen on his turn, to be led even further east through Rohan by Éowyn on her turn.

Character Clumping

Early tests showed that all this traveling together could be a problem, however, as there was a tendency for everyone to bunch together in one big group over much of the game, making it far less interesting. I certainly didn’t want the dominant strategy to be having the entire Fellowship sneak into Mordor together!

To address this, I need the characters to be strong together but then present a whole host of reasons why they needed to be apart.

To start, I developed the shadow cards and battle lines so that the shadow troops would threaten multiple havens in different regions of the board, often at the same time. In this way, players couldn’t accompany Frodo and also defend Helm’s Deep or Minas Tirith at the same time. (While there are some friendly troops in the havens that can defend themselves to some degree, they can’t move or muster on their own. So if the Rohirrim need to rush to defend Minas Tirith, a player character needs to ensure that happens. And if the Easterlings are marching on Dale, well, another player character is going to need to do something about that.) This kept the characters as the major agents of change in the story and required them to be active and make tradeoffs, all over the board.

Easy Melds, Monotony, and Grind

Creating fires all over the board worked pretty well to break up The Fellowship. But other problems reared their ugly heads:

What happens if Frodo draws a lot of ring cards early in the game? He can just sprint to Mordor and win.
How do I prevent each game from being the same, well-worn march to Mount Doom?
How can I make each region of the board interesting and active?

The ring-melding problem plagued me. For nearly a year, I had the players add the ring cards to each section of the deck along with the Skies Darken cards (the cards that function like Epidemic cards). While this technically worked, it felt clunky. It required additional setup, but worse, it felt like the players were playing the game only to bide the time that was required to draw the ring cards they needed. It felt grindy. It felt like work.

A Breakthrough – Objective Cards

Martin Bouchard at The Gathering of Friends (3)

Fortunately, I found a solution that addressed all of the above problems and more. About a year into development, after some fruitful conversations with Martin Bouchard, I added objective cards to the game. Like any great design solution, they solved more than one problem at the same time:

They provided incremental goals to the game. Before I added objectives, the players’ experience was one long, slow, slip into a pit of despair, resolving all at once only at the very end of the game. With the introduction of the new objectives, hope could be rekindled at several points during the game. Completing an objective felt like an act break and helped generate a series of upbeats and downbeats – a simple, proven foundation for a compelling story.

They let me introduce additional non-player characters, threats, and subplots without complicating the core game with additional subsystems. The Balrog, Shelob, Denethor, Théoden, the Dead Men of Dunharrow, and others appear in the game in this way.
They opened up the world of the game, allowing for more counterfactuals to be explored. What if peace was made with the Dunlendings? What if you weren’t exactly sure when Gandalf would appear after his fight with the Balrog? What if Moria, Osgiliath, or even Minas Morgul was retaken by the Free Peoples?
Mechanically, the objectives provided uses for all the other suits of player cards used in the game. In addition to needing to collect the ring (resistance) suit, you might need to meld friendship, stealth, or valor. This solved the problem I had where the players might draw all the ring cards they needed during the first round of the game. With the addition of these other melds, drawing rings early was no longer a blessing since they’d compete for space in your hand with all the other cards needed for the other objectives. This simplified the game’s setup and gave the players flexibility over which objectives to attempt to complete first.
They simplified the presentation of the rules for destroying The Ring. Instead of needing to learn and remember the rules for this one-time action as part of the core game, the rules could simply be presented off to the side, on the card for its objective, next to every other objective.
They provided a more compelling way to scale the difficulty of the game. Players could make the game harder by introducing more objectives instead of just increasing the number and rate of shadow troops that are added to the board.

Managing Complexity

Development was a constant struggle to resolve the tension between bringing to life more iconic story moments while keeping complexity under control. I found that I could integrate many one-off story elements through the game’s objective cards, event cards, and character abilities, but needed some additional subsystems to make the core game tick.

Two of these important subsystems relied on dice: the way the Nazgûl search for Frodo and the way battles are conducted. As these systems evolved, their reference cards saw more iterations than any other element in the game.

This video, showing the evolution of the reference cards, gives you a good sense of this iteration:

The game started like many of the other Pandemic System games, with a single way to win and multiple ways to lose. The problem I started to have, however, was that the number of ways to lose kept piling up and keeping track of all these game loss conditions made the game feel more complex. At one point you could lose the game if shadow troops captured two havens, if you ran out of player cards, if you ran out shadow troops, or if the Ring-bearer took on too much corruption or perished. Not only was this a lot to keep track of, it was unforgiving! In an early demo to the publisher we lost the game on turn four when a single haven was lost. (4) I eventually solved this by funneling all of these loss conditions into a single number: Frodo’s despair. This made the game more dynamic and forgiving (you could gain hope as well as despair and survive the loss of havens) and you could have exciting finishes where you won the game even after all the player cards or shadow troops were exhausted.

Perhaps the trickiest bit of all was managing the overall visual complexity of the board. Players reported enjoying the way the troops accumulated and moved along the battle lines as one of their favorite aspects of the game. But, in addition to simply making them work as a game element, keeping the battle lines from looking like a jumbled pile of spaghetti – while still being accessible to players with limited color vision – was quite the challenge.

The map underwent dozens of iterations, many of which are captured in this video:

Another key part of managing all this complexity was killing some darlings.

Abandoned Concepts

Character Combat, Wounds, Perishing, Different Ring-bearers

Before I had the objective system, and inspired by the 1977 edition of War of the Ring, I went down a path where player characters could confront many of the servants of shadow (The Nazgûl, The Balrog, Shelob, The Watcher in the Water, even Old Man Willow and many others) in head-to-head encounters. Players used the battle dice to resolve individual combat, took wounds, and could even perish. And that, in turn, could mean needing new Ring-bearers…

Needless to say, this was all very complicated and didn’t serve the story particularly well. (Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin shouldn’t be able to defeat the Balrog on their own, for example!) I simplified and removed these elements. The Nazgûl now cause despair rather than wounds. Iconic foes such as The Balrog and Shelob appear instead on objective cards. And only Frodo can now carry and destroy The Ring. (That change alone, saved nearly a page of rules.) As a result, the game felt much tighter, took far less time to learn, and still contained all of its key moments.

Evolving Characters

Taking cues from the story and other War of the Ring games, I experimented with versions of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Gollum that could grow stronger or transform. Gandalf the Grey could become Gandalf the White, Strider could become Aragorn, and Sméagol could transform into Gollum and back again. I loved this concept and must have tried at least a dozen versions of Gollum/Sméagol alone. While these all had their charms, they ultimately proved too complex. I found simpler ways to include these elements using character abilities and objective cards. Only Gandalf now undergoes a change and only after confronting the Balrog.

Some of the many (complex looking!) versions of Gollum below. Click to see a larger version.

Mobilization, Zones of Control, Stacking Limits

Yeah, I don’t think that we’re going to retake Minas Tirith in this game. Fortunately, it looks like Frodo & Sam, Gollum (and Aragorn!) may have succeeded at Mount Doom nonetheless.

I experimented with some rules that restricted both the addition and movement of friendly troops to satisfy the expectations of people familiar with war games. I ultimately removed these rules to increase player agency, minimize frustration, simplify the game, and reduce the number of errors I’d seen in playtesting. I kept some of the thematic aspects around mobilizing the Free Peoples in some of the objective cards without complicating the game’s core rules.

For a long while, I limited the number of troops of a given army to 3 cubes, mostly out of habit. The game got significantly easier to learn and more fun to play when I dropped that restriction. It’s a good rule of thumb: when in doubt, drop the restriction.

Location Effects and Equipment

The landscape of Middle-earth is rich with story. To bring its locations to life and provide additional reasons to visit the various regions of the board I’d initially included a “location event” on nearly half of the player cards. This meant that in addition to seeing a location name and suit on each card, you’d have an effect you could trigger if your character was in the specified location. This provided a rich tapestry of options and potential stories. It also made players’ heads explode and added substantially to the play length. I first moved these effects onto the ring cards and then I boosted their strength and moved the best of them onto dedicated event cards. The effects felt better, play length dropped, and heads stopped exploding. Similarly, I experimented with an equipment deck that players could spend friendship on. The results were dull: it turns out that characters are much more exciting than objects and the deck didn’t add any interesting decisions to the game. I quickly dropped it.

Staying True to Tolkien’s World

I wanted one of the central themes of the book, that even the least of us, standing up to our oppressors, even at overwhelming odds, can make the difference. So, while I briefly considered letting the players win through some sort of military victory (capturing Barad-dûr, for example), I abandoned it fairly quickly. And I never considered letting the players keep The Ring or to use it militarily. You can only use it to avoid shadow troops temporarily, and even that comes at a cost to Frodo.

Which leads to the way Frodo’s struggle is characterized in the game. This evolved over time. In early versions Frodo gradually underwent “corruption.” This changed midway through development into a struggle with despair. That in turn, changed again as opportunities for “recovering despair” multiplied. We changed “recovering despair” to “gaining hope” since that sounded more natural.

I initially made the change from corruption to despair to better explain why losing a haven of the Free Peoples might lead to defeat, but I’d argue the struggle between hope and despair is a more important theme in the book than Frodo’s struggle to resist The Ring’s corrupting influence. (5) But do note that I was able to capture that final moment of struggle against The Ring’s corrupting influence with a final die roll on Mount Doom, where Frodo is better able to resist if he’s suffering from less despair.

Regarding that final die roll: it was important to me that there was some uncertainty regarding The Ring’s final destruction at Mount Doom. This is in keeping with the story. Recall that in the book, Frodo decides to keep The Ring for himself and if it wasn’t for Gollum’s actions at the last moment, it likely would not have been destroyed. But this is also important mechanically: if you’re able to predict with absolute certainty how the game will play out in the final act, there’s less tension and this typically leads to a less satisfying finish. This, of course, needs to be balanced out: you don’t want the game to end on a coin flip! (I learned for myself with my early experience with War of the Ring.) I was able to resolve these forces by requiring a roll in most cases, while also giving the players multiple ways to mitigate its outcome. Other characters (most notably Sam and Gollum) can help, Frodo and other characters can bring extra resistance with them to reroll dice, and players can use event cards. And the test doesn’t even need to be made if Frodo is in really good condition and there are few Nazgûl around.

Bonus Materials

Development History

I’ve written up an abridged history of the game’s development, pulling notes from my design journal (6) for those who are interested in a closer look at how the design came together.

Sources and Trivia

While the game is based specifically on The Lord of the Rings book, I consumed all manner of other related media, using various wikis, the movies, Karen Wynn Fonstad’s excellent Atlas of Middle Earth, and many other games on the subject. Like any fan of Tolkien, trivia started to quickly accumulate in my brain. I thought I’d share some of it in my own, short trivia quiz. Let me know how you fare.

Tube Map

I’m recently back from UK Games Expo where we pre-released the game. Before heading up to Birmingham for the conference I spent the day touring London to get over my jet lag. There, I made good use of the London Tube Map. Later, at the conference, during a demo, one of the players noted that the battle lines on the board reminded them of the tube map.

That got me thinking. And then, I simply couldn’t resist.

Thanks

These games are the result of many talented people working together. First, massive thanks go out to the Z-Man development team. Kevin Ellenberg was a reliable and patient partner who carefully documented many playtests and helped break them down with scientific precision. The product’s gorgeous appearance came together under Bree Woodward’s steady and confident hand. We were fortunate that Sam Shimota was available to work out the challenging graphic design of the board (Sam had proven his skill on other Pandemic System titles including Fall of Rome) and Jared Blando brought many playful storytelling elements to life in the illustrations and cartography for the board. Meanwhile, Cory Godbey provided wonderful character illustrations. This is Corey’s second board game project ever; the first was his work on another title of mine, Ziggurat, and I was so happy when Bree independently discovered and suggested he work on this game.

On the playtesting side, huge thanks go to Randy Hoyt, Rich Fulcher, Brent Lloyd, and Corey Thompson. They each played the game many times and offered countless suggestions over multiple years. Thanks also to Paolo Mori for some of the foundational work on Fall of Rome, to Tom Lehmann for his suggestions and support over the years, and to Pete Fenlon for his encouragement.

Notes

This same Pat Leacock (coincidentally) led Elizabeth Hargrave (of Undergrove and Wingspan fame) on a mushroom foray in the Chicagoland area before I met her.
Please do not add this game to BGG’s database. I only made one prototype and I promise you, it wasn’t very good.
Like the original Pandemic, I’d end up taking this game to the Gathering three successive years.
Here’s a tip: when demoing a cooperative game to a publisher, make sure you don’t lose on the fourth turn.
A simple measure: “despair” appears 63 times in the novel while variations of “corrupt” appear only 8 times.
The journal’s first entry was 14 October 2021, its last entry was 19 December 2024, and it ended up being over 750 pages long.