The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship – Development History (Abridged)
2021
October
I start working in the design journal, writing a treatment and drafting out how the game could work. I then put it aside for a while as there are no subsequent entries until March, 2022.
2022
March
I test the first version.
I decide to make a simplified “toy” version of the game before getting “bogged down [with] equipment, allies, baddies, capture, and so on.”
I pulled search out of the order of play and moved it to the shadow cards.
Issues: some areas of the board aren’t used much. Players “clumped together” as one big fellowship and all moved around the board together.
April
Tons of design, testing, and development. The game begins to take shape.
Players begin controlling two different characters. Later in the month, the 4+1 action split comes into play.
Battles begin to draw the Eye of Sauron away from the Ring-bearer. I noted that this was a big win thematically and tactically.
Added the “Capture Stronghold” action and stronghold tokens.
The Fellowship action was changed so players need to be in the pictured region.
Éowyn gets the ability to attack Nazgûl and Legolas learns how to shoot orcs with stealth.
I starting shuffling the ring (resistance) cards into the deck along with the Skies Darken cards to space them out to ensure they don’t all come out too early in the game.
I add 5 regions to the board, increasing it from 8 to 13 regions.
The board gets its first low-fidelity artwork (mountains, trees, etc.)
I remove the “Travel” suit on the player cards.
I add the separate Resolve and Discard areas for shadow cards to make it easier to track how many cards you’ve resolved.
I start building out the melds required for the game: Mobilize (friendship), Capture (strength), enter Mordor (stealth) and Destroy the Ring (resistance).
The seeds of the Prepare action are sown when I begin work on the Solo game when it becomes clear a single hand of cards won’t work for more than two characters.
I start sketching out a Servants of Sauron challenge that’s meant to embody many of the non-army baddies in the book.
Issues being tackled at this point:
The Skies Darken cards and Nazgûl aren’t scary enough.
How to prevent the game from being flat if the ring bearer draws all the rings?
So many rules!
May
Corruption starts being tracked on the board like outbreaks.
Mordor is quite different at this time and has a lot of abandoned ideas: entering Mordor requires that players spend a number of stealth per character. Capturing a shadow stronghold on the borders of Mordor removes this stealth requirement. Different strongholds require different amounts of strength [valor] to capture. If you capture Barad-dûr, Sauron will no longer search. It’s also smaller, containing only 5 locations.
The new “Prepare” action now lets you turn a card into a token.
Skies Darken cards add corruption but that feels off.
Friendship can be spent to ignore corruption.
I consider adding objective cards (like Pandemic Legacy) into the game as a way of providing some intermediate goals and upbeats. But no development work begins on them.
Lots of work on battles in an attempt to simplify them.
Lots of work trying to simplify search.
Worked on the Agents of Sauron challenge meant to offload a lot of the game’s complexity into an optional challenge.
Issues:
Search is confusing.
Troop interactions are difficult to work out since they behave differently.
Not enough upbeats.
Too complex!
June
Explored the idea of having Frodo as an NPC and abandoned it as a “bankrupt concept.”
Developed the Destroy the Ring action more; added more ways to mitigate the roll so the game doesn’t end “on a coin flip.”
More futzing on various things but not a lot of forward progress.
July
First test with Z-man (Sophie Gravel and Martin Bouchard). We lost the game after 4 turns!
Changed the game loss conditions. You no longer lose if you lose 1 stronghold. Possible to recapture them.
Complexity flagged as an issue. To address:
Decide to drop all of the location effects.
Simplify the strongholds.
Drop the “star” from the battle die (this worked like Fall of Rome).
Sketched out an “allies” deck (which had many of the location effects) and then abandoned it since it was pretty inelegant.
Dropped the ability to transfer the ring. If Frodo dies, the game is lost. Massive step forward in simplicity.
The concept of a “haven” is introduced (as opposed to a friendly stronghold) so that it can also be applied to The Shire.
Rerouted more of the battle lines so they pass through multiple havens.
Invented the “lose 1 troop unless you’re in a haven” die side.
August
More testing.
Developed some abilities pertaining to battles to hand back out to characters now that the “star” result is no longer on the battle dice.
More reference card development.
Havens become hexagons, shadow strongholds stay square.
First start considering feeding every loss condition into the corruption track. Was quite unsure about it at first.
“Corruption” becomes “despair” as a side effect. (The loss of a haven wouldn’t lead to corruption but would increase despair.) Later, after spending more time with the book, it’s evident to me that despair is a better overall term for what Frodo struggles with. “Despair” appears 63 times in the novel; variations of “corrupt” only appear 8 times.
The player cards show a location with its distance from The Shire on them for use as a first-player rule.
Considered moving the events off of the ring cards onto dedicated event cards.
September
Did some solo game development – you have to Prepare in the matching region.
Made the first Nazgûl standees for the prototype.
Frodo starts getting despair if he’s in the region with the Eye when a Skies Darken card is drawn to gradually increase the baseline of despair and keep Frodo on the move.
Changed the cost for entering Mordor. More expensive, but troops can enter.
Removed the stacking limits for friendly and shadow troops.
Concerns at this point:
Overall complexity
Play length
Anticlimactic finishes
October
Skies Darken cards aren’t scary enough. Tried an effect where they caused 3 troops to be put at the front of the drawn battle line. That was scary! But also too variable. Ultimately decide to print the location on the Skies Darken cards themselves in December. I think I must have tried a dozen different things before coming up with this solution.
Continued to iterate on the rules for how troops interact with each other. (Can the friendly troops stop the shadow troops from moving and vice-versa?)
In an attempt to combat complexity, I consider having an intro game and a “full” game (a design crutch). Flirted with moving the Capture action out of the intro game.
Considered removing wounds from the game – a pretty massive change.
Dropped the ability to upgrade Gandalf into Gandalf the White and Strider into Aragorn.
November
Reworked the language in the game. I’d been using “battle” as a noun and a verb and that could lead to confusion. The action becomes “Attack” and leads to a battle roll.
Pulled the Capture action back into the main game. I’d ultimately remove both of the expansions I’d been developing along the way. They were a useful way to capture and experiment with ideas without fully committing to them.
December
Handed the first prototype off to Z-man! (Version 2.9) I make a note that there’s still time for some tinkering, but nothing major. (Heh, if I only knew then…)
At the request of Z-man, I started to tinker around with some new ideas for an expansion. At this point, I’ve pushed the Agents of Sauron rules, wounds (and perishing and the Heal action) and upgradeable characters into a possible expansion.
Toyed around with a “Gifts” expansion concept that captured a lot of the equipment in the novel.
First work on Gollum started.
Lots of work refactoring how search works because of continued confusion.
2023
January
Search keyed off of Frodo moving—not the Nazgûl moving for the first time.
Adjusted Merry & Pippin so they couldn’t call every Nazgûl to their region.
March
Came up with the final design for Skies Darken.
Lots of development on Galadriel and Merry & Pippin.
Started players at 2 despair so Capture has a benefit immediately.
Toyed with an alternate behavior for the Eye of Sauron, then abandoned it because it was worse.
Did some stress testing with 7 and 8 Skies Darken cards.
April
Met with Z-man in person to work on development. They want to ensure the game has enough variability and are concerned a bit about playing Frodo.
Started designing “vignette cards” that evolve into objective cards later in the month. Originally, these were progressively disclosed. I’ve got 18 working objectives by the end of the month.
Experimented with having the Skies Darken cards add “elite troops.”
Briefly considered putting Frodo on rails (on a predetermined path).
May
More work on Gollum.
Toyed with an idea where the Skies Darken cards introduce some sort of new effect or behavior on the game.
June
More development work on characters and objectives. This is the bulk of the development work going forward.
July
Met with the new Z-man team. They start to look for a developer for the game.
August
More objective development.
September
The objectives are made a standard part of the game so the ring cards no longer have to be distributed into the different periods of the deck.
More character and objective development. A bit of map development.
October
Lots of work on Gollum.
Kevin Ellenberg joins the team as a developer and begins lots of testing in Tabletop Simulator.
November
More work on Gollum. So many versions of Gollum.
Lots more development work on Mordor’s locations, paths, and special paths.
Continued development of objectives.
From this point forward, Kevin Ellenburg does lots more testing as well as character and objective development each month with my input.
December
More work on Gollum.
I sketched a Barad-dûr dice tower to try out.
Tom Lehmann suggests that instead of “recovering from despair” you should “gain hope.”
Kevin suggests using “horde” cubes to keep component counts under control. We ultimately reject the idea since making change for horde cubes is confusing and big piles of orcs are fun.
We edit and re-edit and re-edit Éowyn’s abilities for clarity.
More objective development.
I float the idea of using “numbers of note” from the novel for determining the start player and start researching those.
January
Isengard and Mordor are identified as being “too weak” in testing. Kevin suggests starting the game with two special shadow cards, one for Isengard and one for Mordor in the shadow discard pile. (This is roughly similar to the way the purple disease cards are seeded at the start of the Mutation Challenge for Pandemic.) We iterate on the effects. This ends up being a pretty simple way to embody Sauron and Saruman in the game.
We experiment with restricting the movement of troops that encounter shadow troops. (Wargamers who test typically expect this.) Ultimately, I remove this rule so friendly troop movement isn’t restricted because it’s more fun, less frustrating, more similar to the way the shadow troops behave, and less complex.
Early graphic design work starts on the board.
We experiment with an Elven Boats event card.
Kevin starts doing a detailed text review, basically breaking down each sentence of each ability on every character and objective.
February
More work on the special shadow cards and Gollum.
The first artwork for the game comes in.
Graphic design work starts on the character cards.
March
Work on the quotes for the character cards.
Lots more testing.
The region formerly known as Esgaroth becomes “Dale.”
April
Really rough first passes of the board’s graphic design is done.
May
Kevin develops some premade scenario packs of objectives.
June
More iteration on the map’s graphic design.
Many, many continued updates and tweaks to objectives and characters based on testing.
Big advances in the graphic design of the board, shadow cards, and characters.
July
Work starts on the meeple design for friendly troops.
August
Rules proofing kicks into high gear.
Character card design gets picked apart.
We work on the palette for each of the characters.
Work starts on the reference tables on the back of the rulebook.
Lots more visual design development of the shadow card design.
Lots more work on the reference cards – a real struggle to make them legible!
I draft a style guide for when to use inline text vs. icons in the rules, cards, and reference material and Kevin refines it.
September–October
Lots of work editing the rulebook.
Z-man art team comes up with new shapes for havens and shadow strongholds. (Soft vs. spikey!)
December
Fine points that are uncovered during localization are addressed and answered by Kevin.
2025
February–March
Wrote the design diary and the abridged development history.