War of the Ring
After GTF, Brian left his copy of War of the Ring at my house in hopes that it would see more playing time here than in Chicago. It took a few months but I got around to reading the rules again this week. Tristan and I sat down to play this afternoon. He wanted to be evil and took the Shadow Peoples (Sauron). That left me with the task of holding back the tide of darkness and destroying the ring before Tristan’s armies and minions took control of the land.
Tristan focused on building his forces in the southern and eastern areas around Mordor and made several runs at wresting control of Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep from my valiant forces in the area. I pushed the Fellowship as quickly as I could toward Mordor to destroy the ring while reinforcing Gondor and Rohan. My defenses at both strongholds held, repelling Tristan’s hoards on repeated occasions. At the same time, I slipped the Fellowship into Mordor with only 3 corruption. I figured it would be a close race between the increasing corruption and throwing the ring into the Crack of Doom. And it was. By the time I was on the last step before the end, the Fellowship had moved to 9 and 3 or more corruption on the final step would mean that Tristan would gain the ring and win the war.
He used an event to add more dice to the hunt pool so that if he drew an “Eye,” the Fellowship would take more corruption damage. I moved and he drew a 3 which was just enough to destroy the Fellowship just as they were on the verge of destroying the ring. Tristan won the first round of War of the Ring playing as Sauron. Pretty cool.
I had already moved the Fellowship twice that turn and could’ve played more conservatively by not moving again that turn and drawing more event cards to see if I could’ve healed some corruption damage. Hmm…I also wonder if I could’ve revealed the location since Gollum was the guide and avoided the last point of corruption. But, could the Fellowship have still moved in that situation? Looks like it’s time for additional rules study! 🙂
We both enjoyed the game. It took us 3.5 hours for the first play. I put on the soundtracks from the movies and we finished just as ‘Into the West’ ended. Neat, eh? Caleb is interested in learning and I can see this coming out a few times a year. We used the turn summary by SalladDazed. It is very well done and kept the need to reference the rulebook to a very small number of times.