| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2 |
| ⏳ | Time: 30-45 minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 10+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Card Drafting, Set Collection, Area Control, Racing |
We’ve been on an adventure in recent weeks, playing The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth. Despite a name that’s almost as long as the walk to Mordor, it’s an absolutely fantastic boardgame that builds on the design of 7 Wonders Duel.
You get to take on the role of either the Fellowship or the slightly less pleasant Sauron. When it’s your turn you either draft a face up card from the display or claim a landmark tile. Both actions give you benefits and will help you progress on one of the three paths to victory.
Victory comes when a player either has a unit in every location on the Middle-Earth map, moves their marker to the goal on the quest track, or has collected all six of the races of Middle-Earth. As soon as any of these occur the game ends.
We never really warmed up to the original, but the changes here have won us over in a big way. It’s still all about drafting the right cards at the right time, but lots of other small changes have made a huge difference to how it plays.
Theme isn’t usually much of a selling point for us, but with familiar characters and bits of lore woven into every part of the game, it’s impossible not to get caught up in it. The artwork is awesome, and it’s hard to play without throwing in at least a few quotes.
Area control isn’t something we’re fans of, especially at 2p, but it’s been extremely well done here. Planning how to place and move those tiny units is almost a subgame in itself, and you can’t take your eye off it for a moment.
One of our favourite parts is the new quest track. It looks great and works a treat. It’s like there’s a mini movie playing out on the table as the Hobbits try to get to Mount Doom before that dastardly Nazgûl catches them.
We’ve been having an awesome time playing, and it can be very tight. Our last game ended with just one card left in the third round. Steph needed one more unit on the map, or one move on the quest track, and it would have been goodbye Hobbits. Thankfully I managed to assemble the Fellowship just in time to save the day!
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Repos Production website!
The copy of The Lord of the Rings : Duel for Middle-earth used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by LPG Distribution
The Boardgame Detective 