How To Play Lord of the Rings Duel

The game is a two player back and forth drafting game. One person takes on the forces of Sauron and the other the Fellowship. But that’s mainly in name only. The game generally revolves around resource collection and then using those resources to procure other cards or fortresses.

As you play there are three end game triggers that you need to watch out for. If the Nazgul catch the Fellowship, they get the ring and win. If the Fellowship makes it to Mount Doom, they get the ring and win. Or if someone, either side, rallies all six different factions they win. And if either side has a presence in all the locations on the board they win.

That’s the basics of the game, I’m going to get into some of the differences between Lord of the Rings Duel and 7 Wonders Duel next.

What’s Different Between 7 Wonders Duel and Lord of the Rings Duel?

There are a few differences worth noting between the games. While the core loop of drafting cards remains the same between the two. It does vary in a number of different ways. Including a central board.

The Central Board

Let’s start with that central board. This is an area control battle between the players. It kind of takes the place of the combat track. But it’s also it’s own separate thing. There are a number, I believe 7, of locations on the map. If a player either gets troops or towers in all the locations they can win the game. But you battle with your troops, moving them around the board and trading them with your opponent one for one.

And the red combat cards are how you get more troops onto the board. And the purple cards that offer scoring in 7 Wonders Duel, now a lot of them are manipulating where you have troops on the board to help you push for that end game.

Factions

The game also has factions. These are going to be familiar to science cards. You collect them and when you get enough you can win the game. But that’s something that is blockable because you can see if a player is going after that. And there are six factions and two cards of each which might not all be in there.

But there is an additional benefit to factions. If you get two of the same faction you pull two tokens from that faction deck. You select one and that is going to be the one that you use. For some of them it’s a benefit for the whole game. For others Ents and Wizards which are only in the third chapter, you get a one time effect.

Fortresses

Another change to the game is the fortresses. These are basically replacements for the wonders in 7 Wonders and 7 Wonders Duel. So it’s kind of the same thing, a high cost for something but then it gives you a bonus.

The difference in Lord of the Rings Duel is that these are a shared pool. Three are available in chapter one and at the end of each chapter they are replenished. So you fight directly over who gets which one. And that can matter a fair amount. It’s a good way to push to gain that sixth faction with the powers of some of them. Or other win conditions as well.

What Doesn’t Work?

I think for me there is one element that I feel like doesn’t work super well. And I am sure it was done for a good reason. But that’s that I want more in the box. Just one little bit more variety. A bit more variety in the cards maybe? Or it might just be that I miss the final scoring of 7 Wonders Duel. Here there are the three different ways to win or it’s majority on that map. If you figure out that you can’t hit one of the other win objectives, you need to spend on that map in the third chapter.

Now scoring would be a large change to the game. And I get why they didn’t want to add it in. But I’d love to see a little bit of scoring in the game to end it otherwise. Or at least have you look at two or three different things. Like the majority on the map, majority in the factions and furthest to the ring goal. That’d be great for me, I think. And most of the time you should end up with a winner. And it gives players multiple things to push for in that final chapter.

What Works?

Much like 7 Wonders Duel, the card drafting works so well. It’s a great push and pull between the players. And I think the Lord of the Rings Duel even makes it better. Because you have the shared pool of fortresses you are now sometimes skipping a round drafting. It feels like a bit more control than I remember with 7 Wonders Duel, though I’m sure it’s minor at best. But I often sat there in the game counting cards and pushing to get exactly what I needed to buy a fortress to guarantee I got a card I wanted.

I also like the shared nature of the fortresses. Often time you want to fight over them and you look to see what your opponent might need. There was one time where I needed either Wizards faction card or the feather (Eagles) from the Hobbit tokens to win the game. My opponent smartly took the one that let me pull a card from the discard for the age, which did have a wizard. But then accidentally gave me the way to feather token. So you need to pay attention to a lot with the fortresses.

The game is also still really fast. Even with the added element of the area control board to watch, you get through a game in maybe 30 minutes. With learning the game and playing three times in an evening, we started at 7:30 and were done by 9:15 or so. And that’s nice for a two player game to get in a few plays in a single evening. If it was going to take much longer than that, it’d feel like more work than intended.

Who Is This For?

I think the Lord of the Rings Duel is for people who maybe aren’t drawn to the 7 Wonders Duel theme but are interested in the game itself. Lord of the Rings is obviously going to be a more popular them. And I think that as a game too, it’s easy enough to play that it’s that great play it with the Lord of the Rings fan in your life. Give it to them for a holiday or birthday, teach them to play and let them go forth from there.

But if you already really love 7 Wonders Duel and the theme doesn’t do it for you. I don’t know that you need this game. I think that they do enough different that I plan on keeping both. But that is a me thing and I’m not sure that everyone would agree with that sentiment.

Final Thoughts on Lord of the Rings Duel

I really enjoy this game. I do have that one negative. And I expect that an expansion might tweak that end game slightly. Though who knows if there is going to be an expansion to this game. If it does well I’m sure that they’ll make another one. But I also can tell that the game was very carefully curated to create a box that has everything you need for a consistently close and fun game.

I think that the tightness of the game and the closely curated card set also is one of the reasons that I do want an expansion. I think that you’ll get to know the cards very well very quickly. And depending what you see in the first chapter that might start to really focus players in on certain strategies in the future chapters. But there are ways without adding cards you can add more variability. Different and more fortresses or different and more faction tokens easily add in more variety.

My Grade: A
Gamers Grade: B+
Casual Grade: B+

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There has been a terrible accident at the magic school of Geeblegaren the most prestigious magical school in all the land. You as the important adventurers that you are have been tasked with investigating and fixing whatever might have befallen the halls of Geelblegaren.

The players show up, and were basically doing a silly multi-part dungeon crawl as the players find out that someone, on the 42nd floor has unleashed a monster on the tower, a monster known as the Puppet Master. The Puppet Master has turned all of the wizards there into children.

The problems for the players arise because not all of the children are good little kids, some of them are friends (fiends) who has Puppet Master has brought up with him in disguise. Mix that in with the kids now having to defend themselves and they used to be magical students and teachers, so they have a very good arsenal of tricks and traps up there sleeves. And a few of them, those who might have decided to help The Puppet Master are now under the Puppet Master’s control.

The players aren’t powerful enough to just undo the spell, they need to find the headmaster of the school, they need to get components, they need to figure out who might be trying to trip them up and who are the actual kids, and who are the teachers, so that they can get everything undone. I’d try and keep this light, even with there are fiends in the school, they aren’t torturing people, they are there, looking for something or someone and they are caring more about impersonating the kid version of the students or the teachers so that they can find what they need.

As for the traps and stuff like that, this is a magical school, these are powerful wizards, but they are generally nice people. We’re going home alone style on this. Traps should be “none lethal” for the most part. Make them weird with using the full array of wizard spells, so that there are now magical creatures or mirrors that if you look into them you get polymorphed into a chicken, things like that.

This whole thing will end when two things are done. The first being that they have to rescue the head master whom the Puppet Master is obviously going to have tucked away somewhere or mind wiped to not realize who they is somehow. So the players need to either rescue them or get them to remember somehow. Once that happens, they need to get to the top floor, the 42nd floor, where the Puppet Master is in order to complete the spell with the headmaster and banish the Puppet Master. However the fiends in disguise are now going to be more aggressive to the party now that they have the head master.

Facing off against the Puppet Master can work two ways. If they are just going to banish him, it’s about surviving X number of rounds, 5 or 6, and keeping the kid version of the head master alive so that they can complete the spell. If it’s not about banishing the Puppet Master, it’s still going to be about holding out for a number of rounds, 3 or 4, before the head masters spell is completed and the Puppet Master is weakened enough so it’s an appropriate CR for the players.

That’s about where the story will end. Once the players have defeated the big bad Puppet Master, the students and teachers all return to normal and the fiends will be banished.

This is a game to really keep light and fairly silly. Go as full Home Alone as you can. Make the fiends play pranks, just a bit more deadly than the wizards are doing. Do what you can to keep it light hearted as you can and make the thing that the Puppet Master and the fiends want something that’s a bit absurd, maybe even something that has some cool but weird magical power that the players can discover along the way.

How would you keep this game light and silly?

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What I am talking about is how series are crafted and issues that can be ran into when creating a series. Like most of these topics, it’s come about because I read a book, watched a show, heard something about a game, or something along those lines that I thought is important and could be done better than it is often or sometimes anyways. I also want to get out of the way, I don’t think this book, Arsenal (Full Metal Superhero Book 1) was a bad story and poorly written and not worth anyone’s time, I just have some issues with the fact that to get a full books worth of story, you’re going to have to continue the series, Arsenal felt like an opening act.

Let’s start out this article with wondering if you should even be writing a series. I do think there are multiple reasons to write a series and I think there are some that do it fantastically. For example, Harry Potter, that makes perfect sense to be a series and not just tell Harry and Voldemort’s story in a single book. It would have felt rushed and there is a lot to explore in the world that Rowling does a good job doing in that series, no comments about the other stuff she’s doing now. She had a clear vision for each book and a clear story to tell in each book as well as clear elements of the over arcing story that she was telling. The Dresden Files does the same thing very well with clear stories but after the first book or so, a clear plot running through all of the books. Maybe you just have to have a main character named Harry who is a wizard to write good series (if there’s any piece of advice to take, this is it, I’m sure).

However, in Arsenal, it didn’t feel like that was the case. The first book was the opening act of a larger story with no real tension to the story. You had an idea of what the overall story for the series is going to be, but the first book fell flat on delivering it’s own contained story. One could argue that it’s Arsenal’s story of her joining the superhero team, but there isn’t tension surrounding that part of the story as it’s resolved quite quickly in the book and her probationary period doesn’t seem like a situation where she’s ever not going to become a full member of the team.

Beyond having a number of self contained stories, it could also be that your story is just too epic to tell in a single book. There’s a danger with telling a single epic story like this, though, you have to have some sort of plot to drive the story for each book in the series. Again, Harry Potter and The Dresden Files do a good job of that. That’s actually one of the non-trope based knocks I have on The Warded Man as the first book of the Demon Cycle. While there is some plot that drives the book throughout that seems like it is the main plot of the first book, it falls into the trap of not having much of a plot for the book and focusing only on series plot instead. I think that is some of why it had so much exposition and backstory for all the characters that felt like it was overdone.

I’ve already talked about it some, but when you’ve decided to do a series, trilogy or longer really, there is one huge thing that you have to do to make sure that each book feels like a complete book. This is the part I really want to drive home. Even though you have the most epic story for your series, each book in the series is going to have it’s own complete story as well. An obvious example of something that most people know about that fails to do this completely is Pirates of the Caribbean. Unfortunately, after a smashing success with the first movie, they planned on several more of them and decided with Dead Man’s Chest that they didn’t need tell a complete story because they were going to wrap it up in At World’s End. Viewed together, they make a good complete story, however, when you were spending money to get see Dead Man’s Chest in the theaters you felt like you were ripped off because you had to come and see the next one to fully get the whole story.

This is actually why I haven’t continued Arsenal (Full Metal Superhero) yet, because I don’t know that I want to spend Audible credits to continue a story that I know I might have to listen to all of them to get the full story. It’s the idea that I have to do something to really get the story and that there is a very specific amount that I have to spend on the story. If you were to stop after book three of Harry Potter, sure you wouldn’t have the full story of everything that happens in that magical world, but you’d have had a good experience with those stories. It’s the same with the Dresden Files, now obviously, you’ll get more out of reading the whole story, and the same was true with Pirates of the Caribbean, but as an creator, it isn’t your job to force people to give you money to get a whole story. They should be getting a whole story every time, because that’s what they’ve paid for. Then if you’ve written your story well, people are going to want to come back and people are going to recommend your story to others. While I am mentioning Arsenal and that might get some of you interested in reading it, I’m not going to recommend it, because it fails at this tenant of creating a good series and I can’t with good conscience recommend that people spend their money on the whole series to get a whole story.

So quick recap as this wraps up. Make sure that you actually need a series to tell your story. If the over arcing story isn’t so big that you need to, don’t draw it out. You’ll end up with a lot of filler that people don’t want to read and turn people away from your series. Also, and most key, make sure that every book has a self contained story to it. Every book should feel like it’s reached a conclusion and that the consumer got their money’s worth.  And finally, if all else fails, name a wizard character Harry and go from there to see what happens.

What are some of your favorite series, either movie, books, or anything else that you think does a very good job?

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To start out with, this is going to pertain to writing, but also pertains to what you can think about and process as you read through books with wizards in them, especially in a modern setting. In a world where the rules are made up completely, because it clearly isn’t our world, you can get away with a whole lot more when it comes to magic. However, in the human world, you have a lot of things to think about. Even as compared to Merlin vs the Harry’s (Potter and Dresden), you can get away with a whole lot more.

The first issue that you can get away with more is technology. You can simply make technology magic if you want, but when you are tied into a world where both humans using technology and wizards exist, you can run into trouble. Why, for example, in Harry Potter are the wizards so anti anything that would be technology and anything from the muggle world? It makes no sense, they are making their lives more difficult but completely separating themselves from the world. Now, plot wise it makes a good amount of sense, otherwise things would be too easy and you can argue that maybe they are doing it so that they don’t reveal themselves, but really, by ignoring it they stick out more. And by plot wise, I mean, it would make things too easy if they used modern technology. But in terms of the Wizard society, they are so clueless in the world in Harry Potter that they would constantly have to be erasing peoples memories of them because they stick out like a sore thumb for being antiquated and backwards with technology.

This compared to the Dresden Files, Harry and wizards literally fry technology if they get too worked up or use magic around technology. So Harry Dresden can use older more mechanically based technology, but can’t use things like computers. This makes it so that he has to be more of sleuth by using magic versus technology. They also deal with people seeing magic or seeing monsters differently than Harry Potter. There isn’t wiping of memories, it is based off of the idea that if something is to crazy and doesn’t make sense, people will find a way to make it make sense in what they  know. A wizard slinging a spell at a vampire, that’s a gas line exploding, because someone throwing a spell around doesn’t make any sense. That’s a whole lot more reasonable, in many ways, than the Harry Potter methodology of wiping that memory from everyone’s mind who saw it.

So, how you deal with technology and the public is one of the first things to think about. Do they use technology, if they don’t, you better have a reason for it. Now, if it’s less modern, you can get away with them using magic for a lot of things, because long distance verbal communication wouldn’t exist without magic, but Harry, Ron, and Hermoine should really use payphones. It could also be said that Arthur Weasley was the only wizard in the ministry of magic who actually thought stuff through with technology. You can also deal with it by having a small sect of wizards reject technology but not the body as a whole, as it’s possible for any sect to get too steeped in tradition to reject things that would make their life easier.

Next, let’s talk about death and abuse of magic at a young age. In both Harry Potter and The Dresden Files, magic is an inherent skill in some people, it isn’t something that the Average Joe can just pick up without first having a natural talent for it. Then you have to learn how to control it. We see in both series some of what happens when people aren’t trained in magic and are using it without really knowing it or without knowing how to properly use it. In Harry Potter we hear about him as a child causing glass to disappear from a snakes enclosure at a zoo. In the Dresden Files there are people who can learn to use it and not really knowing the true power and destroy or mess with peoples minds because they are using something dangerous and instead of it being a scalpel, it’s a club. In the Dresden Files you see consequences for that, and you see the wizarding council come down hard on those who use magic, even if they haven’t properly been trained or informed of the magic rules, because of how dangerous it can be. In Harry Potter, they try and get you at a young age into schooling so that you aren’t a danger to yourself or others.

But that’s a flaw in Harry Potter, how do they not have more deaths or series injuries every year at Hogwarts. Now, I get why jokesters like Fred and George Weasley wouldn’t use magic for pranks, because their mother would literally kill them if they did. But why wouldn’t someone like Draco Malfoy, or more likely Crabbe and Goyle who wouldn’t care so much about what their parents think of consequences just use magic against someone else. Obviously, it’s against the rules, but you have how  many kids at Hogwarts with raging hormones, you’re going to get magic used to hurt, prank, or kill other students. Obviously, having lots of deaths in Hogwarts wouldn’t make for as good a children’s book, but it’s kind of a plot hole.

So how can you deal with this? In the Dresden Files, if I remember correctly, while you might have magical ability, you can’t really use it without some training. There are ways to train yourself and get into trouble, but you won’t have something just happen as spontaneously. So that is one of the ways that I would suggest dealing with it. You make it so that magic is something that you have to have at least some training to use. Or, instead,  you can also make magic much more dangerous. You can have more deaths, and you can make magic something that probably would be government regulated and those who have the ability are almost scared of it because of how dangerous it can be.

Those are two of the biggest things where Harry Potter and Harry Dresden contrast in magic. And it’s interesting to look at. If you are thinking about writing your own urban fantasy sort of book, they are some big hurdles to overcome. It’s certainly possible that you can leave those plot holes and just say that it’s the way it is, but if you are writing, especially for a more mature audience, it’s going to be something that you want to have thought through.

There are a whole lot more things to think of as well. Where is the power for magic coming from? Who can learn magic? How powerful is the magic in the world? How common are magic users in your world? What sort of magic can be done?

Obviously, that would take a whole lot more to go through, and it’s something that I need to think about. I might come back to that later, but either way, you’re a wizard, Harry.

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Smallworld is won by having the most money at the end of a given number of turns; each board specifies the number of turns. You get money by holding territories, but the board isn’t quite large enough for all the players, so conflict is sure to arise. So instead of a slow and steady march amassing troops through Europe, you take turns running your troops through your opponents’, getting your coins, and then having the same done back to you. Another thing that makes Smallworld better is that while you might start out the game playing Flying Halflings, once you’ve expended your troops, you can put them into decline. A race in decline still gets you money, but are easier for other players to take over, and then on your next turn, you pick a new race. So you could start the game a Flying Halflings, become Seafaring Giants, and end the game as Alchemist Wizards.

So I’ve started to touch on the other aspect that makes this game unique — the combinations of races and abilities. For example, with Flying Halflings, flying is the ability and Halfling is the race. These are split onto two different pieces of cardboard, so that means that the races and abilities vary from game to game. So one game it might be Flying Halflings, and the next week it might be Seafaring Halflings and Flying Sorcerers. This means that each time you play it, the game is going to be different. And after you’ve played it enough, there are expansions. So you can add different races and abilities like Leprechauns or Pixies. The ability to replay this game over and over again is high because of this.

Another cool feature of this game is the fact it comes with four different boards. Each of these boards is for the different numbers of players that you can have. The two-player board is smaller and has fewer territories, and the five-player board is twice as large, with a higher density of territories. This is another great feature, because it forces there to always be conflict. Doesn’t matter if you are playing two players or five players; you will start running into the other player(s) sooner rather than later.

So with all of these things, you can see how the game might be related to Risk, but instead of a marathon of hurt feelings, this game flies through in a limited number of turns with just enough strategy to keep you focused on the game, and it’s simple enough that most people will be able to pick it up quickly. And while a very enterprising player will kind of know who has the most money, as long as people don’t sort their money it’s anyone’s game. I would highly recommend it as something that new gamers would enjoy, that seasoned gamers can break out for a fun time, and that can bring those two groups together easily.

Overall Grade: A

Casual Grade: A

Gamer Grade: B+

If you’ve played Smallworld, what is your favorite combo of ability and race?