Tolkienists.org

Tolkien tabletop № 3

— Daniel Marchant

15 January 2021 | Amon Hen, № 287: January, 2021, 6

The release of Magic: The Gathering in 1993 introduced a whole new category of lifestyle gaming that has since been collected and played all over the world from kitchen tabletops among friends to sponsored and televised professional tournaments with substantial prize payouts. It did not take long for other game designers to recognize the success of this novel format, and a flood of customizable, collectible, and trading card games swept into the market in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The first to be licensed and explicitly based on any of Tolkien’s writings was the Middle-earth Collectible Card Game by Iron Crown Enterprises in 1995. The release of the Peter Jackson films starting in 2001 brought The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game by Decipher, based both on the films and the books. These games may be reviewed in future articles, but this time we turn to the most recent entry into the line of Tolkien-related card games. The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game was first introduced by Fantasy Flight Games in 2011 and is a cooperative game for one to four players. The game has a unique packaging and distribution model which makes it more approachable and sets it apart from previous customizable card games. The game is also highly thematic. These reasons and more set this game apart as my personal favorite among Tolkien-related games.…

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date recorded 📅2022-01-30
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