By Adam Roffel
The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict is a strategy board game set in Middle-earth where players control both the forces of good and evil. Players use dice to recruit characters, gather resources, move their forces, and fight battles while trying to outsmart their opponents. Along the way, they can work to help the Fellowship destroy the One Ring or try to corrupt it for Sauron. With familiar characters and locations from Tolkien’s world, the game combines strategy, competition, and a bit of luck. It's a different take on the Lord of the Rings story.
I wonder if, for some, this is the tipping point where people are tired of The Lord of the Rings games releasing so often. I can confirm that isn’t a problem for me. Does the game hold up, though, or is this simply trading on the good name of The Lord of the Rings? Let’s take a look!
Simple Ideas, Complex Decisions
Each player gets a player board and marker, and the dice and shared components are placed within reach. Your board tracks things like resources, armies, nations, characters, and the Fellowship's journey. Each player controls both the Free Peoples of Middle-earth and the Shadow troops. Your Free Peoples fight the Shadow troops of the player on your left. Meanwhile, your Shadow troops fight the Free Peoples of the player on your right.
At the start of a round, players roll the dice and decide how to use the results for their two sides. The symbols on the dice determine which resources or actions you can work toward. You need to decide whether to focus on building your armies, recruiting characters, activating nations, or advancing the Fellowship. Since the dice offer limited choices, deciding which result is most useful can make a big difference later in the game. Your choices, however, are still dictated by the dice you roll.
Resources help you carry out actions and improve your position. You can develop the different nations by filling in their tracks. This unlocks additional dice and resources. You can also recruit characters, such as Gandalf or the Witch-king, whose abilities can help during the game. Building up your armies is important because you'll need enough strength to compete in the battles that take place later.
One of the main things you’ll be doing is moving your Fellowship toward Mount Doom. You also need to keep the Shadow from figuring out where you are. You secretly move along routes on your board by spending Resolve. Meanwhile, your opponent uses their Shadow forces and Nazgûl to hunt for your location. If they guess correctly, they can damage your progress by removing Resolve or increasing your Corruption. If they guess incorrectly, they receive information about how far away your Fellowship is. Even a failed hunt can help them narrow down your location.
As the game progresses, you'll need to recruit troops and increase your army's strength. Once you've developed the necessary tracks, you can use the Muster action to add troops to your forces. You can also prepare for an upcoming battle by committing to it, which can increase the victory points at stake. Battles don't happen immediately, and long stretches of the game can pass without one taking place. It’s hard to keep building toward something that happens so infrequently.
When you do trigger a battle, the attacking and defending players compare their army strength. Character abilities and other effects also come into play. The defender receives a strength bonus, so attacking at the wrong time can be risky. Winning a battle can earn valuable victory points. The player who starts the attack has to decide whether their army is strong enough to make it worthwhile. Because battles are limited, choosing when to fight can be just as important as winning.
The game gives you several ways to earn victory points. As the Free Peoples, you can work toward getting the Fellowship to Mount Doom and destroying the One Ring, while your Shadow forces try to fully corrupt the opposing Fellowship. Battles also offer a chance to earn points, so you need to balance your armies against those other objectives. When the game ends, the player with the most victory points wins.
Complexity That Rewards Commitment
There are a ton of things about this game I really enjoy. I find it's pretty rare to have deep and strategic roll-and-write experiences. So often, we look at roll-and-write games as entry-level experiences that are good for a wide audience of people. This isn’t it.
The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict is pretty hefty. While the idea of rolling dice and ticking off boxes isn’t complicated at all, how you use the resources you get is tremendously strategic. In fact, with a competitive and strategic group, a few wrong decisions, even early in the game, could result in defeat.
So many recent The Lord of the Rings board games have tried to walk a fine line between simplicity and strategy. They’re trying to appeal to as many people as possible. And in my opinion, most of those games do a really good job of it. You could play just one time and have a really enjoyable, competitive experience.
Circle of Conflict isn’t that type of game. That's quite different from Jump Masters!, where I enjoyed the strategy without a steep learning curve. This one requires more of you: more time spent analyzing the boards and various options available to you; more time spent deciding which heroes to recruit; more time spent playing the game, which ultimately means more games played. If one single group commits to exploring this experience again and again, together, then I think there are a lot of competitive games in their future. If you are the one playing all the time, introducing this to new players frequently, you will have a sizeable advantage. That could ruin the experience for some.
I find Circle of Conflict incredibly compelling, and with my group we will enjoy this for years to come. But I’ve had games of this fall flat as well. Sometimes it was a player thing, where some players just aren’t as strategic as others. Sometimes, it’s simply been a dice roll problem. While it is true that everyone plays with the same dice, it’s also true that a game where one resource hardly comes up isn’t going to be a lot of fun. With any roll-and-write, it is the luck of the roll, and that is definitely still the case here.
A Game for the Right Group
Ultimately, do your research on this one. Perhaps try it at a convention, or get a group committed to playing this again and again and again. There are a ton of great ideas here, and I actually think they work pretty well. The simplicity of rolling dice and ticking off boxes, however, masks a much deeper and heavier game underneath. I think casual The Lord of the Rings fans are not going to enjoy it long term.
So often with recent The Lord of the Rings games from Office Dog (who do a phenomenal job with the production here, by the way), I’ve always said, “If you are a The Lord of the Rings fan, you should try this out.” This is the first time I’m saying, “Take a pause and research. Is this a game for you?”
It is a fantastic game, but it just might not be right for you.
The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict Review Summary
Liked
- Deep, strategic roll-and-write gameplay
- Meaningful decisions about resources, characters, and armies
- Plenty of strategic depth for groups committed to repeated plays
- Excellent production quality from Office Dog
Didn't Like
- Unlucky dice rolls can leave important resources scarce
- Experienced players have a considerable advantage over newcomers
- Battles happen infrequently despite requiring considerable preparation
- Complexity makes it difficult to recommend to casual The Lord of the Rings fans
Adam Roffel
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