LOTR: Journeys in Middle-earth – The board game

Journeys in Middle-earth is a cooperative board game published by Fantasy Flight Games and distributed in Italy by Asmodee, where you can play one of the six characters available in the core box: Gimli, Aragorn, Beravor, Elena (whoever she may be), Legolas or Bilbo.

N.B.: careful, whoever picks Bilbo! As we had the pleasure of noticing during our games, enemies are plausibly drawn to the bearer of the Ring, so they always move toward him. The support the other characters provide him is of fundamental importance — they may want to avoid scattering too much, so they can protect him during attacks.

Back to the basics.

Learning the game system goes fairly quickly. The mechanics partly resemble those of Mansions of Madness. Newcomers will need some time at first to learn the rules and leaf through the instructions but, once the gears mesh, everything turns out simpler than expected. Choosing your character and their role through the app tells you how to build your deck of cards. The cards provide the character’s abilities usable in the adventure, and a certain number of “success” symbols. Actions — exploration and combat alike — are resolved by flipping a certain number of cards from each player’s deck, which may show success symbols or inspiration symbols convertible into a success with the appropriate token, when possible. The number of cards to draw depends on the value of the character’s ability required for the test.

Some useful notes for those who want to start playing.

Avoid keeping cards with the readied success icon among the cards in your hand: this increases the odds of drawing a success card from the deck when you act. Some wounds remain active in play once drawn, and force you to draw more wounds every turn. Some characters have a threshold of three or four wounds/fears and could quite plausibly die early. So try to spare your character — or a companion’s character with this limitation — the risk of accumulating battle wounds or fears: otherwise you may seal the defeat of the whole group.

The production is polished, but the lore of Middle-earth is felt only faintly, since the adventures mostly take place in unfamiliar woods and dungeons. There are no 3D structures or terrain pieces, apart from the character figures.


The core box includes:

• 1 rulebook and 1 rules compendium

• 30 basic skill cards

• 9 bush/boulder terrain tokens

• 22 journey map tiles

• 30 hero skill cards

• 10 stream/wall terrain tokens

• 2 battle map tiles

• 72 role skill cards

• 12 enemy banners (with plastic stands)

• 31 plastic miniatures (6 heroes, 25 enemies)

• 20 weakness skill cards

• 20 search/threat tokens

• 83 item cards

• 21 title skill cards

• 30 inspiration/exploration tokens

• 15 boon cards

• 6 hero cards

• 21 depletion tokens

• 28 fear cards

• 3 pit/mist terrain tokens

• 8 person tokens

• 28 damage cards

• 4 barrels/table terrain tokens

• 5 darkness tokens

• 10 terrain cards

• 4 bonfire/statue terrain tokens

Game length: min. 60+ minutes

A game can also last 2 to 3 hours, depending on the number of players involved and the time devoted to the more roleplay-heavy parts. An app manages the heroes’ adventure in Middle-earth, enriching the experience with events, discoveries and enemies. During games you can earn experience points to advance the individual characters. The app tells you about enemy movements and attacks. Cards are discarded at the end of the turn, after all players and enemies have acted, and are shuffled into a new deck. Missions involve an objective to be achieved within a certain time frame.

A red threat progress bar in the app keeps you aware of how much time remains to complete the current mission. One of the good sides of this game is that success or failure in a mission does not preclude winning the campaign. The app lets you save your progress and continue the game at any time. This is extremely convenient when you have little time to play but don’t want to give it up, and when missions go badly during a game. The app is intuitive and tracks the group’s progress in order to react to their actions. The game can also be played solo.

Once a game has begun, the number of players cannot increase or decrease. This inconvenience is nevertheless necessary to guarantee a better cohesion of the play group, in which every member is indispensable to succeed. The cooperative nature of the game — as with Mansions of Madness — is a crucial aspect of the experience.

The games we played allowed the participants to improve their own play skills and those of their companions, helping each other in a team with a supportive, enthusiastic climate. If only there were more cooperative games structured this carefully!

Clearly, being already fans of this format and of the setting, we had no hesitation or great difficulty sinking into the game — which is, in any case, recommended for novice board gamers too. Good luck, Fellowship of Middle-earth!