ellindar said:

True, but there were limitations. More on those in a bit.

So here a developer has the chance to make a new lord of the rings in which they could FINALLY make a LOTR game that could give you Light against Dark and instead they choose to do ANOTHER **** cooperative LOTR???

Perhaps your definition of cooperative game differs from mine...but neither ICE's METW or Decipher's LOTR were true cooperative games. While it is true that, no matter which player won the game, good always triumphed over evil; however both of the aforementioned games were very much player vs. player as opposed to players vs. game.

Why do people constantly keep doing this with LOTR?

While I don't have an answer for you I do have a couple of guesses, one of which focuses on the theme of the license. In the books good won out over evil; and it may well be the wish of the Tolkien Estate puts some sort of restriction on the license to ensure that games reflect that outcome.

More likely, Fantasy Flight Games saw an unfulfilled niche in the market and decided that LotR would be a good fit.

I played this at GenCon by the way, and why the mechanics are fine, the coopertive play again leads to sheer boredom. We left extremely let down.

Then this game is clearly not for you. Luckily there other plenty of other games out there. Even ones where you get to play the bad guys! (If you'd like to play a deck where you get to lead some orc-like creatures I highly suggest you check out the Nothrog Faction of the Warlord CCG. (www.warlordccg.com)

As for the original Star Wars CCG (and I guess the same could be said for all of them...Young Jedi, Jedi Knights, and WotC's version) one thing that I always found limited was that every game was Light Side vs. Dark Side. But that again was a limitation founded on the intellectual property itself and was likely unavoidable.

As for the LotR LCG....I (and others) anxiously await its release and I applaud FFG for taking a unique idea (LCGs) and taking it one step further into the realm of cooperative play.

ellindar said:

If this is truly your goal then perhaps you should email customer service and ask them to forward your question to the game's designers; as they are the only ones who can give you a definitive answer to this question.

Awe and he got booted before we could really watching him make a total fool of himself.

I was going to pile on to the conversation and suggest that he email the designer of the game directly (nate french)... forums are not a good place to get answers about 'why' something was made the way it was designed...

Very entertaining thread indeed. Really made my day.

propbably not worth commenting as the dude has already been tossed out of the airlock but i thought i'd defend deciphers choice in game mechanics.

When the game came out they explained via a web article the reasons why they didn't follow star wars on the light deck dark deck path and when i read the article i have to agree with them. they explained that due to the movie footage and story the villans were too few and and were mainly masses of orcs. this fact does show in the shadow minions that we currently have in the game. they also added that most people would want to play the fellowship heros and that the people who would want to play the bad guys were out there but they were a minority group and they were in buisness to sell a card game that people wanted. The game won some sort of an award for it's innovative game mechanics.

of course thats not to say that they didn't overdo it and it eventually destroyed itself from its own success lol

Lord of the rings in essence is about fellowship and teamwork and that's why most games use that theme in co-operative play.

mmm...the troll is out of town.... I was getting the mobs mobilised with the custom equipment: pitches and forks to thrash it out.

When I clicked on this link, I only intended to read the OP and move along, but I just spent the past 15 minutes completely awe-struck and obliviously clicking through the pages.

That was an incredible experience.

I'm not surprised OP hates cooperative games....

At first, I was irritated by the OP's tone. But then as I continued to read, he became a hilarious parody of himself (or herself). And then he got booted, which my restored my faith in reason and civil discourse. This has been a great thread.

Unfortunately, I never got a chance to deliver this zinger:

"Of course you want to play as the forces of Sauron. You're already a troll."

ZING!

Then I would have probably followed it up with something about turning to stone in the sunlight. I can't quite remember how it works.

Eldil said:

LMAO!!

BAZINGA!

G'day folks! I was enjoying an all-about-LOTR-search on the internet during my hour of free time when I stumbled upon this website . Curious to learn more about this card game, I searched through the forum threads.

I've just spent the last twenty minutes reading through all of this topic, and since I have some more free time before my lovely piano calls me back to practice, I've decided to make a response with my own analysis!!

At first, I was going to take a degree of pitty on Mr. Ellindar... I needed only reread the posts a bit to get a better view of his position in all this. His first post is filled question mingled with ranting disappointment; a bad combination. If he had left out the "emotion-response instigating" remarks in his post, he would not be labeled as a troll. Unfortunately, many of his posts were filled with remarks and "sasses" that instigated such, and part of the definition of a troll is to make posts that provoke users into an emotional response. This was rather mild though, as Ellindar was indeed staying on-topic, and as is known, trolls make posts to get threads off-topic. The statement that Ellindar was a troll at the start is very debatable at this point.

Following the two posts after Ellindar's first post, Ellindar then proceeds to immediately accuse Toqtamish of being "like most trolls" with his post. This is a blind accusation, seeing that the post had no intent of going off-topic or instigating rageful replies. Toqtamish may have not understood exactly what Ellindar was saying (making posts not totally relevant to Ellindar's view of the topic, by unintentional means. Though it is still debatable whether Toqtamish was on topic but rather that Ellindar took his comment incoherently?), but the post is in no way "trollish". Here Ellindar ruins all respect he could have had by being the first to insult another user, a trollish behavior. Though, Ellindar still remains on-topic, but now assuming that no one understood his first "questions", he responds agressively.

Toqtamish quickly accused Ellindar of being a troll after Ellindar accused him of such, out of retaliation(assuming). Through the following posts, the topic is corrupted from being on-topic by both sides of the ensuing arguement as the world "troll" is thrown about wildly. Ellindar is enraged by assuming no one understands him and by being accused of being a troll, when he believes he is not.

The problem is, Ellindar's goal in this thread is hazy to understand. He discusses very well in his posts WHAT he is talking about(with rage and argument filled in the mix with everyone elses') but the goal of WHY he is stating it in this thread, in the manner of which he presents it, is very questionable. It is best and easiest to assume he wished, or assumed himself, that people in this forums would enter a debate with him and he assumed at least a sum of the users would be in agreement with him. Since no one was on his side of the issue, he first assumed no one understood him, but after the topic turned into an "accusation fest", he realized otherwise and ensued to defend himself with harsh means of words and such. When Ellindar used curse words in his growing aggravation, he broke a wall and the topic that was partly on-topic became little more than a "spam thread." ( you could easily assume my post as a spam also, seeing that I joined this forum with the first and foremost reason of simply posting a reply not relevant to the card-game product in this thread.)

All in all, Ellindar failed in whatever he meant to achieve by use of harsh language, a big no-no if one wishes to be understood as "civil" over the internet. Though I disagree that it was "right" for everyone to be tossing the "troll" word all about, Ellindar did indeed, and inevitably became a troll on this thread.

((I mainly had the fascination to practice my humanistic and psychological analysis capabilities via this argument that broke-out upon this thread.))

I have long thought a "Dark vs Light" tcg would be great for LOTR. Classic epic battle of good vs. evil. If you want that, you aren't going to get it here. And that isn't a bad thing since a 1v1 game and a co-op game are very, very different styles of games.

That being said, I played the LCG demo at GenCon at the FFG booth. Myself and another guy played the game from beginning to end, even as our demo guide wandered off to help other people get started. I walked away mightily impressed with the game, thinking it was great cooperative game - not just a good one, but a great one.

I loved it. I though the art was great. I thought the card design was well done and organized. The flow of play was engaging, but not overly complex. I was really quite impressed.

Now I also realize that this was a demo version, not the full version. Things may have been stacked/slanted in one direction over another. But it still played as a strong co-op game nonetheless. It is right up there with some of the best co-op games on market, like Battlestar Galactica and Shadows Over Camelot.

I am looking forward to this game in a BIG way. I plan to buy two copies of the base set.

I'd say at this point lets let the analysis of Ellindar lie, he's gone, its over and best left in the past as a bad/funny memory.

Crow, able to provide any card spoilers or stuff from having played the demo ?

Indeed, let die what is not resurrectable. Now, time to explore this community and become a member of society! Hand shakes of invitiation are welcome!

As this thread seems to have descended back into sensible discussion, and I've just had a bit of a brainwave on the subject I'll chip in.

Free people vs. Dark Lord, I could see how some people would have preferred this to what we got with the Decipher game. Obviously you have the ability in MECCG to play as the bad guys, but that isn't really a direct duelling game in so much as both deck have a set of threats to play on you opponent.

So we don't have a light vs. dark play style like Star Wars.

I don't think Star Wars is the right game to be thinking of, as that is pretty much the same cards on each side, with different pictures. Or rather both sides play the same and are trying to do the same thing. This just isn't catching the flavour of the conflict in the books.

So I was think at better fit would be Netrunner CCG, or at least in as much as the game play is asymmetric. So both sides word with a different rules set and different card types. Even more so is I recall discussion around the time WotC dropped the game (the fools, best CCG ever!) Where a lot of people thought the game would have sold better as a fantasy theme of parties of heroes breaking into dungeons and defeating an Evil Overlord TM schemes.

I think that as a starting place could lead to a dark vs. light LotR which also captures the feel. and overcomes the big differences between the two sides in the story.

Thoughts?

In MECCG you could play with a minions party, with a Ringwraith instead of a Wizard (or even with Sauron), and a minion party at the same location that a hero party could engage them in combat, count the frags as victory points, etc.

Of course your minion party could avoid the hero company, and get the VP in any other way.

So if you want a light vs darkness kind of game, you already can.

Why develop the same idea again?

ellindar said:

Is that like a long long time ago?

ellindar said:

I realize this is somewhat off-topic, but I was bothered just enough by this statement's omission of the fact that in fact both Star Wars collectable card games had this gameplay quirk to point it out.

On that topic, I fervently wish either of those games would get the LCG treatment.

Finally, on this topic, I think the reason for this is that the Lord of the Rings saga is not at its core a mere good vs. evil struggle. It's got that element to it, certainly, but it's not as much about Man vs. Orc, Free Peoples vs. Mordor as it is about a group of heroes venturing bravely through the wilderness, knowing not what they'll find there.

By contrast, Star Wars has always been firmly focused around the perennial conflict between the light and dark sides of the Force, as well as those caught in the struggle. Certainly an LCG set in Middle-earth could be built in this fashion, but it would be inappropriate to call it Lord of the Rings.

It might be that they add after some time some evil heroes and missions for them. As a start point is ok and it's good to have something different that time. I think is fresh blood in all kind of games to work together instead fight vs each other. Let's see how it would work but for family I see potentially this game as an interesting position.

Seems to me that this game will have the potential in later expansions for exactly that. A team game of shadow players with quests to beat the good guys. I see no reason at all why this shouldn't be the case.

spirit said:

I, for one, would hate for this to happen.

Just seeing the potential.

Unfortunately, I know what you mean

we should combine star wars and lord of the rings and it could be good against evil!! Luke could fight along side of gandolf and darth vador could ride a nazgil dragon mount, when he attacks endor.......the ewoks will need to call on the add of Rohan to fly in there horse shipped spaceship to save them!!