Jason was kind enough to chat with us for a couple of minutes about the game and some of the thoughts that went into its unique design.

Find the interview here: http://thehopelessgamer.blogspot.com/2010/08/lord-of-rings-lcg-interview-with.html

Great interview really appreciate it! The discussion really crystallized my desire to purchase this game.

Of course, I'm slightly concerned about the tournament structure that they are tentatively moving towards. Requiring a team to play really increases the barrier to participating in a tournament. More barriers for tournaments and group play seem disadvantageous to growing a local community. Plus, what happens with uneven numbers of players?

I've seen the suggestion that tournament players are randomly assigned to teams as rounds go own. One's final score is based on whatever factors are eventually selected. In that way, players would not be barred from tournament play. Only issue that would concern me would be how to deal with the heroes, but my preference would be to allow heroes in tournaments to be unique per player. Heroes being unique per player for tournaments is only a small compromise for game play purposes, at least as it seems to me.

I completely agree that the tournament format is one of the most intriguing aspects of this new kind of LCG. If FFG can work to welcome singles (i.e. players without a partner) to their tournaments and randomly match players, I actually think this could grow the local community. You're always working as a team to defeat the game, and this would be something very unique to the traditional competitive tournament format.

FFG's really breaking ground here on a new type of game, and my fingers are crossed so hard that they can make it work. I want this game to have a very long shelf life with tons of support. As an IP, Lord of the Rings has got legs for forever. With a new RPG coming out, The One Ring (hopefully this fall) from Cubicle 7 and the LCG, we may see a resurgence of Lord of the Rings gaming like we haven't seen for several years.

Organized play would be very difficult in co-op (how to stop cheating), although maybe random partners would help. That seems very weird though, what if you just get placed with crappy partners? I guess that could happen to anyone (the best seeds are paired with the worst?...but maybe the worst were the worst because they were originally placed with the very worst...might take a TON of rounds to work that out).

Makes my head hurt trying to work out a viable competative, cooportive tourney...but that is what FFG employees get paid the big bucks for!

Dunno, without using random partners then you would be showing up at tourneys to play with your teammates people you play with all the time as it is. Maybe its just me, but the funnest part of large tourneys is playing and meeting new people. Again, can't wait to see what FFG does.

Solo play appeals to me more here as I wouldn't want to paired with another player, for better or for worse. The question of cheating has come up a lot though, and I think it is a tough one. In just about everyother game you have a living, breathing, human opponent who wants to beat you and therefor won't stand for your cheating. In this way a tournament only needs one or two judges to sort out disputes that the two players involved in a game can't resolve themselves. Since your only opponent in this game is your inanimate encounter deck (which can't really remind you to raise your threat level, or slap your hand when you draw an extra card) we have to find another way to self-police. Here is what I got:

Split the field into two groups. Players in Group A play first, while a randomly chosen player from Group B plays the Encounter deck against them. The players in Group A are running their own show here, The Group B players are simply concerned observers piloting a deck that is really on auto-pilot. They simply deal the cards out into the staging area, deal shadow cards out during the attack phase, and see to it that their effects are being carried out honestly.

Then the roles switch- players from Group B play their decks while the players from Group A take on the encounter decks. Players would be re-paired so that no pairs of players could collude (no you scratch my back, I'll scratch your next round business), and in this way every step of every game would be played under the watchful (lidless?) eye of another player with a vested interest in making sure that you are playing fairly.

Thoughts?