Or fly, even...

Or those rules are beyond any of you,ruuuuun .

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/lotr-lcg/LOTR%20Rules.pdf

Well I am glad its out even if just to stop all of the posts requesting them to come out. Have not had a chance to read it all yet but gave it a once over. Another well crafted rulebook as I would expect from FFG will look great beside my other LCG rulebooks. I especially like the turn sequence chart at the end, good idea.

I also noted the time frame was clarified. Its between the 111th birthday party and days before the day that Frodo and Sam take off on their journey.

This is a good update, I guess. I just wish FFG would step up and release the ru..... oh.

Now I want card distribution lists!

The rules are simple and through them I can see that this game will be amazing. And the best thing in it is that You can always play alone or with friends.

ffgfan said:

That is a good thing. I know a lot of my friends don't have any friends.

I was kind of disappointed that there don't seem to be any official scenario creation rules. I see that some enemies and locations have victory point values, but i was kind of hoping that all scenario cards had victory point values, with tougher cards having higher values. Then they could have allowed players to make their own scenarios for competitive play. Tournament scenario decks could have been given set victory point total value that you had to reach, and players could have tried to build the most difficult scenario decks of that point value level for their opponents to play against, greatly increasing the variety of scenarios and limiting the chance of one "ideal" party deck ever dominating tournament play. Then building the scenario deck would be just as important to competitive play as building the party deck.

It will be interesting to see how tournament play develops. It seems that without custom scenario rules there is a higher risk that eventually the community will create "ideal" party decks for each official scenario which always have the best chance of getting a high score. I believe I read at one point that tournaments will have brand new scenarios that no one had played? But having an original scenario for every tournament seems impossible for game stores that might want to have weekly tournaments. Also completely unknown scenarios seems like it would be very random in that you would have no way to really practice or evaluate your deck prior to the tournament.

Of course the idea of truly competitive play for a co-op game seems very difficult from a judges stand point. After all participants are competing for the best score, but not directly against their opponents, so I am curious how judges could keep track of if people are playing by the rules correctly, or cheating when there is no opponent to call those things to a judges attention?

The game still seems very interesting and I plan on picking up two copies of the core set for my group to try out. I just think that the apparent lack of official scenario deck building rules seems like a big missed opportunity for creating more variety in the game.

Karazax said:

I'm sure there will be a nice expansion for this when the game is established.

Karazax said:

There are many people (including me) that have no interest in tournament play.