'The Lord of the Rings: The Living Card Game' Preview

The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game GBAtemp Preview.png


Fantasy Flight Interactive and Asmodee Digital have partnered to develop The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game, a digital card game title that will soon come to Early Access on Steam. To give gamers a taste of what to expect, GBAtemp was invited for a live Skype preview!

While I did not get to actually play the game, I got to watch a live stream of one of its Quest by one of Fantasy Flight Interactive’s representative and follow up with an interview.

For those unfamiliar with those companies, Fantasy Flight Interactive is a branch of Fantasy Flight which has a significant presence in the physical board game scene, having developed board games based on franchises like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and even Fallout and Doom. Asmodee Digital is a company that focuses on developing digital board games, with digital version of famous games like Catan and Pandemic. As such, a partnership between those two experienced companies sounds like a calculated move for a crossover between medium.



The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game is heavily influenced by Fantasy Flight’s physical The Lord of the Rings The Card Game, bringing the same non-randomized approach to card purchasing and a focus on cooperative, story-based gameplay to the digital title.

The demo I previewed featured a full playthrough of a Quest in a single-player campaign which took about 27 minutes to complete. The campaigns are made up of as series of Quests and Fantasy Flight Interactive tells me that they aim to have 3-7 Quests per campaign, with the first of each being free-to-play. Each Quest is composed of card battles against AI-controlled forces of Sauron. The Quests further double as narratives that take the heroes in your deck across Middle-earth.

In addition to hero cards (think Gandalf, Aragorn and the likes), your deck will compose of other ally cards that will join you in your fellowship, event cards, and equipment cards. I haven’t played the physical card game myself but the traditional card game aspect is apparent in this game.

CapturedBySpiders.png

Your turn is split into phases:
  • Upkeep: Resources replenish and draw a card
  • Planning phase: Ue resources to summon allies to join your party from your hand cards
  • Adventuring phase: Attack enemies with the aim of defeating all enemies that impede your way
When your turn ends, your opponent’s will then start and go through the same phases. Their hero cards can inflict Threat Points to you as well and if it reaches 50, it is game over for you!

Should you experience any difficulties with a card’s terminology, you can open up the handy Glossary at any time to look up the unfamiliar term(s).

ForestGate.png

aragorn banner logo.png Arwen banner logo.png Frodo banner logo.png Gimli banner logo.png Glamdring.jpg

Aesthetically, the card battles are akin to Hearthstone from the card’s design to the animated backgrounds and accompanying soundtracks and sound effects while remaining faithful to the LotR universe.

Once a battle is won, you carry on deeper in the Quest where the load screen will serve as a narrative board and at some points, branching paths may open up to you and each will unfold a different plotline (“Fight your way forward” or “Flee the forest” showed up during the demo). Some bosses will even present themselves only at certain locations.

mirkwood forest story.png

Once a Quest is over, you will get a score and be be rewarded Valor Points. The latter can only be earned and not purchased with real-world money. They will allow you to unlock stuffs like Valor cards, Hero Packs, New Quests and Palantir Views. Gazing into the Palantir is a nice feature of the game that will reward you with new cards or even extra Valor Points.

The developers stress that all playable content can be unlocked using Valor; nothing is hidden behind a paywall.

Real-world money can still be used to purchase some features like Hero Packs, New Quests and Palantir Packs, which include 3 palantir views and a bonus valor card.

Additionally, during Early Access players will purchase Founder’s Packs, which will include cards, cosmetics, and Valor as a reward for backing the game early.

It should be noted that the contents of Hero Packs will always be set, never randomized, and never unknown. A player will be able to preview the contents of that pack before purchasing it with real-world money or Valor. This picks up on the physical game which removes randomness from the purchase model.

MainMenu.png

With all of the new cards that you’ve unlocked, you can start building and/or improve your deck. The deck builder menu is a user-friendly one, allowing to easily drag and drop cards from your collection to your deck.

Tl;dr: It looks like Hearthstone for Lord of the Rings fans.

_________________________________________​

After the preview, I had some time to ask Fantasy Flight Interactive’s (FFI) representative some questions:

  • Prans: The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game is the first title from Fantasy Flight Interactive, right? How did the collaboration arise?

FFI: It is the first title from Fantasy Flight Interactive; we are a new studio. In the past Fantasy Flight has built some things in-house that have been published by Asmodee Digital but this is the first time that our studio is building something from the ground up.​

  • Prans: Where did this idea for the game come from?
FFI: A lot of it came from the fact that it is a very beloved game, The Lord of the Rings. It was one of the first co-operative LCGs (Living Card Games) that Fantasy Flight published and a lot of the impulse was that we felt there was room for this within the digital game market. There are a lot of digital card games that are competitively focused. They are built around playing against other players. There is not a lot of games in the co-operative sense and story-driven narrative game play. We kind of thought that it would be a good idea to open up that market and give players the option to play card games cooperatively if they so choose. So basically that was our idea when we brought this over to digital.​

  • Prans: Since the single-player mode consists of completing Quests, how many Quests are there at present?
FFI: In Early Access the first campaign with five Quests will be available to players. Once the full game is released, the second campaign will be available. The plan right now is to release new campaigns in a seasonal cycle along with new cards.

A lot of the replay value comes out of taking a new deck built specifically for that new campaign and use it to get a higher score/valor or try out new strategies.​

  • Prans: What’s the average length of an average game? (The demo lasted for 27 minutes but being a casual TCG player, I know that a single round of a card game can last up to an hour or more)
FFI: That depends on the deck you are playing and the quest and the campaign because some of the campaigns have those different branching narratives.

If you are going through the first time, it can last a little longer. Once you start to master it, you can get done in about 30 minutes but then again it depends on the quest and the campaign. A campaign itself is made up of about five of the sessions we just demoed.​

  • Prans: What’s your target audience for this game?
FFI: So basically we are looking at people who are used to Steam or who are used to play on digital platforms as well as those who might not be well acquainted. We’ve seen that already developing in our community. We’ve seen players migrating over to Steam for the first time to try this game as they are fans of Fantasy Flight, and we’ve seen Steam users and other card game players move over here with interest for tabletop games.

And that’s something we are very excited about, that kind of cross-pollination of fans. It’s super cool to see!​

  • Prans: How was the development process like? Any challenges in particular that needed to be overcome?
FFI: The biggest thing was to make sure that we kept the game in line with what the spirit of the original design was, specifically make it still feel like you and your heroes were up against this immovable force that is Sauron. Within the tabletop game, you have this deck of cards that represent Sauron’s army and they kind of distribute randomly. Here we have Sauron controlled by an AI, making independent decisions, he is deciding where he wants to attack, which cards he wants to play. He is this powerful and intelligent force. It’s really cool and in-line with what The Lord of the Rings is about, right? The Lord of the Rings is about characters who band together to beat something bigger than them. So our challenge was making sure it felt that way: making it intuitive, easy to play the first time, easy to understand when you look at the board. I think we’ve struck a pretty great balance in terms of maintaining complexity while still making the game accessible.​

  • Prans:Anything else you’d like to add for gamers looking to try this game?
FFI:We have a lot of buzz going on Steam, forums, and our social media. So join us there! But the best thing to do is to add the game to your Steam Wish List to get the latest news as we start closing in on Early Access.​

_________________________________________​

The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game will launch first into Early Access via Steam, as a single-player-only game in the coming months. The game will be launched as a full free-to-play release in 2018. There are also plans for a co-op expansion, allowing two players to bring their fellowships together and fight through quests side-by-side.

:arrow: The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game Steam Page
 

VitaType

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Oh, yet another card game based on a well established franchise, how creative. Maybe this card game will get a Battle Royal mode and a Open World as well ;)

is it sad that i still haven't seen all the lotr movies?
If you saw the first one and then decided to not watch the next two, no. Then it's fine.
If you haven't seen the film with a proper audio experince I strongly recommend to try it again, maybe one of your local cinemas have reruns of the film series. The films benefit alot from a large and good screen and even more from proper speakers.

Edit: btw it dosn't looks like they used the license of the famous film franchise, but the license of the books because they don't use the aesthetics of the films but a generic (meaning the aesthetics long ago developed from the LotR books [which is based on alot of other things]) fantasy one.
 
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Prans

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I'm confused, does this play like the original LotR trading card game or not?
It looks significantly different.
I haven't played the card game but from what I have gathered, it should play similarly or have similar features. But consider it as a new game altogether, hence the different appearances.
 

Stephano

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I haven't played the card game but from what I have gathered, it should play similarly or have similar features. But consider it as a new game altogether, hence the different appearances.
It's a shame then. I was hoping it was going to be like the original game. I played tht card game so much as a kid and have WAY TOO MANY cards.
 

Silverthorn

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The online digital card game market already felt saturated, but there's MTG Arena, Artifact (Dota-themed card game) and now LOTR all coming soon.
Pretty sure that with all the current established ones plus those newcomers, some of them will need to die.
 

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