One does not simply trick-take into Mordor

The release of 💍The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is making big waves currently. And I have to say that is a long title. 😄 The name gives away the genre, but what it doesn’t say is that it is a co-operative trick-taking game! Kind of like The Crew (though to be fair we have yet to play that one). You will play through different scenarios with various victory conditions depending on the available and chosen characters - and it all gets more difficult as you go along your journey. 😉

The core of the game is the common trick-taking ruleset. 👉Someone will start a trick by playing a card, then everyone has to follow that suit if they can - the highest card of this starting suit wins the trick. There are 4 suits going in values from 1 to 8, plus there is the Ring suit which only goes from 1 to 5 - and the value 1 is the “One Ring”, which can win any trick. 🧐 A slight twist with Ring cards is that you can only start a trick with them if someone already played a Ring before due to not having a matching suit to follow. 

Each chapter lists the characters you can choose to play as. New chapters introduce new characters, or also add cards or mechanics. The essence of the fun are the win conditions you have to achieve: 🙃 some characters are easy to do, some will require the whole team to cleverly co-operate. And of course you cannot freely communicate about cards you have, you just know what was already played and what are the goals of the others. 

I’m happy to say that there is a two-player mode included! 🥳 It is quite clever, employing a 7 Wonders Duel-esque card pyramid for the dummy player. During the game one of you will control the dummy, playing cards into the tricks from the pyramid. 🧐 Some cards are faceup, some facedown, so you don’t have perfect information over the dummy’s cards, but this way it also isn’t just a random card from the top of a deck. I’m pretty sure 3p or 4p games are better, but I like this system. You can also play solo, though I haven’t tried that one yet.

The illustrations with the painted glass aesthetic put the cherry on top. So colorful! 🤩