Fate of the Fellowship, Before It's Even Out

Full disclosure, I haven’t touched this one yet, box isn’t even out. What’s out there right now is announcement noise, preorders, a June ship date that keeps sliding, and everybody circling the same fact, Matt Leacock built it, the guy who did Pandemic, and Sauron apparently spreads across the board like an outbreak. Somebody called it Lord of the Rings Pandemic and honestly that’s the whole pitch in four words.

Debrief instinct doesn’t have much to chew on yet, no plays to review, but I did the next best thing, dug through what the early hands on people are saying. One playtester logged plays of the prototype across a couple of years before rating it, which tells me more than the hype posts do, that’s real repeated exposure, not a con floor demo. Another admits being skeptical of LOTR games generally and still came away saying it’s good after a bunch of testing. That kind of grudging endorsement carries weight with me.

There’s also the fatigue voice in the mix, one reviewer just done with the whole IP, too much mythology, too much combat in the films, can’t recommend the source material anymore let alone another game wearing its skin. Fair. I’ve felt that about franchises myself, six years in an ER teaches you what burnout looks like even secondhand.

Seventy dollars got a raised eyebrow or two, and the language rollout is scattered, Italian coming later, Spanish not yet available in some markets. Small stuff, but it’s the kind of small stuff that decides whether a game actually reaches a table or just a shelf.

Downtime clock is an open question for a co-op built on a Pandemic chassis, those can run either tight or draggy depending how the actions stack. I’ll know more once I’ve actually got a copy and a slow enough night to run it. For now, cautiously in. Leacock’s earned that much trust from me already.