Asmodee Digital and Fantasy Flight Interactive have announced that The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game will be coming to PC and Mac via Steam, with early access released later this year on August 28th. The Founders Packs will start at $7.99 with a range up to $47.99 depending on desired benefits. This game is going to be heavily influenced by the tabletop card game The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. Unlike most card collecting based games, this is centered around either a single or co-op campaign and not a 1v1 experience.
How the battlefield will look
I played Hearthstone for several years but always found the adventure modes more appealing and was disappointed when Blizzard announced last year that they were moving away from that format and adjusting their approach. Ultimately Hearthstone wasn’t the game for me so I’ve been looking for a replacement and being a huge Lord of the Rings fan, this has potential. This is first and foremost an adventure game with a card mechanic. While it plays very similarly to Hearthstone with a finite resource to play cards, dragging your attackers to their enemy and managing character health, this game is much more about the long term adventure than beating the opponent in front of you. After you’ve completed one scenario, you move onto the next with interluding text describing your continuing adventure.
Your progress continues forward with each round as do any recruited characters or played cards. With that said, you’re essentially playing against Sauron himself who is looming over the battlefield. This is not quite a mechanic I fully understand yet and will need to see more gameplay to fully grasp the concept. One aspect I really like is that each quest isnt necessarily a linear story, and has different paths you can take after certain rounds. This will add to the replay-ability of each quest for sure. The game itself is based around campaigns, which Luke from Fantasy Flight Interactive has said they plan on releasing on a three month cycle starting with early access. Luke also said that each campaign will contain three to five new quests.
The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game is starting out on Mac and PC, but hopefully we’ll see a future release on tablet or Switch as this game seems to be tailor made for touch screens.
If you are interested in learning more and seeing how the game is played, a live stream on Twitch can be found here.
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