Lord of the Rings: The Fate of Scholarship Board Game Review

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship

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The fate of the scholarship narrates the struggle of the scholarship, trying to destroy a ring on the mountain of Destruction, in which 1 to 5 players occupy the cloak of the fellowship and its allies. Turns are used to manipulate friendly forces and characters Middle Earthcomplete the mission, stop Sauron's power, and bring Frodo and Sam close to Doom Mount.

Before the game begins, players choose two characters to control the impressive lineup of 10 possible heroes, including the King himself, Argorn, the rest of the other fellowship, and Elves Eowyn or Arwen. Each character comes with its own player card, detailing their special abilities and starting points where you can place wooden mopoors printed on the screen.

Some characters help with more sports, such as Gandalf’s ability to move twice as much space while traveling alone. Others, like Eowyn, are more suitable for being thrown into the battle, allowing her to permanently remove Nazgul from the game board. Being able to play to the strengths of each available hero is an important factor in determining whether you manage to stuff that annoying piece of metal into the volcano.

The player's goal is to complete three randomly assigned goals and then eventually bring Frodo to Doom Mountain to destroy the ring, which is a very simple goal. To avoid failure, everyone must work together to prevent Frodo from hiding and to prevent the dark power from surpassing too many safe havens around Middle Earth like Rivendell.

You lose when the hope track reaches zero. Many situations can cause your hopes to be reduced, including avoiding falling in the shadows, finding Frodo or needing to draw a player card, but nothing remains. There are ways to attract hope, but these opportunities are much less, including capturing shadow strongholds and some objective rewards. This tug of war always exists and sometimes requires you to make tough decisions, for example, Frodo is away from Frodo's eyes from the area to risk the friendly army at the cost of a friendly army in one encounter.

When taking action, fate adds some other elements and requirements that may limit what you can do when it’s your turn. You can take four actions with your character. These include preparatory actions such as travel (move characters), calling (adding friendly army), fellowship (donating from another player or picking up a card), and preparation (exchanging one of your cards for its related resources – more on that later). You can also attack (engage the enemy with friendly troops), or occupy (take over/take back the enemy's stronghold).

Since each player controls two characters, with a rather creative move, everyone can take a single action as another character, and they can occupy up to four characters except their main character. There are some limitations like not being able to separate your turn (i.e. taking two moves with your protagonist, completing them with your secondary moves, and ending with the remaining two moves of the primary), but I do like you putting your hands on both places on the board at once. Then you choose the main character for each turn, so you will never lock in.

In the original pandemic game, you had to solidify a similar set of colored cards into a healing virus, but this concept of using resources to act has expanded fate, and many of your actions require at least part of one of four different resources. Player cards feature one of these icons and can be played as the cost of the resource, such as spending on stoking new forces’ friendships or courage to attack.

It is worth noting that the most important of these resources are invisibility and resistance, whether they fail or succeed in the game. The spending invisible card allows Frodo players to avoid causing Soren's search and eliminate the risk of losing hope. Not only will the resistance resource let you reroll the dice, but you will have to spend five, even if you try to throw the ring into the Mountain of Destruction to win.

My feelings about these additional action requirements were broken down. Although I thank them for the added strategy and theme components of the fate they brought to the fellowship, it also shifts the game more to the realm of randomness. It’s great to take off the big game when you have what you need or something that can be your turn. However, if you don't, this can lead to some pretty bland turns, especially when I or my friends can hardly do it to affect our odds of winning. Moments like this just feel bad because no matter how much you do or how much work you have on your turn, you still need to draw inspiration from the dark deck, which can make the good guy worse. Thankfully, though, I would say that these turn only happens often and I feel productive most of the time and my decisions make a difference.

My drama about the fate of fellowship is filled with tense moments, dramatic victory and the risky drama that sometimes pays off in spades, and sometimes catastrophic failures. When the countdown begins to end 2025, I have no doubt that the fate of scholarships will provide one of the best gaming moments of the year.

As a hailstone, the last attempt to win, we used a special event card to go straight to Frodo Mountain on the back of the Giant Hawks. Not only did this make each Nazgur rushed back directly with Sauron's eyes, but we also needed to roll 14 dice and cross our hope tracks to withstand it. The first volume of the Seven Dices has left us dangerously losing all hope, all standing between the scholarship and the Seven Dices.

Unfortunately, the results of these seven dices have resulted in the result dropping our hopes to zero. Or, at least if Tom Bonbadir (or at least his activity card) didn't come to save for a day, that would be the case. After slamming it, I was able to re-roll three search dices and got brand new results that kept our hopes alive. The fellowship and free people of the Middle World have done it! The hype we felt at that moment was real.

17 years separate the original pandemic from Lord of the Rings: The Fate of Scholarship, and the latest adaptation of the Matt Leacock system proves that its bones are still solid. The fate of the scholarship expands and develops everything that has proven to work, bringing challenging yet meaningful experiences of collaboration.

Since this is not the title of the person I want to play board games compared to the pandemic. Also, occasionally there are what you have left, you are just waiting, hoping to get what you need. Still, this is what I'll be playing in very quickly with players who already enjoy the pandemic and are more likely to get heavier board games. Lord of the Rings: Fellowship’s Fate is one of the best Lord of the Rings and the main players on the market right now, and proves that Gandalf intends to fly literally to Doom when he says “Fly, you fool!”