I'm deeply conflicted about the Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game. On the one hand, we have a digital version of a game whose theme and mechanics I love, without any of the arduous and time consuming setup and tear down of the physical version. What's more, the UI has all the love and polish of Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering Arena and some much needed improvements have been made to the deck building component of the game without fundamentally changing the underlying mechanics. Brilliant and clever.

Unfortunately, some entirely unnecessary changes have been made to the game, presumably for the sake of simplicity, that do it a disservice. Threat is now just a counter until the next bad thing that happens to you, culminating in your loss. Gone is any concept of optional engagement or avoiding certain enemies by keeping your threat low. Questing, a rich and thematic mechanic by which you placed progress tokens (with little footsteps on them) onto location cards has been abstracted behind a meaningless "fate" value that robs the game of much of its flavor.

All of this could be forgiven, I think, if the attempt to create a more accessible, streamlined experience came with friendlier encounter design but, alas, it is not so. In my opinion, the designers of the Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game have become so desensitized to their most hardcore fan base constantly complaining about the game being too easy, that they simply lack any perspective about what the experience is like for a new or casual player. As someone who engaged casually both with the physical game and the digital, I can tell you that every brief moment of triumphant success is almost always immediately crushed by a new stage or phase or enemy, often appearing without warning. It's soul crushing, it's not fun, and to add insult to injury, the "narrative" setting does little to alleviate the difficulty, leaving you feeling bad about being unable to play the game on a mode that is a thinly veiled euphemism for "easy".

And so we are left with a game that has the polish and accessibility of a Blizzard offering but the unforgiving depth and complexity of whatever fun-adjacent game Valve has most recently published. Its unnecessary simplifications to the game mechanics will drive away the hardcore players and the encounter design will have casual players putting the game down forever after their third or fourth consecutive loss. It's a game with heaps of potential but, sadly, is right for no one.