Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict

• Designers: Geoff Engelstein, Stephen Buonocore 
• Publisher: OfficeDog
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 14+
• Time:  60-90 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

It is the Third Age of Middle-earth, and a great war between the many nations is unfolding. In The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict, you simultaneously command both The Shadow and The Free Peoples armies; your Free Peoples will fight the Shadow of the opponent to your left, and your Shadow will fight the Free Peoples of the opponent to your right.

As the dice are rolled, you will decide how to apply the results. Will you recruit iconic characters for The Free Peoples or perhaps muster the troops of Mordor to fight for The Shadow in one of two pivotal battles? Will you hunt your opponent’s Fellowship with your Nazgûl or secretly move your Fellowship to evade Sauron’s watchful Eye?

To win as The Free Peoples, get The Fellowship to reach Mount Doom or defeat The Shadow in battle. As The Shadow, you must fully corrupt The Fellowship or defeat them in battle.  When all the victory points have been tallied, the player with the most points wins!

The One Ring board is placed in the center of the table and the six Nation dice placed on their appropriate place.  Each player gets a player board, reference card and marker.  A battle board is placed between each set of players.  To start, each player marks off the Shire space on their Free Peoples board.  

The player board is split into two sides, with the free people on the left and the Shadow side on the right.  Each player is in two battles, one with each neighbor.  There are multiple tracks on both sides of the board. Circles are meant to be filled in and then later erased when actions require it.  Squares are never erased.   As you mark spaces, you may cross thru icons; you gain these immediately, but they must always be used on the same side of the player board that you gained it on.

There are 8 phases to each turn:

1] Roll Dice – Roll the 2 white Middle-Earth dice as well as any colored Nation dice that have been activated by a player.

2] Gollum/Smeagol Actions – Move Gollum one space forward for each Ring rolled.  If a Gollum Icon is reached on the track, players secretly choose between Gollum (marking all Hunt spaces on their Shadow board) or Smeagol (mark all Resolve spaces on their Free Peoples side). Players that chose Gollum also ask their opponent to announce the exact location of their Fellowship.

3] Allocate Dice – choose one of the two Middle Earth dice for each side of your board – there is a scratchpad area on each side to help you track the icons you have to use.  If you have access to Nation Dice, those icons must also be used on the side of the board from which you gained access to them.

4] Use Icons – Each track on the board has a reminder of which icons can be used there.  Mark off a space per icon.  Note that some actions are secret (marked with a green cloak) while others are public (flames).  If you take secret actions, such as Move the Fellowship with Resolve – you obviously don’t mention anything.  

5] Free People Public Actions – Once players have taken all their actions, then starting with the lead player and going clockwise, each player announces any Public actions that they have taken (activating/motivating nations, using a character, marching or raising commitment on the battle board, mustering an army or destroying the Ring).  

6] Shadow Public Actions – Then again in player order, players announce their public actions including an extra action: Hunt the Fellowship, where they use Hunt marks to name a target location that they think their Free People’s opponent has their Fellowship.  A successful Hunt will generate marks on the Corruption track on the battle board.

7] Battle Resolution – if a player have started a battle by marking the 3rd space in the March to Battle area,  Each player has a running total of battle strength calculated from Mustering actions.  To this, players secretly and simultaneously add in effects from characters and aiding armies to determine a final battle strength. The defender also gets +3.  When these are both calculated, each player updates their strength in the box.  The winner will score VP equal to the commitment level of the battle.  Each battle can only be fought once per game.

8] Game End Check – The game ends if any player has moved their Fellowship to Mount Doom, if any battleboard has the final Corruption space marked or in both battles have been fought on a battle board.  If so, move to scoring. If not, play another round.

Scoring is calculated for both sides of the board.  

For Free Peoples:

• VP for each battle won based on the commitment level
• 1VP for each 10 points of strength in a battle
• VP for each space that the Fellowship visited on the map

For Shadow:

• VP for each battle won based on the commitment level
• 1VP for each 10 points of strength in a battle
• VP for each space marked on the Corruption track

The player with the most points wins. 

My thoughts on the game

So I will note that I have been gradually less and less excited about XXX and Write games over the past year or two.  For the most part, they just have felt all kinda same-y, with not a lot to distinguish one from another.  It is with this general ennui of the genre that I approached Circle of Conflict.

In this game, each player gets a huge folder/portfolio to mark up as they play both sides in the War of the Third Age from the Lord of the Rings series.  Thematically, it is hard to wrap my head around that at first, but then I realized that I was fighting a different player with each half of my army – so it was more like I was playing two 1v1 games in parallel here.

Of course, the two games are more intertwined than I thought, mostly because, in each round, you have to split the two Middle Earth dice up, one for each side.  When the values on the dice are disparate, it can lead to some hard decisions for that turn as you pretty much have to choose which of your children you love more.

While the mechanic used is roll-and-write, there is more going on here than just marking marks on your board because you’re really trying to focus on generating armies to win battles as well as the hide-and-seek game between the Fellowship and the Shadow.  In that sense, Circle of Conflict definitely brings a bit more to the game table than just the squeak of dry erase marker on shiny plastic board.

As far as the roll-and-write piece goes, this game has a lot of the things that I like… similar to Ganz Schon Clever, there are plenty of action combos that can be created.  You may start a turn with 3 die icons to mark off, but you could end up making ten or twelve marks once everything cascades downhill.  To that end, the player boards give you a nice scratchpad area to mark down your pending icons – and while I laughed at that when I read the rules, umm, this area is pretty much vital to the game lest you lose track of all the things you have left to mark!

On the flip side of that coin, there is a lot going on behind closed doors (well screens) – and you just have to hope everyone groks the rules and is able to make all the marks legally – because so much happens without anyone being able to police things.  And I mean that not in the sense that you’re catching someone cheating, but more in the sense that players may miss bonuses/combos, and there is no way to provide oversight as everything happens in secret during that phase.  (I mean, really, if you’re worried about people cheating in this phase, maybe you should really be more worried about who you’re playing with…)

The game moves along in fits and spurts.  Some rounds go quickly as you have few marks to make and no combos to generate while others take some time as you have to figure out how to progress down multiple decision path branches.  It is definitely amongst the most complex roll and writes that I have played – but the strong theme really keeps me interested in what is going on (unlike Twilight Inscription, which just numbed me from all the options).

Circle of Conflict is interesting also in the sense that you’re essentially playing two 2p games simultaneously, and yet your overall success is judged against scores from everyone else on the table.  Having played at both 3 and 4p, I think that this game will firmly move into the 3p only arena for me.  At that player count, I’m engaged with everyone at the table.  Of course, others may disagree with this, and I read online somewhere that the designers had successful playtests at 8 players and maybe even more!   As with 7 Wonders, as most play is simultaneous, increasing player count should only trivially increase the overall game time.

If you’re looking for something a bit different within the roll-and-write genre, or if you’re just a LotR junkie, this is definitely a title to check out!

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral. John P
• Not for me…