A few scant months after Matt Leacock's Fate of the Fellowship breathed new, sorcerous life into Lord of the Rings board games, another shiny new Tolkien Tabletop Title (TTT) has charged, Rohirrim-style, onto the scene. Foes of Middle-earth is an $159 big box miniatures board game that describes itself as "a cinematic, collaborative dungeon crawler featuring incredible high-quality miniatures".
The game started crowdfunding on Kickstarter earlier in February, reportedly made its token $50,000 funding goal within 10 minutes, and at press time has raised just over $540,000 with two weeks still to go.
I say "movie-based" because this game is being made under official licence from Warner Brothers, which means it gets to use all the movie aesthetics fans will remember - including using the movie actors' likenesses for its miniatures. Which (for me at least) makes those minis all the more interesting, because your Aragorn is Viggo Mortensen; your Legolas does have Orlando Bloom's perfectly contoured, elven cheeks, and so on (I mean the ones on his face, get your mind out of the gutter).
Per the Kickstarter campaign, the basic game is a combat focused adventure with RPG elements, in that characters gain XP, levels up, and unlocks new skills. Each character (Frodo, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are in the core 'Balrog' box) gets their own player board, skill tree, and legendary items.
You'll select a 'Journey' at the outset, which sets the party's objectives, start, and end locations as they travel from one side of a 5×5 grid to the other. All the squares in between are randomly laid face down until your characters wander onto them, triggering random events to deal with.
Another random card draw each turn causes enemies to spawn, move, and attack you in dice driven battle. All the while, a randomly advancing Barad-dûr tracker will gradually ratchet up the difficulty as Sauron tracks you down - adding some jeopardy to your decisions.
After you've finished that randomized ramble, you'll take your up-leveled characters into one of several puzzle-ish "Mini Boss" battles and, depending on how well you solve that, you can gain buffs to take into the endgame: a videogame style, three stage boss battle with the Balrog of Moria.
As you'd expect for a licenced, big box crowdfunder board game, Foes of Middle Earth has hit the ground with a gaggle of expansions already in tow. The Cinematic Journey addon introduces an alternate game mode that tweaks the exploration to cover specific parts of the actual Lord of the Rings storyline - but weirdly still ends up with you in Moria fighting the Balrog.
Saruman adds a bunch of Two Towers material, including minis for the titular White Wizard, his tower Orthanc, and Merry and Pippin as playable characters, as well as as a Helm's Deep option for the "mini boss" stage.
Separate paid addons will bring minis for Gandalf the Grey and Boromir (making them playable characters instead of just allies), Treebeard, the Watcher in the Water, and Moria's Cave Troll. Unforgivably, Sam is currently locked behind a $650k stretch goal.
Personally, I'm far less interested in the gameplay than the miniatures here - they look very enticing indeed for a Peter Jackson-loving elder millennial like me. Fodder for my tiny people collection, but not a likely contender for our list of the best board games ever made.
But what's your take? Is Foes of Middle-earth an insta-back, or just another megabox of plastic that won't make it to your collection? Come join the free Wargamer Discord community and let us know! Takes on your other fave LOTR games, or just Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game paintjobs, are also very welcome.