Verdict
The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game is far easier to enter than Mordor. An approachable gameplay loop, however, still leaves room for absolutely brutal challenges. Each chapter feels creative and different. Combined with the luscious visual design, this is an unmissable series of bite-sized Lord of the Rings games.
- Thematic design
- Easy to learn, hard to master
- Gorgeous components
- You might want a palette cleanser after a few hours
The Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking Game, a trilogy of card games by Office Dog, retells J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy masterpiece in its entirety. That's a lot of Middle-earth to cover. After playing the first two instalments - 2025's The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game and its 2026 sibling, The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game - I think the feel of the series can be boiled down to a single quote:
"I wish it need not have happened in my time", said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us."
Trick-taking games, by nature, are about making the best of the hand you're dealt. The deck is shuffled, and everyone receives a private hand of cards. The lead player's starting card decides the suit. From there, everyone must follow suit, playing a higher-value card if they want to win the trick, or burning a card of another suit if they can't compete. Sometimes, a trump suit or card exists, and it can swoop in and steal the win regardless of what was previously played.
It's a style of game that has existed for thousands of years, but we're still mining new mechanical and narrative potential. The Fellowship of The Ring Trick-Taking Game first shook up the formula by making it cooperative.
Each chapter, you'll play as a pivotal character from Tolkien's novels. Everyone has their own goal - win a specific number of tricks, win more tricks than a certain character, and so on. You can't tell anyone what cards you're holding, but you can exchange a card or two before play begins.
From there, you must work together to overcome the challenge of incomplete information. A thoughtful, mathematically-minded person can make certain deductions, especially if the exchanged cards are used strategically to drop hints about a player's hand. But your information is never perfect.
Fellowship (as I'll be referring to Office Dog's first game from here on, because damn that title is long) offered a 18-chapter campaign. It kept things fresh by introducing new character goals, rules, and limitations in each chapter. While the journey beyond the Shire was an easy-to-grasp breeze, gameplay quickly grew tense and challenging.
The Two Towers carries many of these same principles into the sequel. I just finished a complete playthrough of the second game (with copies I bought myself, for the sake of transparency), and it's just as engaging and visually gorgeous as the last game. But, man, is it brutal.
It makes sense, really. The Two Towers' 18 chapters take us far from our cozy hobbit holes. There are no more shenanigans with Tom Bombadil. The Fellowship is broken, Saruman is raising his army, and Frodo will take his first steps into Mordor.
While The Two Towers is a standalone card game, it still feels intended as a sequel. The training wheels are off, and the difficulty seems to scale much faster than in Fellowship.
It's also worth noting that the difficulty levels are not linear. That might make for bumpy gameplay at times, as you spend hours struggling through one chapter only to breeze through the next. It serves the narrative perfectly, however. Frodo's meeting with Faramir was never going to be as taxing as the Battle of Isengard.
That being said, The Two Towers builds up to its most exciting and punishing moments. As Frodo draws nearer to Mordor, the deck grows more threatening. Without spoiling too much, be prepared to juggle more and more lose conditions, while your character's win conditions remain specific and challenging.
By the penultimate chapter, I found myself crying 'that's impossible!' in the face of the mountain I had to climb. But there was glee in my voice. The Two Towers creates spectacular set pieces by making such simple changes to its core gameplay.
A player who must win no tricks shows us when a character's power wanes and battle's tide turns against them. Double the character count for a chapter, and you've got one of fantasy's most memorable battles, held at your kitchen table. The One Ring still acts as a trump card, but it's joined by this standalone's signature mechanic: two tower cards that can also trump suits (or cancel each other out when played together).
The rules are thematic, and the components help sell the vision further. As in Fellowship, we have scraps of text from the novels opening each chapter. Every character gets a vibrant art-nouveau-inspired portrait. The two tower meeples help you remember key information, but they're also downright charming to behold.
Like its older sibling, the Two Towers Trick-Taking Game is stunning, versatile, creative, and absorbing. Even the solo mode, which feels a bit like Klondike Solitaire, would grip me for hours on end. There were moments where I longed for a break from the campaign, but those mainly came when a single chapter perplexed me and grew repetitive to play.
There are many wonderful Lord of the Rings board games. The best board games in this genre often attack Tolkien's work with a broad scope. They capture the epic scale of the trilogy, but that doesn't make them approachable to play.
These trick-taking games, with their narrow scope, offer a very different experience, but it's no less faithful. Office Dog's third installment in the series is an instant buy for me when it eventually arrives.
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