A tradeable card game covering the events of the Fellowship of the Ring movie. Frodo and his companions journey from Bag End to the breaking of the fellowship at the river Anduin (no One Ring destruction in this set; presumably it is slated for one of the expansions due to be released with The Return of the King). The coverage of the cards is largely loyal to the movie, but it does take some of its lore from the book, and make references to certain atmospheres within the book. Some card sets, such as the Expanded Middle Earth Draft collection, have actors playing roles that were not seen in the movie, replete with costume. This allows for Tom Bombadil and Ghan Buri Ghan (among others) to be considered part of the card game. Nonetheless, they are rare, and typically you feel as if you are playing the movie rather than the book.
The game will be fairly familiar to veteran CCG players with a couple of important exceptions: firstly, combat is magic-like in execution but more incremental in resolution: each "lost" combat results in only a wound, not elimination as in Magic, L5R, Star Wars, or most other CCGs. Each character can suffer a limited number of wounds before being eliminated, but this "health" rating is also expended for card special actions - there is no "tapping". Also importantly, this is not a "draw one" game but a "hand-filling" game, which results in a very different dynamic. Lastly, like ICEs Middle-Earth CCG that came before, cards are either "hero" or "shadow" cards; when you play Free Peoples cards in your turn, you effectively pay their cost in Twilight Points to your opponent, who then turns around and uses those points to play Shadow Cards to attack you.
As a final comment, Decipher has finally seen the light and put a 4-card cap on every card during deck building (and this includes variations; so there is an Aragorn: Ranger of the North and an Aragorn: King in Exile; you can only have total of 4 combined). Additionally, Fellowship of the Ring has a much more sane rarity distribution than previous Decipher products (many - in fact most - familiar characters are common or uncommon, or at least have common or uncommon variations that are no less powerful than the rare versions).
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