Without any doubt, the Witch-king, Lord of Angmar, Black Captain, has an impressive presence both in “The Lord of the Rings” and in War of the Ring. His entry in the game means an extra Action Dice for the Shadow, a powerful Leadership rating, an impressive ability to use when he’s in battle. He also heralds the coming of total war to Middle-earth, activating all the …
As I had a chance to say in several interviews about the genesis of “War of the Ring”, I used to play Richard Berg’s “War of the Ring” game published by SPI when I was a boy. At the time I quite liked the game, but there were certain aspects of it which I strongly disliked, as I thought (and think) that they were not a …
As I said before, the assault to the DEW line was a critical area of the game in the First Edition. The Appendix to “The Lord of the Rings” clearly shows that the battles in this area were definitely of importance: “When you think of the great Battle of the Pelennor, do not forget the battles in Dale and the valour of Durin’s Folk. Think of …
Everybody knows that Hobbits are sneaky and pesky, and apparently this was the case for War of the Ring’s Hobbits as well. Since First Edition, the game play effects of Merry and Pippin did not achieve exactly what we had in mind. The combination of their Character abilities and Hunt rules which we had used in the original version, later corrected by the Collector’s Edition, did …
After getting promises signed with blood about the secrecy of what we were doing, it was finally time to start playing! The changes we devised initially were sometimes reversals to previous versions of rules and characters that were used before the end of the ‘original’ playtesting. Some of them were considered as options and variants. We knew that the game balance was very fragile and we …
