Lord of the Rings: Nazgul is Wizkids' latest boardgame foray into licensed property, after last year's excellent but badly produced Star Trek: Expeditions. In Lord of the Rings: Nazgul, the players play <PERSON>'s most notorious servants, fighting the Free Peoples and killing their heroes, all the while angling to become the Top Nazgul. The box says the game is "semi-cooperative", but make no mistake – like The Republic of Rome, there can be only one winner, whether it be one of the players or the game system. All of which sounds intriguing, but the game is an epic fail. It's not clear what exactly the game is trying to say, it executes badly on its murky vision, it's not faithful to its source material, it's boring, and it's ugly.
In games everything flows from system design, so that's the easiest thing to look at first. The game takes the view that from the Dark Lord's perspective, everything is a battle. So far it's a promising premise. There are three simultaneous series of campaigns: against the Rohirrim, against Gondor, and against the Ringbearer (where the metaphor starts to break down, but never mind). In pursuit of these goals, it turns out that Ringwraiths are the striving middle managers of Middle Earth, building up their departmental fiefdoms with teams of Orcs, Trolls, Mumaks, and other various and sundry resources which they then decide how they wish to commit to the <PERSON> charts of conquest in service of their personal promotion opportunities.
This brings us to the one clever bit in the game, the battle cup. Once a <PERSON> has chosen which battle to commit himself to, he decides how many of resources to risk. You throw a cube in the cup for each (red for <PERSON>, green for Trolls, and black for Orcs, plus one special Nazgul cube to represent themselves). The game system decides how many Free Peoples to throw in – blue for soldiers and white for heroes. Additionally, the hero cubes are assigned an identity from a deck of 60 named heroes. Sometimes you get the vaunted <PERSON> or <PERSON> which will mean dizzying special powers, pain, and continued undeath for your troubles; sometimes you get the decidedly less fearsome Gondorian Captain. There doesn't seem to be much thematic rhyme or reason to how this happens, and the systems are confusing, so let's not dwell on it and move on. 366
Once the forces are arrayed, the contents of the cup is settled and fixed. Each Nazgul can then in turn pick cubes (usually 1-4) from the mix based on his tactics rating. Picked cubes do damage to the other side (so if you pick a blue Gondorian foot soldier cube, the Nazgul forces suffer one point of damage; if you pick a special Nazgul cube, you do damage to the good guys equal to your current attack rating). Sometimes you can redraw if you have the right power card. Then, you throw the cubes back in and the next player repeats the process until everyone has had one try.
While there is a truly unwieldy amount of chrome welded on top of it, this is the core idea of the game, and the only real resolution mechanism it has. So what kinds of player decisions does it drive? Since Lord of the Rings: Nazgul is a "semi-cooperative" game, the game system itself is a player. At the level of each battle, the Nazgul players want to win the battle (which grants some VPs to everyone for showing up and serves to defeat the game system) and want to kill heroes (which are a more significant source of personal VPs, and your only lever against the other Nazgul present). So, you win the battle by drawing enough friendly cubes to inflict enough damage to wipe out all the defending heroes and soldiers. That damage is absorbed in strict priority order: first the walls, second the soldiers, lastly the heroes from weakest to strongest. So the only real opportunity you have is to be the person who inflicts the right damage at exactly the right time to wipe out heroes. Too early, and you kill soldier blocks, which personally gets you nothing. Too late, and there is nothing left, or only heroes too powerful to kill. Given the inherently chaotic way in which heroes appear and cubes are drawn, this is an extremely tenuous and oblique idea on which to base a game.
Still, at least it's simple and not too hard to grasp. Throwing cubes into the cup alters the mix in a straightforward way with some subtle implications, and there are a few – not many, but a few – choices in how to go about it. The problem comes in the truly vast infrastructure that is built on top of this. 884