Lord of the Rings Boardgame: Battlefields Expansion [Game]

Fantasy Flight Games (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2007

From the ancient ruins of Weathertop to the conflict at the Black Gate of Mordor, the journey of the Fellowship of the Ring is marked with battle. The armies of Sauron are on the march, and unless the courage and faith of the Fellowship can hold, the Shadow will be victorious. The new Battlefields expansion for Reiner Knizia's acclaimed Lord of the Rings board game focuses on the deadly combats that the Fellowship must survive on its quest to destroy the One Ring. Now in addition to guiding the Fellowship through its many perils, the players also help to hinder or defeat Sauron's powerful armies, because the farther enemies march on the battlefield board, the more destruction they cause and the closer Sauron comes to recovering the One Ring!

Product Details

• Game
• Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games; Brdgm edition (June 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1589943201
• ISBN-13: 978-1589943209
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 2.5 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #633,844 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A challenging (and multi-lingual!) expansion, November 29, 2009

By 

Rev. Pee Kitty "PK" (North Atlanta Metro, GA, US) - See all my reviews

= Durability:5.0 out of 5 stars  = Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars  = Educational:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Lord of the Rings Boardgame: Battlefields Expansion (Game)

Let me start by making it clear that, unlike the previous two LOTR expansions, Battlefields comes with English, French, and German rules in every box. In other words, don't let the German writing on this one throw you off! The cards and rules come in all three languages and the tokens and boards are all symbols and pictures. You can buy this, America. :)

So, you've been playing LOTR for a while and you understand why the game focuses so much on the hobbits, but sometimes you wonder, "What's the rest of the Fellowship doing right now?" This expansion answers that question. Three double-sided "battle boards" match up to the six scenario boards (including the new two from Friends & Foes), and represent the major battle accompanying each one. For example, Bree goes with the new Weatherleah battle board, while Shelob's Lair matches Pelennor Fields. The concept is that, while you're getting the hobbits through their travels, you're now *also* helping Aragorn and friends stop the bad guys in the side battle! Every time the enemy overcomes them, a bad effect carries through to the main game (e.g., losing shields, corruption, etc.). Thus, it's entirely possible to do well with the hobbits, but still lose the game because the fortress of the Hornsburg was overrun.

Battlefields includes five character tokens (Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Boromir) and 30 enemy tokens -- five for each board. While a few of the enemies sometimes repeat, you're basically fighting an all-new set on every board, which keeps things fresh. The battle boards themselves are also very different -- the board is covered with white and red arrows that act as a primitive AI, keeping the enemies moving in a certain direction. Thus, on the Weatherleah board, they spawn at the outside and move in towards you in a spiral, while on the fields of Pelennor, they spawn on one side of the board and rush directly across at you. While it's hard to tell this from just looking at the mish-mash of arrows on the boards, once you've played a few times, it's obvious that a lot of thought went into this design.

Let's talk about the good side and bad side of Battlefields' appearance. The good? The tokens. My goodness, the tokens. The artwork on each token (for both the Fellowship and the enemies) is *gorgeous*. It's the best art yet in a LOTR game, if you ask me, and they're done in a linen finish that just screams "quality". The bad? The boards themselves lack any color text, due to the need to be trilingual, and they also lack any artwork, since (by design) it would have just been covered up anyway with a collage of arrows and effect icons. Since half the board will be covered by the beautiful tokens, however, this is not a big deal, but I've seen fans of the LOTR game react with serious disappointment when the first thing they pulled out of the box was the "ugly boards".

I definitely recommend Battlefields, assuming you already own Friends & Foes (if not, go get it!) and are happy to add some extra complexity to your game. It adds a *lot* of challenge, though. If you were already struggling, this one may just kill you, but if you're winning half your games right now, this should knock it down to a more reasonable number. The best thing about it is that it turns Moria from a speed-run into a long, slow, difficult slag -- and that alone makes this a must-have.

(NOTE: This product is an *expansion*. You cannot play it by itself; you must have the base LOTR board game. Unfortunately, as of the time of this writing, Amazon no longer carried the base game, but I'm sure you can find it elsewhere.)