Customer Reviews

Lord of the Rings Boardgame: Battlefields Expansion

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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.)