by W. Eric Martin

When talking about Gen Con 2024, I sometimes mentioned that I wondered whether fans of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings would ever get their fill of game adaptations.

Matt Leacock and Z-Man Games will find out on June 27, 2025 with the release of The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, a 1-4 player game built on the Pandemic game system. Here's an overview of the setting and game elements:

Z-Man Games offered me a brief overview of The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship at Gen Con 2024, and the action takes place on a sprawling game board populated with all of the locations you might expect, with players starting in one corner of the board and (ideally) traveling to Mordor in the opposite corner. Shadow troops move along set paths between locations, akin to the invaders in 2018's Fall of Rome from Leacock and Paolo Mori.

One of the main threats in Fate of the Fellowship comes from the hope/despair track, with players losing if hope hits 0. As shadow forces move into locations, they'll remove friendly troops — whether ones starting there or ones you've added over the course of play — and eventually convert the town into a shadow location, costing you 3 hope.

You can also lose hope if, for example, you move Frodo without using stealth, which is one of four "currencies" you have in the game, along with resistance, friendship, and valor. Friendship helps you muster troops, while valor can defeat the shadow forces.

As mentioned above, each player controls two characters, with one character taking four actions on a turn and the other character taking one. As you travel through Middle-earth, characters can meet at locations to trade cards to help them work toward objectives. Cards can be converted into currency tokens for spending later. At the end of your turn, you draw more cards, then draw shadow cards to see where forces move and what events might take place, with the Nazgûl and the Eye of Sauron always being a constant threat.