One player is Sauron. The rest are heroes trying to stop him.
Someone is going to be here for a while.
The Dark Lord spreads his influence across Middle-earth while the heroes struggle to hold back the shadow.
Middle-earth Quest Game Overview
Quick Rules Summary
The game plays out across a map of Middle-earth split into stages, with both sides racing to complete their secret mission card before the other.
Each round, Sauron takes their turn first, then each hero takes theirs in any order.
On Sauron’s turn, they spread influence tokens across the map, play plot cards to trigger ongoing effects, command minions and monsters, and play event cards that place characters and favours on the board.
The influence must track back to a shadow stronghold and is capped by location limits, so Sauron is constantly managing this.
Heroes then take their turns moving across the map by discarding cards that match terrain types along their path.
After every move, Sauron can trigger either combat or a peril check. Combat is a simultaneous card-play system where both sides play a card face down, reveal, and resolve strength, attack, and defence values until one side is defeated or both are exhausted.
Heroes explore locations to retrieve favours, consult characters, complete quests, and discard Sauron’s plot cards.
How do you win?
Both sides are pushing their respective tracks toward the Finale space.
When that triggers, mission cards are revealed, and whoever has met their conditions wins.
Hero missions include things like keeping corruption low, collecting favours, or clearing monsters from the board.
Sauron’s missions involve getting active plot cards in play, pushing story tracks into specific stages, or placing influence on the Shire.
If neither has, a final boss fight against the Ringwraiths settles it.
Main Mechanisms
Asymmetric gameplay, hand management, area influence, combat card play, and story track racing.
USP
Sauron plays a completely different game from the heroes. I’m not sure how prevalent asynchronous games were in 2009.
Theme
It’s Middle-Earth. The locations, factions and characters are all present and correct.
Setup
Long. A reference sheet is essential, and many are available online. Expect MANY rules lookups in your first game.
Components & Artwork
Impressive for its time, I would think, but still very FFG.
The art looks good, and the illustrations are very ‘Tolkien’.
Ease of Teaching
Not easy. Sauron’s turn is in five steps with multiple sub-rules each.
The heroes have their own sequence with terrain-based travel, combat, encounters, and rest conditions. You’ll spend around an hour learning before you play.
Similar Games
Arkham Horror is the natural comparison with its long playtime and strong theme.
Fate of the Fellowship covers similar Tolkien ground with a more modern design. It also has a quicker runtime.
Middle-Earth Quest Review
Positives
The character variety gives the hero side replay value, with different decks, stats, and quests.
The simultaneous reveal of the strength of cost management in combat is fun.
For a 2009 game, it looks pretty good.
Negatives
It is long. A full game can run four hours or more.
The design shows its age. Modern asymmetric games get more game with fewer rules.
The fiddliness accumulates over many turns with the number of simultaneous things to track across Sauron and multiple heroes.
Summary
A landmark asymmetric game that still delivers on theme and ambition, let down by a runtime and ruleset that haven’t aged as well as the artwork.
Jesta ThaRogue