I was skeptical the second I heard the pitch, LOTR reskin of Pandemic, because I’ve played enough IP reskins to know how often the theme is doing zero actual work, just cardboard wearing a licensed costume over the same mechanical skeleton. This one earns the theme though. Sauron’s influence spreading across regions works exactly like a disease outbreak would, which sounds like a joke on paper, evil creeping outward the way infection does, but in play it’s genuinely tense, you’re always one bad card draw away from Mordor’s reach hitting a region you can’t afford to lose.

Setup is fast, which matters to me on a weeknight, board out, event deck shuffled, fellowship pieces placed, we’re moving in under ten minutes. Co-op communication is where this one lives or dies, same as any Leacock game, and my group has the same personality problem we always have with these, one player who wants to plan every move as a committee and one who’d rather just act and explain after. That’s not the game’s fault, that’s just what a communication heavy co-op does to a table with mixed styles, but it’s worth knowing going in if your group has the same dynamic.

Where I’d flag a real concern, and this is early days for the game so I hold it loosely, is that the fellowship member powers feel a little imbalanced right now, a couple of characters clearly pull more weight than others in a way that changes the difficulty curve depending who’s assigned what. I’d rather that get smoothed by errata or just table consensus (“we don’t let one person be Aragorn every game”) than treat it as fixed. Four stars for now, genuinely excited to see how this holds up over more plays than we’ve managed yet.