The Journey So Far A Look Back at the Repackaged Content for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
For over a decade, The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game has brought players around the world on countless adventures through the fantastical realm of Middle-earth. Just one year ago, we released the Revised Core Set for this legendary game, allowing a wave of newcomers to join the veteran players of Fantasy Flight Games’ first cooperative Living Card Game.
Today, we’d like to take a brief look back at the release of the Revised Core Set, the repackaged content that came after it, and a bit of insight to the current release model for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game.
A Grand Resurgence
In September of 2021, we revealed the Revised Core Set for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game in our Gen Con 2021 In-Flight Report. This game is FFG’s longest-running card game, and even though there were no “new” expansions on the horizon, we still wanted to support the LCG and provide opportunities for new players to finally take the plunge.
The Revised Core Set was the first step in fulfilling that desire. Packed with enough cards and content to support up to 4 players from the get-go, the Revised Core was the perfect chance for us to bring the game back into the forefront of players’ minds. It also allowed a new generation of tabletop gamers to get into the game without having to track down two copies of the original core set.
The release of the Revised Core gave us another opportunity, one that would excite even veterans of the game: the addition of campaign mode. When The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game first released, campaign mode did not exist. You could technically play the scenarios of a particular expansion or wave in sequential order, but there was nothing that directly connected one scenario to the next. Eventually, we would release the saga expansions, which allowed players to experience the events of the classic The Lord of the Rings book series across eighteen scenarios. Those saga expansions introduced campaign play to the game, but you could still only experience that mode with those specific expansions.
The Revised Core Set opened the door for us to add campaign mode to the rest of the game, providing a new way to play and giving the game that last little piece that was always missing. Now, with campaign mode being added to every The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game wave we’re repackaging, there could not be a better time to get into the game.
Hot on the heels of the Revised Core Set was The Dark of Mirkwood, a scenario pack that took two scenarios from a long out-of-print collector’s edition core set and finally made them available for the world at large. This pack served two purposes: the first was to fulfill an old promise we made to make the scenarios from that special core set readily available, and the second was to expand the campaign for the Revised Core Set from 3 scenarios to 5. With some new boons and burdens sprinkled in to complete the package, this pack ended up being a great capstone for the Revised Core experience.
Following The Dark of Mirkwood, we released four starter decks: Dwarves of Durin, Elves of Lórien, Defenders of Gondor, and Riders of Rohan. A first for the game, these starter decks provided pre-built decks themed around the various factions of Middle-earth, which new players could use to kick-start their adventures and ease themselves into the deckbuilding aspect of the game. Each starter deck drew on cards from all throughout The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game’s long history to create cohesive and fun experiences for both newcomers and veterans alike.
Then, in March of 2022, we announced the first fully-repackaged cycle of content for the game: Angmar Awakened. What once existed as a deluxe expansion and six adventure packs now came in the form of just two boxes: the Angmar Awakened Hero Expansion, which contained all of the player cards from the original cycle; and the Angmar Awakened Campaign Expansion, which contained all of the scenario cards, plus new campaign content (as we talked about earlier).
This brought lots of excitement, of course, but also some questions. Back when we announced that we would be doing repackages for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, we mentioned that we would not be rereleasing all of the cycles. On top of that, while Angmar Awakened was the first repackaged cycle, it was not the original first cycle for the game. So why did we go with this one first?
The answer is simple: since we were not planning to repackage everything, we wanted to prioritize providing newer players with the “greatest hits” from the game line, as well as cycles that best represented what the game was capable of. In many people’s eyes, the Angmar Awakened cycle is when the game really hit its stride, taking the lessons learned from its predecessor and improving both the narrative and gameplay aspects overall. While the Angmar Awakened campaign is certainly more challenging than the one in the Revised Core Set, players should have plenty of tools to take it on between the Revised Core, the starter decks, and the Angmar Awakened Hero Expansion!
To cap off 2022 for The Lord of the Rings releases, we saw a repackage of the first two saga expansions combined into one: The Fellowship of the Ring Saga Expansion. As the expansions based on the legendary works of Tolkien himself, there was no way we couldn’t rerelease the saga expansions for this game. Plus, with the new focus on campaign play for the repackaged content, it made even more sense to repackage the expansions that pioneered the game’s campaign mode in the first place. Now, each saga expansion will correspond to one third of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, meaning you no longer have to track down two separate expansions in order to recreate the events of The Fellowship of the Ring. Players can look forward to playing each part individually or engaging in an epic-length campaign through the entirety of The Lord of the Rings saga once the next two parts release!
The Road Goes Ever On
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is still going strong, and will continue to do so in the years to come. We have a lot more repackages to go, and with them plenty of exciting things for the game on the horizon. Whether you’re a newcomer just getting into the game or a veteran returning to experience the campaign modes for the first time, one thing is for certain: The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is here to stay.
We look forward to continuing this adventure with you all in the future!