Rob Doupe - 10:16pm Jun 7, 2001 PST (#4182 of 4185) "If those little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they'll face French ones." john - The Fellowship of the Ring: Uses a large hex map with various chokepoints and special locations, such as towns, lairs and havens. The Dark side starts with the Nazgul and the Good Guys start with the hobbits, all of which are represented by nicely illustrated cards. The cards contain things like movement, attack, defence and hiding ability (I'm going by memory on this). When an encounter occurs, the cards are arrayed in ranks for battle, kind of like in Hera and Zeus. The really clever mechanic is that each side has a couple dozen little plastic dice that have a letter on one side. The letter corresponds to a lettered box on the cardsheet each player has. Only the controlling player can see which stack of face-down cards the playing piece represents. These same markers can be rotated to reveal numbers 1 to 4, each of which represents a different kind of movement, such as hiding, sneaking, horseback and maybe water travel. These pieces can also spawn decoys, which don't correspond to any units - they're just rumours. The Sauron player begins the game by deploying his various nasties such as Balrog, Kraken, Vampires and so forth in spaces indicated as Lairs. So Moria might contain a Fire Drake and the pass through the Misty Mountains could be the lair of a Wight. Then the Fellowship player begins his journey, sending off decoys and minor characters like Fatty Bolger, who can spread even more decoys. Of course the party can split up and reform at any time,and allies can be gained in non-traditional places as well as the usual Rivendell and such. The board covers the entire map of Middle Earth from the books. There are random type encounters with orcs and giant spiders and so forth along the way, as well as the dreaded guardians mentioned above. Meanwhile, Sauron is sending out the Nazgul to expose the Fellowship markers and try to catch them in the open. He can't spread himself too thin, as a large Fellowhip can outmatch a couple of Nazgul. The map is broken up into about a dozen zones. The goal of the Fellowship is to get the ring as close as possible to Mount Doom before the bad guys grab it. You don't have to drop the Ring in Mt. Doom for a Fellowship victory. As Nick mentioned, the map is superb and the artwork on the cards is excellent as well. The tactical combat is well thought out and even random encounters with things like Uruk-hai can put a scare into the Fellowship. I lost my copy years ago, but a friend of mine has the game and all this talk about it has me hankering to play. If I do get a game going, I'll post a replay here and in the Sci-Fantasy folder. Don't hesitate to pick up a copy if you find one. I got The Fellowship of the Ring as a Christmas present when I was 13 and I really regret losing it when I moved out.