Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth Review – Bilbo Deserved Better Than an iPad

I don’t envy any professional tasked to create something new with an existing pop culture property. Whatever you make, no matter how good is going to draw comparisons to the original. Any deviation from the source material is examined to the nth degree by the fan base.

If it’s an improvement, it will be challenged.

If it’s not, well, see the response to the latest Star Wars Movies.

So let’s leave the lore to one side and talk about Journeys in Middle-Earth as though it wasn’t based on Lord of the Rings.

Is it still a good game?

Well for starters, we need to ask, should it even be a board game?

Journeys in Middle-Earth is an adventure game where you’re given a mission to explore the countryside for clues. But it’s not just, it’s also a dungeon crawler where you’re stuck in a room with two orcs and a handful of ruffians. It’s also a deduction game where someone’s poisoned the water hole and you need to find out who.

Ultimately, it’s a campaign game played over several scenarios. With each scenario offering its own experience. Traditionally, this would require hours of setup time and more cards than a Hallmark factory.

But here, thankfully, it’s done with an app.

Screen and table

The app does a lot behind the scenes, from making the game flow smoothly, to taking the pain out of the setup. Be gone the hour-long setup of the original Mansions of Madness. Replaced with a couple of minutes of creating token banks and handing out character sheets. This is a fantastic and welcome change.

However, because of the way the app integrates with the board game, it creates friction during gameplay. Instead of focusing solely on the board, your focus splits between the screen and the table. As there’s no narration in the app, you’ll be reading from the device, and then moving your minis on the table. It can be irritating flicking between the two.

This is especially the case when you’re stopping and starting gameplay to place new map tiles, when uncovered, or add tokens to the board. Often you’re doubling up the work the app has already done just to make it physical.

This is why I question whether this should be a board game at all. As with the doubling up of work, and the need to shuffle your deck every turn. It seems as though Journeys in Middle-Earth would be a better experience if it were fully digital.

The gap in reality

Outside of the app, Journeys in Middle-Earth differentiates itself from other dungeon crawlers by giving each player a deck of cards instead of dice.

Starting each turn, you’ll draw two cards with the option of placing one in your prepared area, and the other on the top or bottom of your deck. You can use these prepared cards during your turn for their actions, while you use the rest of your deck for tests when they arise.

You conduct a test by looking at the attributes on your character sheet and drawing that many cards from the deck. Then you count all the success symbols on these cards taking the total as the result.

To give you a bit more control over the outcome, there is the Inspiration symbol. You can use the Inspiration tokens you’ve accrued throughout your journey to change these symbols into successes.

In theory, this card play allows you to exercise your grey matter, and customize how you play the game. With only four successes in your deck, preparing one of them might net you a great ability, but makes you weaker during tests. Alternatively, preparing a card that isn’t a success may give you a cruddy ability, but makes increases your strength during tests.

In reality, this decision felt inconsequential. At its best, there were times when you’d have the right cards prepared, Inspiration to spend, and choices about what to do. But then I spent a lot of time in the opposite scenario as well, with no Inspiration tokens and prepared cards unsuited to the situation.

These situations left me frustrated and in the unfun position of being a victim of whatever the game threw at me. Without the ability to react or change my fate.

Poor, poor Bilbo

This inconsistency of inspiration carried through to the rest of Journeys in Middle-Earth as well. Where in one scenario, the timeline was so tight that one wrong move meant my downfall. To the next, where I finished it with not even a third of the timer (threat meter) passed.

Similarly, there were times I easily killed an enemy in one action, while at other times my characters would swing two or three times without landing a hit. Other times still, where the toughest monster appeared on top of my weakest member, leading to combat and the immediate death of one of my characters.

Rest in peace, Bilbo.

Because of this erratic gameplay, it makes it tough to gauge how you’re performing within each scenario. Consequently, you’re not able to discern how you should be playing.

Making matters worse is the missing information. For instance, in one mission deep into the campaign, I was working towards an objective when all of a sudden the threat meter passed a threshold. There was no warning of what would happen in this event. But everything changed.

I failed the objective

Not knowing this was going to happen, I felt cheated. Up until that point, the threat meter had been an annoyance, but this time it had some dire consequences.

This is my Lord of the Rings story

The story in Journeys in Middle-Earth was exceptionally well done, and even though I failed a couple of missions, and won a few others. The story never missed a beat, making it feel like it was telling my story rather than a pre-written piece. And while it wasn’t as grandeur a masterpiece as Lord of the Rings, it hooked me enough to see through most of the campaign.

Otherwise, compared to other dungeon crawlers, Journeys in Middle-Earth feels restrictive both in play and levelling up after a mission. However, it is considerably easier to get to the table. So if you’re looking for a game to quickly pull out and satisfy your cravings, you could do a lot worse.

However, if you are looking for a dungeon crawler that’s less restricting and goes great with beer and pretzels, then look no further than Hellboy: The Board Game. Alternatively, Destinies is another app-driven narrative board game that’s made BGG’s Top 10 of 2021.