LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring Deck-Building Game - Tips & Strategies

The special cards that each character gets create an imbalance in the game from the start. Gimli starts out the game with much more power than Aragorn or Boromir, whose cards strengthen after they won’t appear as often. This allows Gimli to gain an unfair early advantage which in a deck-building game can usually not be overcome.

To balance this, we do a silent auction before the game. Every player writes down a list of characters (one for each player) and puts a number next to the character name. The number represents how many negative points they are willing to start the game with. You may also write “no bid” which means you are happy to stick with a random character after all the others have been distributed.

All players reveal their bids. If nobody matches picks, then everybody loses their bid in points and gets their choice. Matched picks are rewarded to highest bidder with the loser moving down to his second choice character. Ties are resolved with a secondary silent auction between those players for just that character, where the bid must be higher than the first.

This format adds a new fun layer of strategy to what could be an extremely random event of the game. Players can pay what they feel is fair to possess the “best” character. This in turn makes the weaker characters stronger by because they can be played without the self-imposed handicap.

There are cards in the main deck that cost zero to buy from the path. I would like to shuffle all these cards into the top half of the main deck. This would allow for a faster start while we are slowly buying and building our decks. Less chance of a turn with not enough in hand to buy a card.

Some of the cards have tricky wording. So reading the confusing cards several times and even asking the other players for their opinion will clear things up. The rules do not explain specific cards like in DC Comics DBG from same company with same game mechanic.