The Components

This expansion comes with:

Battlefields: These are the heart of the game. There are three total, all double-sided, providing one battlefield for each of the six scenarios--including the two that were introduced in Friends & Foes. The boards are all full-color and linen-textured.

Each board features a somewhat arcane collection of square and circular spaces laid out in a web of interconnections. Many of these spaces have icons in them. Despite their obscureness, the boards are pretty easy to figure out once you start using the game, thanks to the regularly good use of icons found in the Lords of the Rings games.

Battlefield Pieces: These are cardboard markers that are used for play on the battlefields. Thirty of them are enemy pieces, each of which has a distinguishing color and is used on a specific board. The other five are hexagonal pieces which depict the remaining members of the fellowship (Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, and Aragorn).

Though small the battlefield pieces have (as usual) good quality art by John Howe. There’s also a variety of icons on the enemy pieces which remind you of special powers and rewards. Sadly, the special powers of the fellowship are not depicted on their pieces, though it’s pretty easy to remember them after you’ve started to play.

Trigger Tiles: A collection of rectangular linen-textured cardstock tiles. These black tiles are placed face-down on the board to activate the battlefield as you move along. On their front most of these tiles depict swords, which show you which enemies to move when the tile is revealed.

Cards: There are 6 new feature cards and 3 new Gandalf cards to help players out against this new, more difficult game. They are generally similar to the cards found in other LotR supplements.

Overall Battlefields maintains the graphical excellence of its predecessors. I have some qualms about the continued proliferation of icons in the new game—especially since the new ones seem to be done by a different graphic designer—however those are minor. Overall I think Battlefields stands up its predessors, and thus earns a “5” out of “5” for Style.

The Gameplay

Battlefields introduces a new subgame to every Lord of the Rings scenario where you have to fight with enemies on an abstract battlefield. And, if you don’t pay sufficient attention to them, the results of these “battles” can impact your ability to complete your quest.

The Battlefields: Each scenario board now has a battlefield to go with it, which is laid out at the start of the scenario, and is thankfully free of enemies. There are also five enemies for each board--all color-coded to coordinate their movement--and you always have your five fellowship characters. All 10 of these pieces start each scenario off to the side of the battlefield.

The battlefield itself contains four spaces where enemies appear. Beyond that there’s a web of nodes with arrows between them. Each node typically has two arrows, a white one and a red one. The red one is for primary movement, the white one for secondary movement.

In addition, many spaces have icons on them, all representing bad things. For example the Moria board contains icons for die rolls, Sauron advancing, losing spaces on the main track, losing cards, and picking up corruption. These effects will occur when the enemies move onto those spaces.

Trigger Tiles: The battlefield is coordinated through the trigger tiles. These are tiles that are placed next to each event in the scenario and next to each space on the main track. Whenever you advance on the event track or on the scenario track you take the appropriate trigger tile, and place it face down in front of you. At the end of your turn, you flip up the trigger tiles one at a time, and play out the appropriate results.

A few trigger tiles are thankfully blank, but most have one or more colored swords on them, with the five colors relating to the five enemies. Whenever an enemy’s color comes up, if it hasn’t appeared yet, you place it on a starting space shown on the board. If it’s already there, you move it along the red arrow if you can, else along the white arrow.

(And, if the enemy is already dead, go you!)

When an enemy lands on a space with an icon the active player suffers the consequences depicted (or sometimes the ring bearer does, using the standard consequences-in-a-gold-ring iconography).

Fortunately there are two actions you can take to deal with enemies: killing them and summoning the fellowship. These can both be done as “interrupts”, meaning that you flip a trigger tile, you see what the results would be, and then you react accordingly.

Killing Enemies: Some spaces on the battlefields are square. If an enemy is on one of these spaces, the active player may discard two wild icons worth of cards to kill it.

Summoning the Fellowship: Alternatively the player may summon one or more members of the fellowship by paying their costs. This takes one to three swords for most of the fellows, else two wilds for Gandalf. A fellowship marker can be placed on any non-gray space on the battlefields—usually a space an enemy would otherwise move into. The fellows all have slightly different effects:

• Gandalf automatically kills an enemy moving into its space, but also is removed. (In all cases, when a fellowship piece is removed, it’s taken off the board and isn’t available again until the next scenario.)
• Aragorn blocks all enemies from moving into his space (presumably protecting a space that you really don’t want to take the consequences of, and/or helping to totally block movement along with another piece).
• Legolas and Gimli block enemies unless they’re charging (which is the result of special enemies or special trigger tiles). A charging enemy will run over them, causing them to be removed, but you don’t take the consequences of the space.
• Boromir doesn’t block, and is removed if an enemy moves into him, but you don’t take the consequences of the space.

Rewards for Defeating Enemies: Whenever you defeat an enemy through Gandalf, the two-star payment, or the new “Onslaught” Gandalf card you get a reward, which is also depicted on the enemy. These might allow you to draw cards, take shields, move Sauron back, move your hobbit back, or something else. Some are scant repayment for the cost to destroy the enemy, while some are so good that you want to go out of you way to earn them.

Final Notes: That’s Battlefields in a nut shell. It has considerable effect on the game, because it can’t be ignored, and you must thus constantly think about how to resolve not just the situation on the main board, but on the battlefield too.

Relationships to Other Games

Battlefields is the third expansion to the Lord of the Rings board game. The previous two supplements are Friends & Foes and Sauron.

The Game Design

I had some trepidation about Battlefields. Unlike the other Lord of the Rings expansions it was designed well after the original--an add-on that originally hadn't been intended. In addition it clearly added a totally new and orthogonal type of gameplay that I was afraid would overly complicate things.

However, I was both surprised and pleased with the results. In many ways Battlefields feels like it plays exactly like the original Lord of the Rings. You have a board which things are moving around, and you have to make careful decisions about what resources to expend, and what negative effects you’re willing to accept. When shifting from the Lord of the Rings board to the Battlefields and back, I felt like we had the same sorts of decisions, just in different venues.

As a result, I think Battlefields works, and it works well. It manages to capture lightning in a bottle, repeating exactly what made Lord of the Rings successful in the first place, but in a new, innovative, and interesting way.

The only downside is that Battlefields will extend the length of your game since you do have all these new decisions to make. The rules say 2-4 hours, but I think that's on the long side. However expect that your old Lord of the Rings game might be 50% longer.

However I still give Battlefields the same rating I gave to the original Lord of the Rings: a "5" out of "5" for Substance. If you liked the original, you'll like all the new plotting and worrying that this new supplement brings into the game.

Conclusion

The Lord of the Rings Battlefields Expansion repeats the gameplay of the original Lord of the Rings game with its tight resource management and its constant flow of impossible decisions, and it remarkably does so by introducing a new, parallel game that you must pay attention to as you slowly move through the scenarios, toward Mount Doom.

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