The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is a cooperative living card game designed by Nate French and published by Fantasy Flight Games beginning in 2011, set in the Middle-earth of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. One to two players, expandable with additional core sets, build decks of hero and ally cards drawn from the peoples of Middle-earth and send them on quests represented by an encounter deck of enemies, locations and treacherous events, resolving combat, questing and exploration through a shared staging area. As a living card game rather than a randomized collectible card game, every copy of a given expansion contains the same fixed set of cards, so players expand their available card pool through direct purchase of new packs rather than opening random boosters. The game supports up to four players at once, though it is generally considered to play best with one or two, and it built a long-running campaign of small expansion packs following an ongoing narrative through locations across Middle-earth. A digital adaptation followed from Asmodee Digital in 2019.