As I just loving giving my money away to various companies I decided that sticking to only one card game from Fantasy Flight Games wasn’t enough.

Instead, I needed to get involved in THREE.

Well, actually four, but after an initial outlay into Star Wars Unlimited I found the god-awful artwork too much to overlook to continue¹.

I have Arkham Horror and Marvel Champions running alongside this Lord of the Rings one. I think I actually prefer Lord of the Rings for depth and theme, but naturally it comes with the biggest overhead. Lots of rules, lots of cards, and lots of confusion around expansions. Some are repackaged, some are not.

Regardless, the obvious starting point was the Revised Core Set (see above picture). This contains a ton of cards to get started and a small campaign to have a go at: Passage Through Mirkwood.

In addition to the starter set I have additionally acquired these sage expansions:

• The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Two Towers
• The Return of the King

As I am a good participant in this capitalist hellscape I also bought:

• The Dark of Mirkwood
• Elves of Lórien
• Defenders of Gondor
• Dwarves of Durin
• Riders of Rohan

But this time I gave my money to a person on ebay rather than direct to a company. Good for me, I suppose?

There are now only three cycles for me to get in the future, as FFG have discontinued a lot of their less successful expansions:

• Angmar Awakened
• The Dream-Chasers
• Ered Mithrin

I am not sure which cards will now be difficult to get hold of, and I am not sure it even matters too much, as I have literally hundreds of cards from the sets I have already collected. That’s without including the next three expansions, so I should be fine.

If you are confused about what cards are contained in which box, what scenarios you can complete from with expansion etc, then have a look here. I was massively confused when I started looking at what was needed to play a decent campaign, and now after buying several packs, I am only extremely confused. Hopefully this page will help new players? At the very least it helps myself.

Anyway, this will be the landing page for any future playthroughs of The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game.

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