Playtime: 30,7 hours (only failed to beat final boss)

Played: 2025

Context: I actually owned a deck of the physical game back in the 90s, i remembered it being decent.

The Good

• Really strong core gameplay, in part because of the third attribute (fate).
• Actual deck-building. You pick every card yourself.
• Multiple adventures with multiple paths.
• It's always nice to have pre-movies LOTR stuff.

The Bad

• There aren't that many cards and some are just plainly better.
• Each hero has a quest you need to complete to unlock its special card, some of these are a bit too annoying.
• Some of the art is really ugly.
• The final boss seems completely unbalanced. I didn't even remotely stand a chance.

The Ugly

• By playing game you get gold. The game locks a ton of card art, card backs, etc. behind this system. Worse, it locks certain cards too, behind an insane cost. Winning a campaign gets you maybe a few thousand gold, depending on optional objectives completed. The two locked hero cards cost 50.000 each. After 30 hours i don't think i had enough gold to unlock the second one, let alone all other things. It's a bizarre and completely pointless system.
• The menu is truly terrible. It takes so many clicks to start a game or edit a deck.
• The game has built-in standard decks that you cannot delete and that will always be listed first during deck selection. Wow.

Conclusion

LOTR:ACG is a really fun game that anyone who likes the genre will likely enjoy - until they get tired of the bad menus, like me.