I am, on principle, tired of Lord of the Rings board games. There are just too many, and most of them lean on the IP instead of doing something with it. So when the pitch for this landed as “Matt Leacock does a co-op LotR game,” I rolled my eyes for about four seconds and then actually read what that meant.

It means Sauron’s influence spreads across the map the way disease cubes spread in Pandemic, outbreak mechanics and all, except instead of curing four colors of plague you’re racing the Fellowship toward Mount Doom while shadow creeps outward from Mordor in a way that feels genuinely dread-inducing rather than just a reskinned mechanic. Someone in the discussion around this called it “the idea that Sauron might spread like a virus” ingenious, and I don’t think that’s overselling it, it’s the rare licensed reskin where the system and the theme were clearly built for each other rather than bolted together after the fact.

I’ve only got a handful of plays in, this only came out this year and copies are still trickling out to the table, but every session so far has had that specific Pandemic tension of watching the map get worse in ways you can see coming and still can’t fully stop. Teaching it to my group took maybe fifteen minutes, if you already know Pandemic’s bones you’re playing within one round, and if you don’t, the ring mechanic (literally, whoever holds it makes harder calls under more pressure) gives new players an obvious throughline to grab onto.

Two-player holds up well, which matters to me more than almost anything else in a cooperative game, since that’s how most of my plays actually happen. The escalating shadow spread scales down cleanly rather than feeling toothless with fewer hands on deck.

Five stars on a still-small sample size, but the sample has been consistent, and “Matt Leacock’s got something big in the works” turned out to be the understatement of the year.