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That only counts as one!

Such an odd game, fun to see! Thumbnail is a masterpiece BTW!

great work¡¡¡ i enjoyed too much the two streamings, and congrats to the champion ¡¡

This game was really LoTR as Tolkien intended it; a dark despairing situation for the Free Peoples rescued by a series of Eucatastrophes that save the day miraculously! And also the heroes played such a big role; if it wasn't for the steadfast refusal of Aragorn, Gandalf and Boromir in Dol Amroth, the daring recklessness of Gimli and his Northmen in Mordor, and the plucky bravery of Merry leading an army to take back his homeland, Sauron would have triumphed! (Ringbearers did a shit job though, no points for you schmucks) I think these sorts of stories are what I loved about this game from the first playthrough; every FP victory feels like a miracle but the deck is sprinkled in with so many miracles it happens pretty often. PS; if anyone would be willing to teach a Java noob how to use the client properly in a game hit me up! I've played a bunch of live games and enjoy the videos but didn't really understand how the Java client works and would like to try with someone who's willing to be patient for a first game! :)

WOME videos upcoming??! Nice!!!

Wow, insane game. Technically wasn't even over at the end though, with how insane dice were this game, I would only have been half surprised if SP managed to use the last die to take DA after all!

Wow, that ending was hilarious.

A great example of why I love and hate this game at the same time. Fantastic commentary. Yes to all you experts, many things I could've done differently to avoid the result.

I think it's pronounced "eye-hour".

@6:010 wouldn't the triple snake eye be 1 1 1 1 1 1 ???

My flabbers are completely gasted. What did we all just watch.

(Stella Rossa here) Thank you so much for showing this. Hope everyone can enjoy it, and sorry for my mistakes, I was a very unexperienced player at that time. P.s. Marry was there because I hoped for Mazarbul to defend Dale

On the first turn, if I only have one movement, I'll make that move the last action. Curious why others move right away.

Great and surprising gameplay :) But I have two questions: - why did Vanali reduce VP to 7 (time 1:09:09)? He should have 8VP. - am I right that Vayze should remove the regular unit after winning the defense of Rivendell? (time 1:16:00)

Where’s the “gg wp” lol

Another nice commentary, thanks for doing this!

Absolute classic. Just watched again. A tour de force!

Great work GP and GB - thanks for covering this! Can't help but feel bad for how it went. But no doubt these are 2 amazing players! LF to next tourney!!! Hopefully we get another WOME tourney and y'all join in :)

How do you guarantee that neither player can watch this live stream during the game?

Great one! Tricky whether to keep Gandy in the FSP - you could go the next 25 dice with no W (as in 90% of my FP games). Also, SP player was trying to troll FP into mustering the S & E to War for him, so I think it was good play. I think you nailed it - the timing was slightly off for the attack on Mordor. But how can you blame the FP player for jumping on a SP 5E roll? Super tricky. But generally, given time, SP will get those 2VP back. So timing FPMV has to be precise!

6:00 You must retreat the entire army when attacked, so you can't split off characters from an army this way (you can when moving an army). 10:05 Yeah no reason to use a will instead of an h when s&e are not at war, also you probably want to at least have the option to get gandalf the white. 11:00 I think the idea behind the shadows gather play is to protect osgiliath since Fp can't attack it without giving you a free s&e muster, plus then that army can retreat into the wk (although those extra units could only be used defensively). 15:14 As FP I would definitely be thinking about a Mordor charge here (west harondor-> south ithilien-> minas morgul, then one of the other mordor strongholds next turn). They only have 1 hybrid which they need to put an orc in barad-dur and morannon to stop me from getting those strongholds for free next turn, and they've only drawn 5/24 strategy cards, and have already played half orcs, I'd be willing to see if they had one of the remaining reinforcement cards. 23:20 Yeah SP could've brought MM up to 4 hits here, which seems much better. 27:50 As FP I might've stayed for a field battle there, you're definitely not the favourite to win it, but if you win it you're in a very good position, plus you can play fateful strike as well to try get rid of the wk and then retreat if you don't win the first round. Retreating into siege means that you're counting on your next action dice roll to win the game. 32:05 Probably best to hold your presses, you have the extra attacks to whittle aragorn down in a slightly less risky way. 34:45 See above, if you had an extra 2 hits here you could take 2 hits on the relentless assault without losing combat strength. 41:30 I think there is a realistic chance of getting a SPMV well before the FPRV though. Lorien + DA + Rohan is 10 vps, with new power is rising in hand, the only issue is opening up cirdans by attacking lorien before DA. So isildur's bane's event effect is probably a lot less useful than the cruel as death. 51:55 I would probably get rid of Saruman while I can, take shadow down to 7 dice for the next turn, you've hidden so no automatic corruption, and you can then react to a muster or eye heavy roll next turn. Then you can chain into gwaihir to move gandalf into HD for free. 55:25 I would kill the mouth while I could here. Even if you lose the will to day without dawn, you can move with a ring to stop the automatic corruption, and then you're on 5 dice to 7 for the rest of the game, plus no leadership against gandy in HD.

Great stuff. Cool balrog play.

Where was Gondor?

Hahaha the infighting started 1 step out of Rivendell, the Fellowship is Broken as Elrond is watching from his porch, shaking his head ;) Wild game & luck swings, never give up! Thx for making this GP!!!

Java dev be like, "Why would I need to code for more than 7 dice in the hunt pool? No one plays like that; it's not a real game state."

Thought process behind separating legolas by the way was 1) I'd already mustered into WLR through thranduils and if i have to defend moria figured rivendell could need some defending, 2) allows me to move those companions 2 tiles instead of 1 should i get fear fire foes, 3) having kept gandi in I felt i could afford to take an extra corruption :) Also separately - I didn't move into mordor on T7 for a couple of reasons. 1) had to assume that shadow had cruel weather so better to move twice this turn and twice next turn 2) moving only 2x allowed me to defend HD, DA and Rivendell. If i had not defended all 3, one of them would have fallen a turn earlier which would have lost me the game and nullified any advantage gained from getting into mordor a turn faster 3) Corruption was already starting to become a significant issue after the 2nd move. Had I been hit again and revealed into mordor on my 3rd move i would have been in a lot of trouble. As things stood I still only won through sheer luck not drawing any reveals (let alone 8 C eyes or reds!) on my mordor run :)

This was such a fun one, well done by swift!

TY 4 this game! make more videos please)

War of the ring looks so interesting but I can't find anything about it as a computerized version, where do you play this?

Another great thumbnail love it! Really fun game, could not be closer. It's so hard as FP to decide Ring/FPMV and you get to a point where you have to commit instead of splitting your resources. Wonder what a ring attempt would have entailed ... hard to say!

Ernie here. Great commentary by you two, and appreciate all the video content yall make, it's very entertaining! It was a fun game and as FP, I love creating a dual threat for Shadow, balancing and pivoting back and forth from fellowship progress to military options, based on the dice and opportunities you see. Makes it very fun and dynamic. Anyway subscribed to both of yalls channels and will continue to enjoy the content!

Not having a regular does change things quite a bit, makes the elite decision make a lot more sense. I guess what else do you do. Dwarves have a very limited force pool.

This kind of game is a hoot. Definitely some mistakes by both sides there. That last muster, ouch.

Enjoying this! Idea: it seems that everybody tries to avoid reposting boring "by the numbers" games in favor of wacky ones filled with running around and military hi-jinx. But maybe consider posting one or two more "average" games to show us newer folks what exactly such games entail.

A pleasure to do this with you - always a good time. We did notice one thing after the cast that changes our last little bit of analysis: (Spoiler spacing) There were no drawrf regulars left at the end

Great video as usual! I can’t find reference to the two FP tokens in the rules. Where do these come from?

Really useful series! Thanks

Thank you so much for this great video! I'm only starting and in my first game alone I have made half the list of mistakes you explain here. This video is a pure gem, thank you so much for taking the time for it!

Giving tokens to Free People is redundant in LOME.

Goddamit GP, cant get image of Aragorn fellating Ents out of my head now! This was a fun game, nice to see players that play a bit differently, like I would not in a million years attack that massive Moria army - I would expect the standard 'no 6s on the next 20 dice' and then you are royally screwed. But it worked!

Great analysis. I think going for MT in the beginning is a good idea. I also think that last turn SP should've gone for the military victory, this way free do not have enough action to both reclaim lorien and moria. Then next turn you just need 1 more point and you still have a huge army around MT. going to the shire from MG might also be feasible depending on the rolls

6:00 I think killing Gandy is definitely the play here, the 6th dice is too valuable, the extra corruption can be burned off in lorien along with wwsat, if necessary. 13:00 Balrog seems way better here, if they declare somewhere other then lorien you can potentially reveal them with the extra tile to get your moria tile, and if they do declare in lorien you can hold off on triggering it so you can use durins bane to quickly bring down lorien to get the extra reroll in lorien instead. 19:25 Not just devilry of orthanc, but fighting uruk hai could be played as an event card here, for the 2 free presses. 27:30 I don't hate moving the fellowship here, to force shadow to allocate an eye, but I wonder if maybe using boromirs muster ability to bring gondor to war (with the other muster) would be better here, to threaten fpmv next turn more easily. 31:40 One problem with that plan is shadow can use 1 army to merge up in gorgoroth, and then hold the other until fp commits to either north ithilien or dagorlad, then moves the full 10 orcs into the stronghold they want to defend. 35:00 Now that you mentioned it, this is another big problem with the plan, and the shadow is moving (+ similar cards) aren't necessary since you would be giving shadow a ring (if you brought in aragorn to play anduril). 38:30 Commander swift forgot to downgrade an elite for the press here. 42:30 Fellowship was not revealed here, Columbo just uses the reveal + hide shortcuts to declare the fellowship (changes the fellowship track to 0). 53:00 Either way looks like a long shot for commander swift, but maybe you stay for the field here, you have more hits than the free people do, you can play devilry or dread and despair, and if the free people stop you can muster another elite and waste one of the free peoples dice. If it goes well enough, maybe you even stay for a field battle against the other army since you have leadership and they don't.

Nice! I have done most of these…

29:00 was a little surprised no balrog muster by this point. It would pu dwarves closer to war but DEW wasnt happening much anyway and it would be an elite and a die

WTF is a musterling ;) ... another great set of advice for newer players, and reminders for vets, great video Ross!

I believe point 2) and 3) are a little in opposition... Ok if you go military , go 80 % and use 20% of dices to use cards that hit the fellowship, But moving nazgul and orcs some time need 2 eyes to be effective. I not believe there is a right percentage of corruption strategy mixed with military it is more an alchemical potion of intuite and luck. Try to kill Strider is good and right things to do(from the Gospel of Sauron ⚔ )also if you wish conquest middel earth !

6:10 yes you did. That was a wild game.

Oh yeah, Lorien can go sideways hard in LoME if you're not careful.

Loving the replay commentary! On my first rewatch, I’m surprised how many silly misjudgements I made throughout, but it was a pleasant first FPMV nonetheless!

So what is the game how do you play