Middle-earth CCG (1995) - Learning a Classic

Learning the play the Middle-Earth CCG from Iron Crown Enterprises.

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[fuumaxkamui]

Am I dreaming??!! This game is amazing and I NEVER thought I’d see a prominent YouTube channel actually cover it!

[BogWraith]

Arguably, this is one of the greatest games ever created! I 'm so glad to see both of you guys, who I consider the BEST teachers of card games anywhere, streaming this and bringing it to the attention of folks who never heard of this incredible game.
The middle-earth theme drips off this game! The artwork, quotes from the books and the cards themselves are so immersive that you feel like you're actually travelling in Tolkien's world!

The Challenge decks are a great way to play and I think there is still a decent amount of it available to purchase. Do so if you can as it's well worth owning this set.

Thank you both for doing this, I really appreciate it!

[patrickdunham]

The weirdest thing about this game, for me looking at it in 2022, is how dedicated ICE was to make it playable with JUST the cards ... even though the rules say that's not the best way to do it. The designers put numbers from 2 to 12 on each card so players could reveal the top of their deck instead of rolling, and they took up at least one of the slots in a booster pack with region cards in case players didn't have the map. And THEN they put terrain icons on the location cards in case players hadn't pulled all the region cards they needed!
Today we've got games like X-Wing that have no issues putting game critical information online, or the Star Wars RPG requiring special dice that don't come with the core rulebooks. But in the 90s, ICE was like, "... But what if these fantasy nerds don't have 2d6 handy?"
This game is crazy, and great, and I would not be at all surprised to learn it was originally being designed as a full-on board game that was converted to a CCG after Magic: The Gathering took over physical games and ICE suddenly had to come up with weird solutions for not having all the packed in physical components anymore.

[petsontherocks]

I love you guys :) I played this game in late 90s with my friends, then forgot all about it and then I found my old cards in a drawer at my mom's place and now I am trying to understand from what sets my cards are and how to play them again.

[RedZoneRogue]

Thank you so much for this video! This is easily one of my favorite dead card games - if not one of my favorites of all time. Would love to see ya'll play more Middle Earth for sure!

[henryrodriguez]

I very much appreciate you both taking the time to explore this gem. It really is the most boardgame-like CCG ever designed, and the best thematic representation of Lord of the Rings as a game in my estimation. There is a lot going on, which you both waded through admirably. Regarding learning to deck build, it can be overwhelming (given the 6 expansion sets) to find a strategy and weed through all those cards (it is a sandbox of a game). If possible, I'd suggest sticking with just the base set (The Wizards) when building a first deck. Those Challenge decks are actually drawn from several sets. That Companion book you were leafing through has a very simple deck on p. 54 that is perhaps easier for learning the game with.

[cerealkiller]

the best part of these old ccgs is how much detail they went into also the art was great! i actually watched the whole thing over the course of a few days. wonderous!

[david]

26:58 So much joy on Zach's face haha, can't believe we were watching this live a year ago, now...

[MrKikke]

Man... I miss this videos. Hope you can make more videos with this game, Battletech, L5R, and all the games you liked during covid

[TrevorJust]

This was awesome, pulled my old stuff out and started teaching my kids. Thanks. Also this was how I found you guys

Thank you for those MECCG videos ! It's a breath of fresh air to go back there :)

[monkehbwoy]

Oh what a interesting game. So many cool mechanics: the movement, the testing of rings, corruption of gaining items and damage.
All without a single token!
Would be amazing with a updated game with just cleaner rules/language without removing all the cool stuff :)

[ChrisGlein]

This was incredibly satisfying to watch. Thank you so much for working through an intimidating 90’s classic and recording it for all to see. I would absolutely love to see how a second game played out for you. You’ve put in the hard work of learning it, might as well see how it feels after the learning game. For speed and simplicity of play the starter movement is much more manageable. You really went all in jumping straight to advanced rules :o.

[Mixxathon]

That was one epic stream! 6:30 just flew away. Time to order me some challenge decks.

[typhus]

I've unironically watched this video probably 3-4 full times, this last time while thumbing through my copy of The Wizards Companion, and slowly but surely I feel like I'm fully absorbing and being more deeply engrossed by this game. This game is absolutely astounding, incredibly ambitious, and I couldn't even imagine what more space they could have explored with more success and further blocks/sets

[Anondod]

Regarding deckbuilding in this game, as I recall it it's a fairly organic process compared to many more modern games.
Typically you want to end up with a deck that fulfills the following criteria:
* It can get all it needs in a reasonably limited area, preferably one where you can get from any site you need to any other site you need in one turn (though that's often not possible).
* The characters have enough bonuses to recruit the factions with very little risk of failure.
* Enough prowess and/or canceling ability to handle expected hazards (which depend on what region you're sticking to - another reason to move in a smaller area is to limit your opponent's ability to play hazards).
* Redundancies, because characters will die.
* A hazard deck that doesn't make things worse for yourself. If you're planning on going into the more dangerous regions you don't want to play with Doors of Night for example, since that allows for more effects that strengthen the hazards playable there.

(There were exceptions to all these, of course. Some decks could move far and wide, some would include factions you weren't strong against because they were conveniently located, some would bet everything on a specific character and make big efforts to keep them alive, and so on.)
But even though you will end up in a similar place, you can start the deckbuilding process anywhere.
Do you want to use a particular character? Find out what factions they have a bonus to recruit, find other characters that have the same skills (Scout, Diplomat etc) so you can include cards that key off of that, figure out what hazards are likely to be dangerous in the area you will be moving around. If you start with Legolas you'll want the Wood Elves and some other characters that have a bonus to recruit those, and you'll be close to dragon country up in the north so you'll probably want to be able to cancel the few but big strikes those hazard creatures have and so on.
Or do you want to play in a particular area? Pick out the factions that can be recruited there and find characters with good bonuses towards them, go for more or fewer items depending on what sites are available for those.
Or do you want to play a particular hazard archetype? (The big ones I recall are Orcs & Trolls (best in wilderness and shadowlands), Spiders (best in wilderness, particularly Mirkwood), Men (best in borderlands and borderholds with some playable in freeholds, and most factions are recruited from borderholds and freeholds), Undead (needs shadowlands, but there are cards that turn wilderness into shadowlands if you can keep Doors of Night in play), Drakes & Dragons (best in wilderness and the northeast), and Ringwraiths (very difficult to get to work properly but scary if you can do it, as I recall). So if you want to play with undead you probably don't want to go into the shadowlands or even the wilderness much because more dangerous hazards will be playable there and you'll want to avoid sites with undead auto-attacks.
Or do you want to go for pure theme? Hobbits puttering around in the region around the Shire, dwarves taking back the Lonely Mountain, Aragorn reforging Narsil into Andúril and rallying Gondor and Rohan, or, of course, dunking the Ring are all possible.
Regarding the design of the game, there are a few ways in which it could have benefitted from some modern tech even if you kept the core the same. For example, I think there was only a single character with an alternate version (not counting the Fallen Wizards, which were a great addition, or the evil faction versions of some hazard creatures) which was a Strider version of Aragorn, and having more variant characters could have helped with the glut of named-but-unknown characters currently in the game. Streamlining the process for influencing the other players' stuff and making it more transparent as well as amore core part of the game rather than what mainly seems to be a huge, kludgy patch for "but what if we both play Aragorn?" situations would also have helped. Also, and this feels weird to say about such an incredibly thematic game, but putting in more thematic cards and making the story moments stronger could have enhanced the experience even more, primarily if they were allowed to change the game world more in the same way the White Tree turns Minas Tirith into a haven (in some limited ways).
But there are also things I wish other games had picked up, like the integrated way the sideboard is used. For longer games, where you expect to go through your deck twice, having a first and a second phase was pretty common - my first time through the deck I try to get certain cards into play, and then I shuffle in these other cards for my second cycle, perhaps one located in a different region or ones that build on the first group. For a game that takes place in a known setting I also like the focus on minor variations on general abilities for most characters rather than giving every single character a unique ability, the way many newer games do. To me, the latter makes the characters feel more like game pieces, like they're representing a game mechanic rather than a character.
Anyway, this has gone on for way longer than I had planned. Off to the next video!

[warbossd]

Wanted to thank you guys for this stream. I own literally thousands 9f cards for this game and haven't had them out of storage for years. This has rekindled my desire to blow the dust off and track down a fellow LOTR nerd to try it out with again.

[fgonzalezandrade]

I never thought I'd see a 6 hour video! I played back in '96, and revisited it about 2014. I think we never played it right! Some of the rules are a bit difficult for my taste, like enduring the trouble that it is to play a ring, then examine it (too bad if you dont have Gandalf, have to wait till a card lets you examine it) and then to get discarded if you dont have the specific ring according to the result of the 2D6 etc, but I have to admit that is tempting to revisit it once again. Thanks so much for the wonderful video, it really brings back great memories! You guys are great!

[Arashmickey]

Thank you for this, it was real joy watching you play. Fun fact: the starter decks would always include certain cards: the region movement cards, the havens, and one from 5 sets of "fixed cards" consisting of 2 different wizards, 5 characters, 2 factions associated with your characters, and 7 sites including home sites for your fixed set characters and wizards. Eg. one of the fixed sets always had Alatar, Saruman, Beorn, the Beornings faction, Beorn's House, Gimli, Iron Hill Dwarves, Iron Hills, etc. More random than a challenge deck, less random than MTG. I completely misunderstood so many rules for a long time, but it was fun anyway. I played MTG, Star Wars CCG, Star Trek, Jyhad/VTM, X-Files, love them all but none have married theme and gameplay as well as MECCG. It's a real work of art.

[mattcat]

I loved this game as a kid and especially enjoyed that one could even do it solitaire.

Is there a version of it on Tabletop Simulator?