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Climbing the Walls

by Tom Lischke
Senior Game Designer

First, let me say that I'm sorry for the delay on this article, but as anyone who has lived through a hurricane can tell you, they aren't a whole lot of fun. Now that the water has gone back down and things are getting back to normal, let's have a look at one of my favorite parts of The Return of the King set, the besiegers, and see what they do for the Sauron culture.

Let's start with a little background. Coming into the design for King block we thought it was time to sit down and look at the game as a whole. With two blocks of cards in the books, we wanted to examine our basic assumptions and guidelines for the game. These are the things that make The Lord of the Rings TCG what it is. Things like cultural definitions and flavor, as well as more mechanical things like card templating. (Chuck Kallenbach will be touching on the tweaks that we are making to the templates in a few weeks, but I provide some hints at it below.)

To evaluate the cultural definitions, we looked at how often each culture shows up in constructed play, and how well they perform. If a culture wasn't showing up very much, we also spent some time talking about why that was.

One of the conclusions that we reached is that we wanted to do something about the cultural definitions for the Sauron culture. While they have some nice verbs like Hate, Enduring Evil, and Orc Bowmen, the culture as a rule has better individual cards than groups that work well for constructing deck modules. Minions like the Tower Assassin were more likely to show up as a splash than as part of a Sauron-themed deck.

We've long had concerns about the site number 6 for the Sauron minions. With that site number, we have to give a lot of value on the card in other places before it becomes efficient enough to include in a constructed deck. Or, there have to be relatively painless ways of getting around the roaming penalty, which is what trackers attempt to address.

Discussions have come up before about dropping the site number for the Sauron minions, but we've resisted it for one reason or another each time. One of the main reasons is that in the first two movies, Mordor Orcs don't travel very much. We get lots of impressive shots of them standing or marching around in Mordor, but not yet waging open war. Even the shots at the beginning of Fellowship show the Orcs fighting on the border of Sauron's land.

Well, not to give too much away here, but that changes in The Return of the King so we felt like it might be time to let it change a little bit in the TCG. Besiegers will make their appearance, and have a site number of 5. Story-wise, this obviously represents the fact that Sauron has loosed his armies on Minas Tirith, and in the front lines come the besiegers.

When designing this new sect of Orcs, there were a couple of priorities. We wanted to make sure that they didn't simply become better versions of the old minions in the culture. They obviously don't need a whole lot of tracker support (although throwing a couple of the old ones in there might be interesting). We also wanted to keep away from doing better versions of direct damage minions or verbs, as this is the one thing that Sauron actually does pretty well. After a little more talk, we decided to that they should revolve around one of the mechanics from The Two Towers, site control.

Seems pretty obvious, right? Well, we actually jumped through a few hoops to get to that point. Back when we opened design on The Return of the King, Joe Alread had come up with the concepts of initiative and threats (and a couple more that I can't tell you about until sets 8 and 9). At that point we decided to temporarily retire a couple of the set mechanics from the Tower block, including site control. This meant that when we started looking at these site 5 Sauron Orcs, site control wasn't on the list of options. After some discussion, which included the fact that Sauron did the least with site control in Tower block, we felt the match was just too good to pass up. It is what this army is all about.

So we started spitting out minions with texts that revolve around controlling and stacking on sites. Here are a couple of representative game texts. As the cards are still at approvals, we can't show complete cards (or title and lore) yet:

Besieger.
When you play this minion from a site you control, add a burden for each site you control.

Besieger.
Skirmish: Stack a besieger on a site you control to make CARDNAME strength +2.

Besieger.
Shadow: Discard 2 cards from hand to play a [Sauron] Orc stacked on a site you control (discard 1 card from hand instead if that Orc is a besieger).

And finally:

Besieger.
Skirmish: If this minion is stacked on a site, discard him to make a [Sauron] Orc strength +5 (or +10 if you have initiative).

I think they'll give some new options, and hopefully help the whole culture. But these guys have some fun toys too, so lets look at one of the engines:

Condition • Support Area
Engine. To play, spot a [Sauron] Orc.
All [Sauron] Orcs are strength +1 for each besieger stacked on a site.
Regroup: Discard a besieger to take control of a site. Discard this condition.

And one of the besieger events:

Event • Maneuver
Choose an opponent to discard the top card of his or her draw deck. If the twilight cost of that card is less than the number of besiegers you spot, take control of a site and all besiegers are strength +3 until the regroup phase.

Well, that is a peek at this new group of minions. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do for the culture. Stop by the chat on September 25 to let me know what you think. And make sure to check back in a couple of weeks when we take a look at another surprising development from The Return of the King.

September 24, 2003