Overview of the New War of the Ring Kings of Middle-Earth Expansion
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In this article, I will evaluate the application solely from a gameplay point of view, here you will not see an evaluation of the compatibility of the game's lore with the so-called Shadow of the Wicked (in the girlhood of the Vampire King).
The add-on fixes several issues with the base game:
1. Slightly improves the position of free peoples, adding to them actions thanks to the cube of rulers and powers with add. recruitment and protection thanks to the abilities of the rulers. On the one hand, the rulers are relatively easy to "awaken" in order to gain access to their proteins (for example, to "awaken" Brand, you only need to have a Severian active and spend an action cube with the value of Nym), on the other hand, it is also relatively easy for the Darkness to memorize them remember that it also gives the Darkness access to the white "scorned by corruption" versions of the rulers. I don't know if there is a balance here, but the chip is generally interesting.
2. Fixes an issue where a player has too many eyes dropped due to darkness, which deprives him of the ability to act on the field. Or when a few eyes dropped and the free peoples didn't drop swords or will of the west, meaning the brotherhood wouldn't advance, making the eye cubes useless.
It is now possible to spend eye cubes from the hunting pool, just to correct the rulers. You roll the cube with an eye, draw 3 hunting tokens from the bag, choose one and place it on the field next to one of the rulers you want to carpathize. At the same time, there are 2 tokens in the bag, which force you to discard the rest and count as 0, that is, they mean, in fact, the failure of the corruption attempt, that is, corruption is not a freebie for Darkness, there is also a risk of wasting an action in vain.
3. Adds a little more opportunities to Darkness with Dark Lords. This solves the issue where Darkness lacks Nazgul leadership, and solves the problem of lack of variety of whites and combat capabilities of Dark minions. Leaders are still given the same ruler cube as free peoples.
4. They add more meaning to free peoples in the movement of satellites through the field. In the base of satellites, it rarely makes sense to move around the field, often cards like "There and back" or "Fear, fire, enemies" somewhere in the middle or at the end of the game lie dead weight and are used as combat. Now the satellites have an additional meaning to move them in order to "cure" the rulers of the disease.
In general, the additional is normal, it slightly improves the balance of the base, makes it more diverse.
Not sure if it will additionally go well with lords, most likely there will be a slight imbalance in favor of light.
With warriors, most likely, it will be bad, even more advantage in favor of Svetlana, but I do not recommend playing with warriors at all in principle.
All in all, I recommend this add-on for purchase and will buy it myself (but haven't seen the event map yet, maybe there will be a hat).