Lord of the Rings dungeon crawler Foes of Middle-earth raises $600K on Kickstarter

Foes of Middle-earth has already raised more than $600K on Kickstarter

There is no shortage of great tabletop games based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, including The One Ring role-playing game, a highly successful Magic: The Gathering set, and The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, a challenging riff on the classic cooperative board game Pandemic. Brazilian publisher D20 Culture will soon add to that collection with Foes of Middle-earth, a dungeon crawler board game that has already raised more than $600,000 on Kickstarter.

D20 Culture CEO Peterson Rodrigues told Polygon in a video interview that he owns almost all the previously published Lord of the Rings games and was looking to create a different experience. One big difference between Foes of Middle-earth and other Lord of the Rings games is that D20 Culture has a licensing agreement with Warner Bros. to use visuals from Peter Jackson’s films, making this an official product.

“When you get Gandalf, you get the face of Sir Ian McKellan,” Rodrigues said. “When I started approving artwork, I remember the exact sensation that I had when I went to the theater to watch the movie for the first time. That nostalgia is the feeling I want to evoke in people.”

Sessions of Foes of Middle-earth start with an exploration phase, where up to four players move through a game board by flipping randomly placed square tiles, where they might find enemies or items. The tiles double as little battle maps when you’re fighting enemies. Players also need to resolve event cards as they move through unexplored terrain, which can give them rewards or spawn enemies depending on their dice rolls.

As players explore, the party earns a pool of experience points that they can use to level up their characters to gain new abilities. Each character also has a personal quest that they can fulfill, like exploring seven locations or defeating five Uruk-hai. Completing these goals gives them access to better equipment. Once they’re powerful enough, the party can take on mini-bosses like the Watcher in the Water at Durin’s Door, the tentacled monster the Fellowship battles outside the Mines of Moria. The whole game takes about two to three hours to play, ending with a showdown with the Balrog.

“We wanted the progression to be constant,” Rodrigues said. “You never waste too much time waiting for your turn to act. Every time something is happening at the table, everybody is involved with each other’s decisions because the decisions affect the entire group.”

The $159 base game comes with Aragorn, Frodo, Legolas, and Gimli, though the huge success of the Kickstarter means D20 Culture will also release stretch goal add-on packs with more playable characters, including Treebeard and Boromir. Each hero has their own strengths – some are better at exploring new tiles while others are more combat-focused. But any group of heroes can win, so long as the players work well together.

“It’s a very easy-to-understand game, but hard to master,” Rodrigues said. “The main mistake people can make is to not respect the group as one entity. We are in this together. The group is the main character, like the Fellowship.”

Characters can also gather allies to help them in their quest. If no one’s actively playing Aragorn, you might be able to recruit his ally card so you can still use some of his abilities. Solo players will need to control at least two heroes by themselves, but for groups of two to four, the hit points of the bosses and mini-bosses scale based on how many characters are in play.

D20 Culture’s team includes designers who worked on Zombicide and Cthulhu: Death May Die, and like those games, Foes of Middle-earth also includes highly detailed figures for heroes and monsters.

The Kickstarter also unlocked the game’s first two expansions. One creates a cinematic mode where instead of randomly exploring tiles, players follow the characters’ journeys in the movies. The other adds Merry and Pippin as playable characters and allows players to fight through the Battle of Helm’s Deep and face Saruman. The crowdfunding campaign runs until March 11 and the game is expected to ship in 2027.

“We have two more expansions to be released,” Rodrigues said. “We’re only going to announce them when we fulfill the game to backers because we don’t want to overwhelm them. Let people play and enjoy, then we’ll show them the future ahead.”