I’m going to continue on with my symposium series about what I call the cooperative adventure card game. This time around, I’m hoping to zoom in on The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, though with the usual call outs to other such games, in particular Fantasy Flight’s other cooperative LCGs.

I want to see if we can describe the relationship among the storyworld (Tolkien’s Quenta), the individual narrative of the player’s session, and the particular mechanics that scenarios like “A Shadow of the Past” (the first scenario of The Black Riders saga expansion) lay atop the more basic mechanics of the game.

One of the very first decisions the player must make as they set out on the long journey of the saga expansions is how many characters to commit to the quest, given that there’s a Nazgul in the staging area and more lurking in the Encounter Deck. That choice is a complex one, and if things go to plan Thursday night we may spend the whole time just on what it means from a practomimetic point of view — and of course what the implications of our description are for Flip Flop Solitaire, jazz, and Milton.

We’ll meet Thursday at 8:30 EDT / 7:30 CDT / 5:30 PDT, voice chat over Discord.