'War of the Ring'. On a large map of Middle Earth, armies are mustering and heroes are readying to fight the shadow spreading out of Mordor. The game is played on two levels. Both sides (or three if someone wants to play Saruman) have great armies that battle in a typical war game style while another game is going on at the same time with individual characters around the fate of the One Ring. In the Campaign game Sauron's forces are the more powerful but the free peoples get the edge in the Character game.
Highly sought after as a collectors item. It could be purchased with either a paper map or a full mounted map, and was also sold in a three-game set with the folio games Gondor: The Siege of Minas Tirith and Sauron. That trilogy set is called The Games of Middle Earth.
War of the Ring was the first licensed product to attempt to cover the entire series of conflicts depicted in Lord of the Rings from the Fellowship's departure from Rivendell to the final battle at the Black Gates of Mordor. It is a two-player game, with one player taking the side of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth, and the other player taking the dark forces of Sauron. There are also rules for a three-player version, with one player taking the role of Saruman.
Character game
The Character game uses more basic rules, and follows the quest by the Fellowship of the Ring to destroy the One Ring. On one side is the Fellowship. The other player controls the nine Nazgûl, Saruman, the Mouth of Sauron, and possibly Gollum, if he manages to acquire the Ring. If the Fellowship succeeds in transporting the Ring to Mount Doom, the Fellowship wins. If the Dark Forces locate the Ring, wrest it from the Fellowship and transport it to Barad-dûr, then the Dark Forces win. The Dark Power also has the option of winning a military victory, played out by moving Nazgûl to various important Fellowship-controlled fortresses and rolling dice see if they are captured.
Campaign game
The more complex mode of play is the Campaign Game, which adds in army units for both sides as well as other characters from the story who were involved in the military campaigns. An odds-ratio combat system is used to play out combat between armies. Players can win with their Ring-based objective from the Character game or by capturing a specified list of objectives with their armies.
Characters in the game are rated for their abilities in individual combat, magic, army leadership, endurance, and resistance to the lure of the Ring. The latter rating determines the difficulty they have of voluntarily removing the Ring once they put it on; they gain various benefits by wearing it, but if they do so for too many turns, they become a "semi-Ringwraith" under Dark Power control.
To simulate Sauron's conflicting needs of searching for the Ring versus directing his armies, the Dark Power player is given a variable number of "Shadow Points" each turn, which they can spend to perform various activities. Among these is searching for the Fellowship; although the hex locations of various Fellowship members are known, their identity is not (their counters are kept upside-down), and Sauron must perform search actions with Nazgûl or orcs to identify the characters, and to spot them so they can be fought or captured. Which areas of the map can be searched, and with what forces, is controlled by a small deck of cards.
