The expansion for Fantasy Flight Games’ Lord of the Rings: Journeys Into Middle-Earth has leaked online. According to the Australian game retailer “The Gamesmen,” the first full expansion for Lord of the Rings: Journeys Into Middle-Earth will be called Shadowed Paths and will add the iconic locations Moria and Mirkwood to the adventure game. The Shadowed Paths expansion will also include new heroes, new enemies, new terrain, and new items, along with a new 13-scenario campaign. No specific heroes were named, but the box art shows Gandalf standing within Moria flanked by two dwarves.
Lord of the Rings: Journeys Into Middle-Earth was released last year as an exploration/dungeon-crawling game similar to Fantasy Flight Games’ Mansions of Madness and Star Wars: Imperial Assault. The game features a mix of established Lord of the Rings characters like Aragorn, Bilbo, and Legolas, along with new characters created by Fantasy Flight. The game’s campaign features two distinct types of scenarios – one that involves exploring an expanding hexagonal map, and a more focused combat map that represents buildings, campsites, or small caves. Players take on different roles over the campaign which grants them different persistent abilities. Throughout the game, players make checks using a small deck of cards that they can enhance over the campaign, adding crucial success cards to the deck or adding abilities that players use every turn. One interesting part of the game is that players can “prepare” abilities from their deck, which forces them to choose between pulling out success cards to unlock stronger abilities or preparing weaker abilities to maximize their chance of success.
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The Gamesmen website lists a February 2020 release date for the Shadowed Paths expansion, although Fantasy Flight’s releases have a notoriously shifting schedule. The website lists a release price of $134.95 in Australian dollars, which converts to a $92 US release price.
