Leacock’s fingerprints are all over this, the escalating threat track, the resource juggling, the way a bad round snowballs if you don’t put out the fire fast, but Fate of the Fellowship bolts a real branching narrative engine onto that Pandemic-family chassis and honestly it works better than I expected going in skeptical.

The book of choices is the star here. You’re making actual decisions as the fellowship splits up, do you send someone toward Rohan or hold the line, and the game remembers what you picked in a way that changes later chapters. It’s not a legacy game, nothing gets destroyed, but the throughline across a full campaign felt more like reading the books again than any LOTR game I’ve played, including the old Reiner Knizia one.

Setup is heavier than I’d like for a game this narrative-forward, there’s a lot of sorting story cards into the right chapter piles before you even start, and the character powers are asymmetric enough that a new player at the table needs real hand-holding for the first session or two. My partner, who’s never played a Leacock game, was lost for most of chapter one and only found her footing once she stopped trying to optimize and just leaned into her character’s flavor.

The threat escalation, which is the Pandemic engine underneath everything, does its job well, there were two sessions where we genuinely thought we’d lose the fellowship to Sauron’s board state before the story even resolved, and that tension is the best thing the design does.

Where it loses a point for me is replay value on a fixed campaign, once you’ve been through the story the choices lose some weight on a second run. As a one-time campaign experience with the right group though, it’s some of the best co-op storytelling on my shelf right now.