Middle-earth Collectible Card Game

Middle-earth Collectible Card Game (MECCG) is an out-of-print collectible card game released by Iron Crown Enterprises in late 1995. It is the first CCG based on J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth, with added content from ICE's Middle-earth Role Playing Game.
The cards used in the game feature original artwork by a multitude of artists, many of them longtime Tolkien illustrators such as John Howe, Ted Nasmith, and Angus McBride.
In its basic form, it is a game for one to five players, each choosing one of the five wizards to represent themselves. A turn in the game consists of one player's wandering around Middle-earth with the help of famous characters of Middle-earth, trying to gather influence and power to aid in the battle against The Dark Lord, while another player tries to harass, and ultimately kill his characters with specific hazard cards. Then, for each player's turn, the roles change clockwise around the table (the player who was moving his characters then throws hazards at the player to his or her right). Any player may also win by acquiring and destroying the One Ring after a complicated set of events.
Later expansions have added the possibility to take the role of a Ringwraith of Sauron (MELE), a corrupted wizard playing by his own rules (MEWH), the malevolent Balrog (MEBA), or even Sauron himself. The game is somewhat distinguished from most other CCG's with the use of two six-sided dice for a random factor and also by the actual map of Middle-earth, including regions your companies travel through, and site cards they visit.
MECCG won two Origins Awards: Best Card Game of 1995 for MECCG: The Wizards and Best Graphic Presentation of a Card Game or Expansion of 1996 for MECCG: The Dragons. The game's production ended in 1999, when ICE lost the license that allowed them to use the content of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. This license was later bought by Decipher, who used it to bring out another CCG. MECCG still has a relatively loyal and active fanbase of players.
The game can be played online through the use of the Generic Collectible Card Game (GCCG), allowing normal or sealed games. MECCG online events are organized several times a year and every player is free to participate in them. A web-based game variant is active at https://cardnum.net/
An expansion set named The Dwarf Lords was planned for September 1998, and the set The Elf Lords was scheduled for mid 1999. Both were indefinitely postponed in November 1998.
ICE Publications:
Independent Publications:
Andy Butcher reviewed Middle Earth: The Wizards for Arcane magazine, rating it a 7 out of 10 overall. Butcher comments that "If you're willing to put in the effort (and buy quite a lot of cards), there's plenty here to make it all worthwhile. At the end of the day, though, I for one can't help wishing that one person got to play Gandalf while the other took on the role of Sauron, leading to a far more direct and involving conflict."
Andy Butcher reviewed Middle Earth: The Dragons for Arcane magazine, rating it an 8 out of 10 overall. Butcher comments that " Impressively, Middle-earth: The Dragons manages to emphasise the positive aspects of the game, without adding greatly to the already weighty rules."
Rick Swan, in a review of The Wizards release in The Duelist, stated that the game "has enough quirky innovation to distinguish it from the multitude of play-’em-and-forget-’em copycats" of Magic: The Gathering, and that it was "as faithful an adaptation" of the Tolkien novels that could be expected in a card game. He also stated that the artist's commissioned for the set "reads like a cavalcade of the industry's heaviest hitters" and the artwork they produced for it could be framed to hang on a wall. He said that the rulebook was poorly organized, with novice players having to scour the booklet for definitions of gameplay terms. Overall, he states that the game "may not always soar, but it never sinks."