u/Dashmeistr

I was. So if you're lurking in this subreddit but haven't jumped in, here's my experience.

I am more into TTRPGs than board games, but love Tolkien and felt like War of the Ring was the holy grail of Middle-earth gaming experiences. Having Nepitello as a designer was also a draw since I love The One Ring.

So I pulled the trigger and I bought it for myself as a birthday present knowing my wife wouldn't play it. I unboxed it, read the rulebook, but didn't get it to the table for months. I remember feeling like "this is is such a deep and complex game, it takes hours to learn and play, not sure if I can do this".

The thing that finally got me over the line wasn't reading the rulebook again—it was trying solo first and giving myself permission to play badly.

I played two solo games (not using an AI emulator - literally playing both sides in the fairest way I could for both). I found the Dized app tutorial really useful to learn the flow. I still made plenty of mistakes, but by the end I understood why the rules existed instead of just trying to memorise them.

A couple of months later I taught the game to a friend. We still spent six hours on our first play and looked up loads of rules, but there was a huge difference: we were never confused about what the game was trying to do. The solo games had given me the context to teach, and once our strategies emerged, the game sped up naturally.

My biggest takeaway?

Solo play didn't teach me every rule. It taught me enough confidence to get the game to the table.

If you're on the fence, I'd recommend:

• Play one solo game first.
• Use a tutorial (I used Dized).
• Accept that you'll get rules wrong.
• Focus on understanding the flow, not memorising every exception.

I wrote up both experiences if you're interested:

Part 1: How I finally started War of the Ring
https://www.thedashaction.com/2026/06/how-i-finally-srated.html

Part 2: Was playing solo worth it?
https://www.thedashaction.com/2026/07/war-of-ring-part-2-was-playing-solo.html

Curious how others approached learning this beast. Did you jump straight into multiplayer, or learn it solo first?

Not seeing a lot of coverage for this solo RPG adaptation of the Fallout 2d20 RPG. Here are my impressions after about 5 hours of play, and you can read actual play notes to see how the game mechanically works in my blog post below.

https://www.thedashaction.com/2026/07/fallout-wasteland-wanderer-five-sessions.html

• The biggest strength is the structure. It has a really clean solo gameplay loop: travel → encounter → take action, with a defined list of actions plus enough flexibility to improvise narratively when needed. Character creation is quick, the 5x5 map system is excellent, and gradually sketching out the wasteland as you explore feels very Fallout.
• It’s also much more streamlined than the full Fallout 2D20 RPG, which honestly works in its favour for solo play. Combat is fast and abstracted, and while enemies can feel mechanically similar, the trade-off is that you spend far less time bogged down in crunchy systems. It captures the “open world wandering into emergent side quests” feel of Fallout decently well.
• That said, usability is rough in places. You do a lot of flipping between the rules and the tables section. I understand why the tables are grouped together — it’ll probably feel great once the game is internalised — but early on it’s clunky. The included turn flow reference sheet also isn’t complete, which caused me to completely miss actions like Endure for multiple sessions.
• I’ve also spotted a surprising number of typos, ambiguities, and what look like outright errors (including Oracle odds that seem inverted). None of them are game-destroying, but together they create friction in a game that otherwise wants to flow quickly. It feels a bit like the book needed one more proofreading pass before print.
• Still, there’s a strong core here. The scope is intentionally small, the format is table-friendly, the artwork and production quality are great, and the system does a good job scaffolding solo narrative play without overcomplicating things.