Next week, at the Essen Spiel ’12, Lords of Middle-earth will finally be in your hands, after one year in the making.

So it’s finally time to complete this long series, which kept us busy in the wait, and provided you with some insight about what happened during the design, development, and testing (often intertwined!) of this expansion.

Even with such a long series, it proved to be impossible to give full credit to all the suggestions, feedback, comments provided during this year by our friends who volunteered to join the playtest group.

Lords of Middle-earth, first expansion for War of the Ring Second Edition

My warmest thanks to Kevin “Krieghund” Chapman and Kristofer “Veldrin” Bengtsson. You probably know their names already, because they are always the first helping hand that shows up in a BGG forum when somebody has a question. They have been as helpful to us, even during times of personal difficulties, and it’s impossible to thank them enough. They have been also involved in the design of some of the components of this expansion, and specifically some of the new combat effects, so they really “leveled up” this time!

And my thanks to Andrew Poulter, for his continuous assistance during the playtest process.

A lot more people helped during the playtest process: Rafael Brinner, Ralf Schemmann and Chris Young made exceptional efforts, but every one of our testers helped to steer the boat in the right direction: Amado Angulo, Melanie Chapman, John McKendrick, Peter Majek, David Morse, Nicolas Pagès, Leonardo Rina, Craig Rose, Glenn ‘Magic Geek’ Shanley, Barrett Tucker, Alija Villa, Wes Wagner...

Last, I want to thank John Howe, for finding the time of helping us to round up the artwork for the Expansion even if he was incredibly busy with the production of The Hobbit movie, and Jon Hodgson, for teaming up with him to create some great new art.

And now, what you’ve been waiting for… the complete downloadable rules of Lords of Middle-earth!

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