A new fully-cooperative, app-supported board game set in the ever-popular Lord of the Rings universe has been unveiled by Fantasy Flight Games. Slated for a Q2 2019 release, The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth will see one to five players dive into a series of 14 replayable adventures, battling the evil Sauron and his minions along the way.

Fantasy Flight Games, which has experimented with app support before for popular titles such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark and Imperial Assault, says that Journeys in Middle-earth will come with a free companion app that will advance the narrative and control the enemies that players face.

The game’s core set will come with six heroes, including the likes of Bilbo Baggins and Gimli, each with their own unique deck of skill cards used when exploring, attacking enemies and engaging with the people of Middle-earth. Before each adventure, players will also select their particular role in the party, such as Pathfinder or Hunter.

As the party explores, they will build up a ‘journey map’ of double-sided tiles representing the forests, mountains, lakes and plains of Middle-earth, with players investigating their surroundings by interacting with search, threat and person tokens on the app. In certain combat situations, the action will shift to a zoomed-in ‘battle map’, enabling our heroes to scrap with orcs, trolls, wargs and other nasties in a more granular, tactical manner.