I picked up the new Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth on Thursday and my son and I have played 2 of the scenarios. We're really enjoying it. I'd describe it as a further refinement of the Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition formula (cooperative adventure game with an app as the dungeonmaster). Some of the things we like so far are:
1. All of the MoM2 scenarios we've played have a mostly hidden timer to them. So many turns in you'll get a vague warning like "the ritual chanting is getting louder, they must be opening the portal soon", then later a more dire warning but no specifics. I get the need for a timer to add tension, and to a point I can appreciate keeping it hidden so players are never sure what's going on and how much time they have left. But too many of our MoM2 games end abruptly when the app simply tells us we've lost because we took too long.
Journeys has a timer in the form of a Threat Bar. The bar fills up so much per turn based on the number of players and how many unexplored tiles are present on the board. The bar displays certain thresholds that, when reached, trigger something bad. So you know going in how much threat until the game ends, when some negative event is going to happen, and a general sense of how quickly threat is going to build up. In one scenario there was a mechanism where we subtracted threat from the bar, so that might come up now and then.
The tension, so far, has been in knowing generally what we have to do in that time frame but never really knowing exactly how to proceed. The board has encounter tokens spread around and interacting with them reveals new parts of the board, provides clues, or helps accomplish the scenario objective... but some are optional and you don't really know which are which. Maybe you got a clue that bad guys were to the west, but tokens to the east might provide useful bonuses or items. How much time do you spend searching every corner of the board vs. focusing on what you think might be the path to overall victory?
2. Journeys is a lengthy series of scenarios vs. stand alone scenarios that MoM2 has. There is progression in both upgrading items and adding new skill cards to your character. Losing one scenario doesn't mean the end, it just means you go into the next scenario with some setback.
3. There are no dice. The game is played using a small deck of skill cards per player. Everyone starts with 6 basic cards that are identical, 5 cards that are unique to that character (Aragorn, Gimli, etc.) and 3 cards unique to a role you've chosen for yourself. There are 6 roles... things like captain, burgular, musician. They have suggested roles (Aragorn - captain) but you're free to make Gimli a musician or whatever. You're even free to change after each scenario...
4. When you complete a scenario as one role you earn so much XP to spend and add a new card from that role to your character. So as a musician you learn a new song and add that card. But if you then choose to switch roles, maybe to a hunter, you keep that one new musician card while replacing the 3 "core" musician cards with 3 "core" hunter cards. After a few scenarios you could have a real multi-classed character or one who's focused and purchased a lot of cards from one role.
5. The cards themselves are used in 2 ways. First, they can be "readied" which just means they provide certain passive abilities or things you can do by discarding the card. Secondly, whenever you perform a test in the game (interacting with tokens, attacking, defending, etc.) you draw so many cards from your deck and look for success symbols on those cards, or "inspiration" symbols that can be converted into successes with certain tokens (just like MoM2's dice system). The catch is the cards with really strong passive/discard abilities are generally the cards that have success symbols on them. Do you ready them for those abilities, or leave those cards in your deck so that when you do test you're more likely to draw the success symbols?
The short version is, there's a mild deck-building and deck-cycling element to the game instead of dice and we really like it
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