The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth

We didn't have enough people to play D&D, so we tried out this boardgame touted as "DMless D&D". Well, the DM was actually an app on a laptop, telling us how to place new tiles on the map, along with interaction tokens and enemies. It also told us how the enemies fight. 

We assumed the roles of Aragorn, Bilbo, Gimli and Legolas and dove in. 

The game itself does play like an RPG, with each character having actions and movement. Besides revealing the map and fighting enemies, characters can interact with tokens for non-combat encounters. I approached some people in a friendly manner only to find out they're bandits; I talked to children playing and went on a barrel ride in a stream; Legolas climbed a tree to look for more bandits; and so on.

We somehow went the wrong direction while still discovering the rules, and we ran out of time, failing the first mission. This meant going into the second scenario with a disadvantage. We explored a combat map of a bandit encampment. Lots of fighting, but also an interaction with a rusted portcullis to disable bandit reenforcements, and a hard boss fight with an orc leader.

Instead of dice, the game uses a deck builder mechanic for tests and combat. Then it's the player's responsibility to know all of the available abilities and triggers.

After soundly defeating the orc, we ended the game session.

Verdict: not bad, but it's too close to D&D without any of the good parts.