The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is a cooperative adventure game where players attempt to complete a scenario, each with three heroes of their choice and a deck of allies, events and attachments to support them. Each round, players dispatch their heroes and allies to quest or to battle with enemies that engage them. However, as the heroes and allies exhaust after questing, protecting, or attacking, the players' options are typically insufficient to deal with everything at once. Therefore, players need to decide whether it is more urgent to quest and make progress in the scenario while the enemy forces gain power, or to battle enemies while making no progress, not knowing what will come next.

The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is the base game of a Living Card Game where new adventure packs are released monthly. The base game has three scenarios, twelve famous characters from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (including Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Denethor and Eowyn), and four pre-constructed player decks. Players can choose to use one of these decks or construct their own deck to increase their chances to be successful in the more challenging scenarios. The monthly adventure packs have a new scenario, a new hero, and new player cards to be used in their deck. The base game is for 1-2 players, but with an additional base game the scenarios may be played with up to four players.

Although this game takes place in Tolkien's Middle Earth, the scenarios do not represent scenes from the books, but rather in the seventeen years from Bilbo's 111th birthday until Frodo's departure from the Shire.

The scenarios from saga-expansions represent scenes from the books. Saga-expansions form the Campaign Mode so players have all the saga quests that deal with the trilogy (+ Hobbit) together in one marathon campaign.