Wounds are used to represent injury sustained in battle that affects a character's vitality. Wounds are shown through the use of wound tokens, which are usually blood-red glass beads. Once a character has wounds equal to their vitality, they are immediately killed. This is in contrast to exertion, which a character cannot die from.

The most common way that wounds occur is through losing skirmishes; once a skirmish has resolved, the losing characters each receive one wound (or more if the winner has any damage bonuses). Archery is also a common form of wound-dealing, either through indirect archery fire (that is, your opponent gets to pick where the arrows land) or directed archery fire (such as through use of cards such as Legolas, Greenleaf or Aragorn's Bow). In King block and beyond, threats also became a potent form of wounding, with mechanics similar to a surprise Archery phase.

However, there are a great many cards that allow wounds to be assigned at plenty of other times, such as Hate shown to the right. orcs in particular are well-known for this type of direct exert-to-wound setup, but men and orcs also have a number of cards that deal damage in similar ways. See the index below for a list of such cards.

Preventing wounds is done through a number of different avenues depending on the culture. , for instance, relies primarily on spell events such as Intimidate to prevent wounds at the last moment, whereas and have possessions such as Armor and Gimli's Helm, respectively. Wound prevention can certainly be a powerful avenue to keeping your Fellowship alive, but for most decks it's a secondary consideration at best, since healing is more versatile (in that it can also help against exertions).

See also exhausted, heal, exert, threat.