Lord of the Rings Review

This is a tricky review to write. The game is quite difficult to describe, but here goes:

Lord of the Rings is a co-operative board game. All of the players (from 2 to 5) play hobbits, all working together to dunk the ring in Mordor before Sauron overcomes the Ringbearer. But I’m sure you all know the story…

The players take control of Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin and Fatty. (Fatty Bolger was apparently a hobbit who stayed behind in Bree to fend off pursuers – he was included here purely to allow five players.) The game includes a little hobbit marker for each of these characters. Each player gets a special card showing a special ability that their hobbit has.

There are lots of cards in the game – Hobbit Cards, Gandalf Cards, Feature Cards, and the aforementioned Special Ability Cards.

There are three boards – a Master Board, and two Scenario Boards (double sided – Moria and Helm’s Deep on one, and Shelob’s Lair and Mordor on the other).

There are Shield Tokens and Life Tokens (Suns, Rings and Hearts).

There is a special dice, several white pawns, the One Ring, and Sauron himself (looking unfortunately a little like a stylised cat with one eye).

So what do you do with all these bits, then? Well, that’s when it gets a bit complicated…

The Master Board has two tracks on it – the Corruption Track and the Progress Track. All of the Hobbits begin the game on the zero space of the corruption track, and Sauron starts on space fifteen (or, if you want to make the game harder, twelve, or even ten). A white pawn starts on Bag End, and off you go.

The Progress Track on the Master Board has several locations, which are visited in turn – Bag End, Rivendell, Moria, Lothlorien, Helm’s Deep, Shelob’s Lair and Mordor. When at one of the ‘nice’ places, simply follow the instructions on the Master Board next to that location (which generally results in the Hobbits gaining cards, having to play cards, and being able to basically sort themselves out). When at a ‘nasty’ location, the game really begins…

When the pawn is placed on one of the nasty locations, control passes to the correct Scenario Board, and the group has to make its way through that location before continuing on the Master Board.

Each Scenario Board has several more tracks on it, each with a symbol showing either fighting, friendship, hiding or travelling. One of these is the Master Track, and this one must be completed in order to traverse the board. There is also an Event Track down the side of each board. Events are generally bad…

Each player takes it in turn to be the Active Player (and generally is the only player allowed to play cards during his turn). He must turn tiles until a progress symbol is shown. The tiles may also cause events to occur. The Active player may also play cards to progress along the various tracks on the board. Essentially, there are a lot of decisions to be made – “Can we cope with the next event?” “Which tracks should I progress along?” and so on. Each player has his own hand of cards, and is not allowed to swap or show the cards to anyone else. Although discussion of the cards is allowed.

The events, as I said, are generally bad, but with creative card play, and forward planning, they can also generally be avoided. The Gandalf cards I mentioned before can be ‘bought’ to use at any time, and one of these allows the player to completely ignore the next event. But the events get bigger and badder as you get closer to Mordor, so you have to decide if you want to use up Gandalf’s powers now, or suffer the current event, and save the card for later use against one of the tougher events?

There is a lot of this sort of thing in the game, and with everyone working together against the board, it can get pretty fraught at times.

I won’t try to explain any more of the rules, but will go on to give my impressions of the game, now. There are wrinkles and extra titbits that I haven’t mentioned, but the general gist is there (and what I’ve said may allow you to make sense of the pictures on the back of the box, now).

This game is unlike pretty much any other I can think of in that it is a co-operative game that works. It is very interesting to watch events unfold – even more so if you are a fan of the books, but a novice to Middle Earth could easily pick it up and play it. The decisions are hard ones, and the tile play makes each game slightly different.

After a couple of plays, you learn what to expect on each board, and can anticipate more easily what cards and resources you are going to need. But it doesn’t always go according to plan thanks to the random elements involved.

In almost every game, at least one Hobbit is going to be overcome by corruption and fall under the sway of Sauron (during the game, Sauron moves slowly down the Corruption Track, whilst the Hobbits move slowly up it – if a Hobbit and Sauron ever pass one another, that Hobbit is out of the game). The tricky part is deciding who that will be. Is it safer to allow one Hobbit to ‘take’ all the corruption to save the others from being overcome, or is a better strategy to try and corrupt all the Hobbits as evenly as possible to keep them all in the game? The game is filled with tough decisions like this one.

And if you get too good at learning the foibles of the board, simply start Sauron on a lower number on his track. You’ll be hard pressed to use the same tactics against him if he begins on ten…

The game is not all good, however…

The replayability suffers a bit, as the board never changes. Every time, the scenarios are encountered in the same order, and the events stay the same on each board. It quickly becomes easy to remember what is coming next (although being able to do something about it is another matter entirely). The ability to alter the difficulty (by moving Sauron’s starting spot) rectifies this to some degree, but not entirely.

Two expansions have been released, which go a long way toward lengthening the replayability of the game, but that is a subject for different reviews…

Summary

Presentation: The artwork is fantastic. John Howe painted the boards and the box, and illustrated the rule book, and did an absolutely stunning job. He brings Lord of the Rings to life, and evokes the atmosphere of the story brilliantly. The hobbit figures are nice, if a bit bland (they are all identical except their colour), and the other components are functional. 8.1/10

Clarity of Rules: The rulebook, whilst fairly comprehensive, is actually really badly written. It takes quite a few reads, at least one game, and then another read to pick up every little detail. Things are not where you might expect them to be, which generally makes your first few games quite slow affairs, as you scour the rulebook to find an obscure instruction. And there are a couple of fairly important details missing entirely. There is an incredibly comprehensive FAQ available on the net, though, which helps counteract this problem, but it still should have been picked up before now… 8.5/10

Game Length: The game can go on a bit. It will take about two hours of playing to finish a game. However, as all the players are involved and (in theory) interested in whatever is happening at the moment, there is very little downtime before your next go. It never feels like it drags (it can be frustrating sometimes, but never boring). 9.1/10

Value: For the amount of enjoyment straight out of the box, this game is definitely worth the money. This game has had more playings at my gaming table than any other game I own. I would gladly play it any time. 8.7/10

Overall: The game succeeds admirably at creating a balanced and well thought-out co-operative experience, strongly themed, and based on a great story. It is instantly accessible (theme-wise), and after simplifying the rules, can be explained to, and enjoyed by, non-gamers as well as gamers. 9.5/10 (not an average)