Author: Reiner Knizia and John Howe
Category: Board game
Company/Publisher: Sophisticated Games (manuf.) / Hasbro (UK) / Wizards of the Coast (USA)
Line: n/a
Cost: UKP 35
Page count: n/a
Playtest Review by Mark Green on 11/05/00.
Genre tags: Fantasy

It's a Lord Of The Rings game and it's by Reiner Knizia. A fair number of people will, I suspect, buy it just based on that, and they're unlikely to be disappointed.

If you haven't encountered a Knizia game before, you are likely to be pleasantly surprised; he has an established reputation in the board gaming community for involved games with seemingly simplistic rules that blossom to reveal hidden complexities. Lord of the Rings is no exception.

The most notable aspect about the game is that it is cooperative. The players do not play against each other; rather, they all play against the system. Each player takes the role of a Hobbit from the book; two to five can play. The game doesn't include rules for solitaire play, but it can be done without great difficulty.

The aim of the game is to reach the top of Mount Doom and destroy the One Ring; the Ring is carried by one player, although which player that is may vary over the game. The other players may well have to make sacrifices, even eliminating themselves from the game, to ensure that the ringbearer gets through the game. The primary enemy in the game is corruption; this is tracked on a "master board" which contains a 16-section track (numbered 0 to 15); the Hobbits begin on 0, and Sauron begins on a value set to determine the difficulty of the game - 15 for easy, 12 for standard, and 10 for hard. The Hobbits move up the board as they become corrupted, and Sauron moves down as his evil grows. If any Hobbit ever meets Sauron, they're out of the game. And if that Hobbit had the Ring - game over. Each Hobbit has a special ability; by and large each Hobbit can break one rule of the game.

The journey is divided into seven sections. Three of these are "havens" where a fixed series of events happen; these cover things like the initial meeting with Gandalf, the forming of the Fellowship, the appearance of the first Nazgul, and similar. The remaining four are adventure boards, and this is where the meat of the game lies.

Each adventure board (there are two double-sided boards) represents one of the significant locations in the story: Moria, Helm's Deep, Shelob's Lair, and Mordor. All of them bear elegant, well-drawn yet unobtrusive full-color artworks and look gorgeous.

The core mechanic of the game is this: each of the adventure boards bears a number of tracks, each one related to one of the four skills the hobbits have: Travelling, Hiding, Fighting, and Friendship. All but the last board have three tracks; the last one has all four. One of them will be the "main" track. Each track represents a task at that location; for example, on the Moria board, there's a Fighting track (fight the Orcs and Balrog), a Travelling track (leave Moria), and a Hiding track (move through Moria stealthfully). On each one, there's also a track of Events, which get progressively worse and worse. On the Helm's Deep board, for example, the Events chronicle the attack of the Orcs on Helm's Deep; the very last Events show the Orcs successfully conquering it (which advances Sauron 2 spaces down the track - at best). Each track has a marker on it representing the progress of the whole group; all players move the same marker.

Before each turn, the player flips a tile from the top of a stack of event tiles. The tile flipped will have one of several effects: most commonly, it will forcibly move one of the trail markers and activate the effect of the square it lands on. However, nastier tiles are present, which will corrupt the ring-bearer, or advance the event track - possibly in a way that the players can prevent, but possibly not. Even nastier, there is a tile which forces one player to take two corruption points to prevent sauron moving down a square. And if one of these "nasty" tiles is flipped, then the next tile in the stack must be flipped as well, and so on until a trail advancing tile is reached. Then the player's turn proper can begin.

Each player has a hand of cards. There are two types of card: Hobbit cards and Feature cards. Hobbit cards each show a single skill symbol (or a wildcard symbol); Feature cards may show more than one of the same symbol, or may have a seperate special ability. Hobbit cards are handed out at the beginning of the game and are available throughout; Feature cards are handed out freely at two of the haven locations and are available from certain spots on the tracks on some adventure boards. Both types of cards are discarded once used, but Feature cards can never be gotten back. Cards can have a white or a grey background.

On each turn, a player plays one or two cards (one with a white and one with a grey background); playing an appropriate skill card advances the marker on the appropriate trail on the adventure board. Every square the marker visits takes effect; even if you move it twice with a single card, both squares you move over take effect. Squares on trails can have a number of effect; they may award Feature cards, corrupt the active Hobbit, or force a die roll (more on that in a moment). By far the most common effect, though, is to award the active Hobbit one of several types of token: shield, ring, heart and sun tokens. Shield tokens are required by some Events, and also have another use mentioned later.

Ring, Heart, and Sun tokens, on the other hand, are more significant. When an adventure is completed (by reaching the end of either the main track (success) or event track (failure)), each player is required to have one each of these, or suffer a point of corruption for each type they are missing. The stinger is that there are only 3 each of Heart and Sun tokens available, and only 5 Ring tokens. This means that in a game with more than three players, somebody is going to be corrupted every turn (although one of the Hobbits' special abilities reduces this corruption, and a Feature card exists that can cancel it entirely - once). Also, if any player has more Ring tokens than the current ringbearer at the end of a board, they become the new Ringbearer for the next board - this is the only way the ring can be transferred. In a 5 player game, this again means that somebody will have to suffer corruption as the ring is moved around. At the end of each board, all tokens (except shields) are handed back.

The dice is, by and large, a bad thing; a roll of the dice may have no effect, but may advance Sauron a space, inflict between 1 and 3 corruption points on the roller, or require the roller to discard two cards. If they cannot discard these, they are eliminated from the game. Players can replenish their hand of cards by choosing to play none during their turn; they may then take two new Hobbit cards, or may instead choose to heal a point of corruption.

The shortage of Heart and Sun token means that you have to think very carefully about advancing the tracks, since if you advance too far you may consume tokens that your teammates then cannot get and force them to become corrupted. Also, it's desirable to carefully decide to whom Shield and feature cards ought to go. Combine this with the need to play your cards to complete the adventure versus the need to retain cards in your hand in case a discard is required and you have a surprisingly involved game. Drawing new Hobbit cards may put you behind schedule and have you overtaken by events, but running out of them is equally undesirable: you don't want to have to throw away a valuable double-symbol Feature card when you could have chucked a single Hobbit card - if only you'd had one at the time...

To this basic system a number of twists are added. The Feature cards have already been discussed. Additionally, the ring-bearer can choose to use the ring; this advances a track of the ringbearer's choice by a random number of spaces, and uniquely causes the squares moved over to take no effect; but also requires a roll of the die by the ringbearer, something worth avoiding. Gandalf can also aid the hobbits. He has five abilities, each of which can be used once during the game: examine and rearrange the next 3 event tiles, act as a double wild card, heal 2 corruption, prevent an event from taking effect, and let a player draw 4 cards. However, every time Gandalf is used, a single player must pay 5 shields; this is why it's a good idea to focus shields on a single player until they have enough.

Perhaps the only real disappointment in the system is the endgame. Once you finally reach Mount Doom, destroying the One Ring turns out to be a matter of rolling the dice twice and hoping that you aren't eliminated from the game by either roll. Manage that and you've done it. This climactic moment actually tends to provide considerably less tension than the journey that preceded it, largely due to the lack of control at that point; all you can do is hope that the die rolls well and that the group is sufficiently equipped to withstand the damage it will cause.

Generally the game rattles along at a good pace and it doesn't take long for table discussion to move from the details of the rules to the details of how the game should be approached (always a good thing). There is a genuine sense of progress as the boards are completed, and a strong sense of fellowship from the need to consider the effect of your move on all the players rather than purely yourself. The game is not easy; even on the easiest setting it may take a while and a lot of careful thought to destroy the Ring before Sauron corrupts everyone. The playing time of the game is suitably short - an hour or two, perhaps - so expect to have a number of the group ready to take another shot right away.

The supplied rulebook also includes several variant rules: some of these are to simplify the game somewhat. There is also a competitive variant. In this variant, the player with the most shields at the time the ring is destroyed wins; but a player can also win, betraying the group and handing the Ring over to Sauron, by deliberately corrupting themselves while bearing the Ring and holding 3 of the 5 Ring tokens. Of course, the other players will tend to take those tokens.. but they won't if they're corrupted too. I haven't tried playing this variant yet, but I suspect some thoroughly nasty arguments could result.

My only slight concerns, apart from the mildly disappointing ending, are the sacrifice requirement and the event tile draw. The fact that players might be required to sacrifice themselves to get the ringbearer through was no problem in any of the games we played (an eliminated player can still advise and hence can be very well involved in the game), but it might not appeal to all players. As a general principle, a game in which a player can sacrifice their own or another player's involvement in the game to gain victory is usually problematic, but the cooperative nature of this game cancels that out somewhat.

The event tile draw can also feel somewhat unfortunate, simply because a bad run of unpreventable event tiles can ruin a board for you. There are in-game ways to prevent the events taking effect, but they can only hold off some events and they can only hold them off for a certain amount of time. There's nothing as annoying as developing a detailed plan for advancing the tracks and then having the next player flip two or three unpreventable event tiles in a row and seeing everyone get corrupted or the board end in failure. Of course, this is probably the player's own fault for not considering the events properly, and expertise will probably get over it, but it is initially frustrating. I suspect it is almost mandatory to count the number of event tiles left in the stack at any time (there are 8 event tiles out of 23 total tiles).

But beyond that, this is an excellent and enjoyable game that should appeal to a wide variety of players. Its cooperative adventuring format is ideal for introducing RPG diehards to the "German" style of strategic board games, and it offers enough depth that those already used to the format will find a good amount here to get their teeth into. Highly recommended.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)