Week 13 (27th January - 2nd February 2014): The Lord of the Rings Bord Game - Fingering My Own Ring

 

What it says in the post title.

Well, I'm up to week 13 which - for good or ill - represents the quarterway mark through my 52 week journey of ludic self-abuse. Continuing the fantasy boardgame theme, this week I've given another Tolkien co-op game a go: Riener Knizia's The Lord of the Rings boardgame. As per last week's post, my time is limited at present, so I'll be keeping this short - with regard to which, this blog is primarily intended as motivation for my personal journey through my gaming collection, not an attempt to offer in-depth game reviews. Even so, time permitting I may return to some of the shorter posts in order to add more depth (last week's Runebound certainly warrants this, it being one of my favourite games of all time).

Lord of the Rings game setup

Lord of the Rings is a lovely little game, albeit a little abstract for my tastes (to be expected given the designer). Regardless, the game is quite a nice little representation of the hobbits' famous journey through the narrative of Tolkien's epic. The game's core mechanic is card-based, with each player (who each take on the role of one of the named hobbits from the novel) using cards drawn throughout the game which are then used to complete various tasks or overcome specific challenges during each turn. This will ultimately lead to the players completing the journey to Mordor and casting the One Ring into Mount Doom, or become corrupted by the Ring's influence and thus lose the game.

This latter occurs as players are also tasked at various points in the game with rolling the Mordor dice, usually with dire consequences: either moving the hobbits towards the Sauron marker on the main board, or moving Sauron towards the hobbits. If at any point Sauron and the hobbit who is currently designated as the Ring Bearer end on the same space, the Ringberarer is corrupted and Sauron is victorious. The game is relatively challenging, and took me about an hour and forty minutes to play from start to finish (I lost on this occasion). One potential issue from a solitaire perspective is that the game has to be played using a minimum of two hobbits/players, and each player is required not to reveal their cards to other players. However, the rules do allow players to communicate freely the content of their hands, such that playing solitaire is not really a problem if the no reveal rule (which seems somewhat redundant anyway) is simply ignored.

This being another of Fantasy Flight Games' fare, the production values are extremely high, and notable for the inclusion of famed Tolkien artist John Howe's illustrations on the game boards.

Overall a solid little game, especially for fans of Tolkien. If a little abstract, the game nonetheless does give a sense of the story of LotR. On the Gamic Self-Abuse Scale (tm), this scores 7.5/10.