Lord of the Rings
Published by Sophisticated Games, Kosmos, Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast, Fantasy Flight, and others
Designed by Reiner Knizia
2-5 Players
90-120 minutes
http://www.lordoftherings-boardgame.com

Lord of the Rings was the most anticipated game from Essen 2000 for me: the designer of some of the greatest games of the 90s puts his mind to one of the greatest settings in fantasy literature. Tolkien games have such a mixed track record: the late ICE’s Middle Earth: the Wizards and Middle Earth Role Playing were both first-rate, but most other offerings (Fellowship of the Ring, Riddle of the Ring, Lonely Mountain, War of the Ring/Sauron/Gondor, etc.) have ranged from the merely weak down to the truly mediocre. Thus, I was anxious to see what Mr. Knizia would produce, although certainly there was some trepidation; he is not as facile with the theme element of games as he is with the mechanism.

Well, the answer is that the game is something new and rather unexpected: it’s cooperative and it works. When did you last play a game that was cooperative that actually worked? In my case, never (although you might count Republic of Rome). The group solitaire game faces a number of obstacles which have never satisfactorily been overcome, at least not prior to the Lord of the Rings.

Anyway, on to the game... what you get when you open the box is one overview board which provides a “large scale” view of your progress from Bag End to Mordor; 4 beautifully illustrated scenario boards (by famous Tolkien artist John Howe) for each of the four major adventures from the books: Moria, Helm’s Deep, Shelob’s Lair, and Mordor; a deck of cards with 4 different symbols for the activities of the game - fighting, hiding, friendship, and traveling, plus a wild card; a deck of event chits; and some miscellaneous markers.




The heart of the game, the "big board" if you will, is the master board above. There are two separate tracks. The top track, with the white pawn, tracks the party's physical progress from Bag End to Mordor. The bottom track represents the individual character's spiritual struggle against Sauron. This is the only place in the game in which individual characters are represented separately. Sauron is represented by the Dark Tower and starts on the right; the players all start on the left. Various game events will cause the figures to move towards each other; should a hobbit reach or pass Sauron, that player is eliminated from the game.



Four of the physical spaces on the master board then are played out on individual adventure boards, which is where the actual game play is and - as you would expect from Knizia - is fairly straightforward. On the adventure boards, the players no longer have an individual identity, but only the progress of the party as a whole is tracked. The tracks on the right each represent activities: Fighting, Hiding, Friendship, or Traveling (not all tracks are on all the boards - Moria lacks a Friendship track, for instance). One of those will be the main track (in Moria, fighting), and if the players can get to the end of this track before time runs out, the players successfully complete the adventure. Each player’s turn consists of first picking a chit from a pile. These chits are roughly half good and half bad. The good chits have a picture of one of the tracks on them, and give you a free advance on that track. The bad chits have a range of effects including corrupting the ringbearer, strengthening Sauron, and - mainly, and most crucially - noting the passage of time. There is an event track down the left side of the board which represents the major events of the book and which are triggered by drawing the “time passes” chits from the pile. Typically, they start out benign enough (allowing the players to draw more cards or some such), but later events are typically very, very nasty. The kicker is, you have to pick and resolve chits until you get a good one - so things can get out of hand in a hurry. If the event track hits the end, the players are considered to have been "overtaken by events," which usually involves a severe penalty, and they move on to the next board.

All this having been done, each player will then generally play 1 or 2 cards to advance one or two of the tracks with the matching symbol. As you move down these tracks, each space will have a picture on it: a shield, one of the three life tokens (heart, ring, sun), or the dreaded die roll. Shields are the game’s “victory points,” and they can be saved for the end, when they rack up your score if the party is successful, or they can be cashed out along the way to earn bonuses or pay various penalties. At the end of each adventure board you have to take one corruption hit (move one space closer to Sauron) for each of the three types of life token you are missing. For the die symbol (a black square which occurs frequently on the board and in the events), you have to roll a special die, which can result in corruption for the rolling player, advancing Sauron, forcing you to discard cards, or no penalty at all.

That’s the general overview. The various people and items in the Middle Earth world are incorporated as cards, usually just with more than one symbol. Gollum is perhaps the most interesting - a triple-wild, allowing you to advance rapidly one on track at the price of a corruption roll - but most of the rest are here also, albeit somewhat abstractly. Aragorn is a double-wild, Theodin is a double-Travel, Anduril is a double-Fight, and the Elven Cloak is a single-Hide - not exactly bringing to mind famous passages from the book or anything. Gandalf is abstractly represented by five cards with various special powers which players can call on by spending five shields. You can also use the Ring itself to rapidly advance on the tracks, but at the cost of a die roll.

Despite the fair amount of chrome, there are only two major elements at work in the game. The most obvious and fundamental one is the relatively straightforward Knizia resource management game. Cards and time are the key resources which you have to stretch as far as possible. Although the system of managing the resources is not particularly inspired in and of itself, the reason that this works is because the resources are very tight. They are precisely tight enough to make the game very challenging without being so tight that the whole thing seems futile. Our games have typically been extremely close, with the Fellowship struggling up the slopes of Mount Doom with just a few cards left, but being unable to quite make it. This is what provides the "just one more time" draw of the game.

However, this is really just old hat, and what really makes the game work is the human factor. The key theme here is the group management “mechanism” - how to get everybody on the same page startegy-wise (you are explicitly disallowed from showing other players your cards, and this is important even if it doesn't seem to be initially). While the priority obviously will be completing the main track of each adventure, each of the subtracks can have some payoff (in cards or in lessening the impact of future events) which it's important for everyone to agree on some approach to. Related to this, a key sub-theme here is how far each player will go just to stay in the game, even though their score may be better if they sacrifice their character. It's easy enough to say "yeah, it's best for the team if I take this huge penalty on myself, eliminating me from the game", but there seems to be a strong (and understandable) desire on the part of most people to keep playing. Balancing this with the needs of the group is the key thing that makes the game interesting and tense. This goes down to a rather detailed level of risk management. For example, players need Life tokens to avoid massive corruption penalties, but the spaces that generate life tokens do not generally further the progress of the group as a whole. So every time you claim a life token for yourself, you increase your character's chances of survival while increasing the risks to the group as a whole. On the other hand, though, the group is strengthened by the presence of each individual (at least, as long as they have cards), so you don't want to gratuitously take on too much personal risk. Additionally, although it’s played cooperatively, this is not a game played by committee - there are no communal resources, and each player has total control over themselves and their own resources. This whole balancing act, done with real people, is the key "mechanism" of the game and is what will make the game work or not for you.

I must admit that the fine balance here, the subtlety of the tradeoffs, and Mr. Knizia's leveraging our psychological desire to stay in the game to make a cooperative game that actually works left me truly impressed by his ingenuity and design skill.

Apart from the quality of the design, there is an entirely separate question as to how well the Lord of the Rings succeeds strictly as a Middle Earth game. Trying to discuss this is a little tricky, as expectations from a theme or simulation game have changed dramatically in recent years. Trying to compare Lords of the Rings to such low complexity American "simulation-style" gems as We the People, Napoleon, or Battle of the 5 Armies seems an exercise in futility. Lord of the Rings certainly doesn't hold a candle to Middle Earth: the Wizards. The list of "simulation" oddities in the Lord of the Rings game is lengthy and depressing if you focus on it (and honestly, I recommend you don't).

Given that we're simply not going to get anything like a simulation from a German game, it's best to simply discard the notion entirely; the concept of "theme" is anyway much less concrete than that of a "simulation". When compared to similar games such as Tikal, Stephenson's Rocket, or Taj Mahal, Lord of the Rings does rather well - and in many ways is thematically superior to any of these titles. The sense of the epic journey, the long trek across Middle Earth, actually comes through surprisingly well. You are constantly spending energy (i.e., cards) to make progress, and towards the end of the game as your card supply dwindles to zero the sense of drama really sets in. The corruption theme, with the Hobbits constantly striving to avoid Sauron, is also well done and adds considerable tension to the game. The strict cause-and-effect relationship one might expect from a simulation game is missing, but as theme, it works quite well.

The other potential negative for some players is the luck element, in this case the event chits. If you are lucky, an easy run of chits can lead to a virtually intact party sauntering up the slopes of Mount Doom, while a disastrous run can savage you early regardless of any good play. However, given that the players are playing against the system, if that system were predictable or more constrained, the game would simply become solvable. For the players to feel pressured, to force them to make tough decisions, the potential for disaster has to be ever-present. The cost of this is inevitably a few games at the edge of the probability curve that aren’t very entertaining. My experience is that about 1 game in 10 will be problematic.

I don't think either of these problems takes away from the game. Lord of the Rings is a game that works extremely well for me. I suspect most people will enjoy it because, like Modern Art, the psychological element is key and so the appeal is very visceral. It's not like Java or Torres which seem rather rarified for games that people are supposed to have fun playing. Lord of the Rings is such a novel, brilliant design that leads to a game that is fascinating to play... I find it one of the most interesting, engaging games to have been released in quite some time. In my opinion will take it's place beside Modern Art, Tigris & Euphrates, and Quo Vadis as the best of Knizia.