Lord of the Rings Boardgame Review

If you take Gandalf’s wisdom above as one of the core themes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, then no game in any medium has as successfully conveyed the soul of the books as Knizia’s classic cooperative design. We don’t get to choose the era in which we are born, and we don’t get to choose the opportunities for greatness we are encountered with. But we do get to choose how we react to adversity, certain defeat, odds stacked impossibly against us, and how we help others do the same.

It’s such a clever thing, the tile draw in the game. You must draw a tile before you get to do anything, and it could kick off a string of brutal events that start chipping away at the Fellowship’s resolve, or drawing Sauron’s gaze ever closer to discovering the group’s true purpose. And tiles will keep on being revealed until finally a “good” one pops up, pushing one of the tracks toward the end of the board and the sweet relief of a challenge overcome. Since tiles aren’t shuffled until one of the four boards is completed, a sequence of great draws only heightens the tension, as players will know the likelihood of bad events is greatly increased. A set of bad draws means players will have hope that their battered, weary adventurers will find a moment’s peace.

The narrative arc of most modern co-ops progresses about the same way every time, with players slowly getting stronger as threats loom larger, until a decisive battle is fought or a winning objective is met. It’s a path well-trodden by now, and for good reason: players like the feeling of getting new powers, items, and resources to match the growing threat the board throws at them. These games seem to reward player turns, then beat them down as more evil moles pop up for the players to whack. It’s a time-tested approach, though if you’ve played one, it can feel as if you may as well have played them all.

Knizia seems to have taken a different tack with Lord of the Rings, fittingly so as he was one of the early pioneers of the contemporary co-op genre. The narrative begins on a hopeful note, as Sauron’s corrupting influence is way off over the hills in Mordor, far removed from the quiet country life in Hobbiton. The game generously lavishes players with gobs of resources, in the form of abstract cards that represent the trust, fortitude, combat readiness, and stealth of the Fellowship. Even after weathering the first board of nasty events and encounters in the dark depths of Moria, players will find respite under the lofty trees of Lothlórien, healing and gaining spectacularly powerful gifts from Galadriel and her bands of elves.

And then everything goes to hell.

Players don’t get stronger in Lord of the Rings; they spend their precious resources one after another after another, until they’re frantically looking around to the rest of the group, asking if anyone has healing or any way to call for a rare Gandalf appearance. But then you realize everyone else is in the same boat you are. You glance toward the looming Sauron figure and come to terms with the fact that one of you is going to die.

And you’ll volunteer to take the fall. When the Ring-bearer rolls the die, grimaces, and slips on the Ring, he’ll inevitably roll the nastiest result of all at the worst possible time. You’ll encounter the situation in which either he dies or you sacrifice yourself for the good of the group, and you’ll do it. If you can’t find it in you to remove yourself from the table for the good of the mission, one of your companions will. The quest must succeed, even if it means one player doesn’t get to participate in the last third of the game with the rest of you. When your tattered band of travelers sees Mount Doom in the distance, you know you have to finish this fight, even if it’s just Frodo all alone casting the ring into the fires from whence it came. Those who say player elimination has no place in modern game design have not played Lord of the Rings.

You won’t always get that far, of course. Frodo’s quest was a long shot from the beginning, and if the tile draw is unfriendly, you could collapse in Moria or at the battle of Helm’s Deep, hundreds of miles from your destination. Luckily, the game is delightfully easy to reset in order to take another crack at it. You can even go for a high score by preserving your shield resources and using Gandalf’s aid sparingly, though sessions in which you won’t need his help will be pretty rare. The game’s difficulty can fluctuate from a cakewalk to impossibly difficult, with the player count factoring in depending on how the group manages the characters’ abilities.

While it’s overall a simple game, there’s some mechanical nuance to be explored. When should the Ring-bearer put on the Ring? Should players blast through a board without collecting the appropriate Life Tokens, or might they dawdle in Shelob’s Lair to make sure everyone survives? Should Frodo share the burden and pass the Ring around, or is everyone better off if he carries it all the way to the heart of Mordor? These are questions that have no right answer, and groups will find themselves engaged by these tough choices and engrossed in the setting as the game’s depths are explored through dozens of plays.

Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece- the best cooperative design on the market. It’s not just good “for its time” or “for a co-op.” It’s the single greatest marriage of theme and gameplay ever achieved. That it does all this without much flavor text, flashy art, dice-based combat or garish plastic miniatures is that much more amazing.