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Lord of the Rings
Players 2-5
In short then, a big number. The production values show. There are plenty of bits; although probably not enough to justify the £35 price tag. Several sets of playing cards, wooden markers, cardboard tokens and tiles, a die with strange symbols on five of its faces, little plastic hobbits, three playing boards, a plastic ring and a big, solid and weighty black Sauron figure. The one annoying setback is that the moulded storage tray has recesses for the playing cards, but they are not deep enough to hold them all…and in the darkness bind them (oops, sorry, you know how it is). This is not a major problem, but in an expensive game it is a pity this got overlooked in the process when such things should have been put right. The artwork is gorgeous. In a design where the evocation of theme has to be a vital component, an insensitive illustrator could have ruined it before the first card was played. In recognition of this pitfall one of the leading Tolkienian artists – John Howe – worked up the pictures for the box, boards and cards. While it might not represent everyone’s idea of what Gandalf looks like, which would in any case be an impossible task, I cannot see how anyone could be offended by Howe’s classic fantasy vision. I particularly like his rendition of the showdown between the wizard and the Balrog which stands out from one of the playing boards. It is not often in a game that the illustrator will get a printed bio the equal of the game’s designer. In this case, however, it is an appropriate gesture. Anyway, enough intro; how does it work? Many people who are acquainted with Reiner Knizia’s games may be thinking it is just as well the illustrator has injected some atmosphere into the game. After all, brilliant though he may be, everybody knows Knizia is weak at getting clever game mechanics to rise much above the abstract. To quote the great John Peel: "Not for the first time, everybody is wrong". Personally, I think this charge of thematic weakness can be levelled a little too often at Knizia’s creations. True, theme is often irrelevant to his designs. Equally, many of his games are good enough not to need a theme to engage the players (Ra, Schotten Totten, Samurai spring to mind). And it is certainly not always the case that theme is irrelevant to the Knizia mind. It seems to me that Modern Art, Quo Vadis, Euphrat & Tigris and Stephensons Rocket all generate a healthy dose of atmosphere. Anyway, don’t worry. Not only has the designer produced a game which oozes theme, he has achieved it with a novel game, rather than by producing a game which forces you to read bits of the novel. You know the sort I mean, roll the dice, pick up a card, read out the text, roll a double six to kill the Nazgul sort of thing. Just as his games will often eschew the frilly bits so as not to obscure an elegant but simple game mechanic; in searching for the theme, Knizia has applied the same principle and stripped down the book to its core element – the battle to avoid the corruption of Sauron's will. This struggle is played out on a fifteen-space corruption track, which moves from the sunlit uplands to the depths of despair, represented by a graded colour scheme from white to black. The hobbit counters start off on the white space at one end of the track – each player controlling the fate of one hobbit. The Sauron counter, meanwhile, is placed on one of the dark spaces, at an initial distance from the hobbit party of 10, 12 or 15 spaces, depending on the difficulty level the players want to set. As the game progresses, Sauron will move closer to the hobbits and individual hobbits will be drawn towards the dark side. To win the game, the players must destroy the Ring before Sauron and the Ringbearer share the same space. As you might have gathered, the stand-out feature of game play is co-operation: the players against the game system. In its basic form the game is a question of everyone wins, or everyone loses. As long as the Ringbearer is protected for long enough to complete the destruction of his heavy burden then all the players will win, regardless of whether their hobbit survived the ordeal. The game comes with a Hall of Fame scorecard where you can record your achievements. Even if you lose, you still get a numerical rating of your progress, which indicates how close you managed to get to Mount Doom. If you destroy the ring, there are degrees of success, represented by bonus points (shields) you have picked up and retained. So even if you have managed to destroy the Ring a few times, there is still an incentive to go out again and try to improve on your personal best. Since my personal best remains steadfastly mediocre, I am not yet in a position to conclude whether such a goal is really incentive enough. There are rule variants to introduce a competitive element to the game. While these certainly look interesting, I think the co-operative version is the way the designer intends the game to be played. I have already sounded the game’s death rattle for some people. No matter how innovative the system: a non-competitive game where everyone can lose? – no thanks. I, too, had my doubts, but there was no way I was not going to buy the game, so I persevered. I am glad I did. It really is a corker. So the objective is destroy the Ring while avoiding a private meeting with the evil one. As you would expect from a Knizia game, to achieve this requires a lot of tough choices, the efficient use of a variety of resources and considerable forward planning. Unlike most Knizia games, however, you also need a bit of luck on your side. The bulk of the game is played on four scenario boards. These represent some crucial passages in the story: the journey through the mines of Moria, the defence of Helm’s Deep against Saruman’s orc hordes, the passage into Shelob’s lair and, finally, the cold, dark trek across Mordor to Mount Doom itself. The scenario boards have a selection of ‘Activity Lines’ printed upon them, superimposed over a dramatic picture of the scene. Each line consists of up to 14 circular spaces and a variety of symbols. One of these tracks is designated the main activity line. To successfully complete a scenario the party marker must be moved to the end of this path. Also printed on each board is a six-space event track. The events recount an incident from the novels and outline the effects it will have on the party in game terms – usually bad. As the scenario goes on these events are triggered one at a time. The effects are progressively destructive and, should the final event be initiated before the final space on the main event track is reached, the scenario is over, although the game continues. Mind you, if you have reached the final event, your party is usually in such a parlous state that much further progress is doubtful. The events act as the clock in the scenario, and it can tick down pretty quickly, really putting the pressure on your tactical choices. If your moves are weak, the game will usually find them out. It is always later than you think. Each activity line is keyed to one of four symbols. During a player’s turn cards can be played with the appropriate symbols to move the track marker along the number of spaces which match the number of symbols (one or two) on the card. Each player starts the game with six of these hobbit cards, a hand-size which fluctuates wildly during the game. Driving the game is the deck of 23 cardboard event tiles. These are split almost equally between good tiles, which will advance a marker along one of the activity lines, and bad tiles which will either move the event marker along or move Sauron and the hobbits closer together. A player’s turn consists of drawing tiles from the top of this event deck, only stopping when one of the good tiles is drawn. In this way – as will frequently happen when you are least able to deal with it – a long series of negative tiles can be drawn, initiating an escalating event cycle which can threaten to overwhelm the party before any progress is made towards the end of the scenario board. Once one of the good tiles is drawn, the marker is moved along the track with the matching symbol and the player can then play one or two cards from his hand, moving the marker along the matching activity line as a result. There are restrictions limiting the number of cards played as well as joker cards, which can add some flexibility. Rather than lay out cards, a player has the option to instead take two new cards into his hand, or move his hobbit one step back towards the light. When moving along the tracks on the scenario boards, the active player will have to fulfil the requirements of each space passed over. This usually involves picking up a shield token or one of three varieties of Life token. Less usually it can mean gaining a useful special card or, less usefully, rolling the special die. This is a real instrument of pain and its use is to be avoided if at all possible. When using the die you have a one in six chance of nothing bad happening. Any other result is pretty depressing, ranging from losing cards to marching your hobbit a whopping three spaces towards Sauron, convinced the master of disaster is hosting the best party ever and you want to get there before the booze runs out. The Life tokens are a more necessary evil. You need to collect one of each of the three symbols to avoid moving your hobbit towards Sauron at the end of each scenario, by the number of spaces your collection falls short by. Unfortunately, collecting these tokens usually requires movement along one of the subsidiary tracks. Such movement absorbs valuable cards while not advancing the party any nearer to the end of the scenario. This forces players to make a difficult choice between keeping their hobbit safe by burning resources and using up valuable time, or moving toward Sauron, sacrificing personal survival prospects for the good of the party. Shield tokens are the most common hand-out from moving along a track. These form the currency of the game. If successful in destroying the Ring, the number of shield tokens held by the party is a component of the final victory score. More importantly, during the game, these shield tokens can be used to avoid events, purchase cards and, most vitally of all, traded in to enlist the help of Gandalf. True to the theme, Gandalf is a powerful, but limited, influence to the good. At a price of five shield tokens a shot, a player can benefit from Gandalf’s help up to five times during the game. This aid is in the shape of five one-off special cards which bestow benefits ranging from drawing your hobbit figure away from Sauron to granting some protection from an adverse Event tile draw. Another nod to the book in the game play is the use of the One Ring’s special powers. Once per scenario board the Ringbearer can elect to put on the Ring. This allows him to move forward from one to four spaces along an activity track at the cost of a die roll. Since the position of Ringbearer will rotate during a game, these tight decisions will not be left to the same player throughout. In addition to the scenario boards there are brief respites in the game, before and after the Moria board, where the players will gain other benefits, risk some penalties and, most importantly, get their hands on a load of feature cards. These act either as one-off boons, rather like a toned down version of the Gandalf cards, or as double-strength activity line cards. The proper use of these cards will be crucial to the outcome of the quest. Also, each hobbit is different, and has a special power used throughout the game. Sam, for example, only takes limited damage from the evil die, while Fatty Bulger gets to pick up more hobbit cards than anyone else. And that is all you need to know. The game time passes quickly and the pace is excellent. As a party you have to carefully marshal your resources to get to the end of each track. You have to make vital joint decisions about when to use those irreplaceable special cards and when to spend shields to summon Gandalf’s powers. As you get closer to Mordor you also have to start thinking in terms of sacrificing your own hobbit to Sauron’s evil grip in order to protect the Ringbearer. Should you manage to get the Ring to Mount Doom it is a case of throw the die and, if the Ringbearer survives its effects, it is game over and everyone goes home happy. If you don’t get that far, it is game over and everyone goes home thinking, if only we had done such and such or so and so... And this really encapsulates the game’s essential strength, which, for some, will also be its fundamental weakness. You are playing against the game and his dice are loaded. Despite the various tools at your disposal and the opportunity for good and excellent play, if the game decides to get nasty there is really nothing you can do about it. Conversely, if the die rolls are kind and you avoid the long run of consecutive events which will kill most parties, less than perfect play will also get you through, albeit rarely. This random element, the feeling of powerlessness which can overcome the party if the tile deck runs badly, and the fact that there is no individual winner will be enough to turn off some people. Other potential negatives, as yet untested (by me), would include a longevity problem. Will this game lose its sparkle once you have destroyed the Ring a couple of times? Possibly. I suspect there can also be a problem if there is an experience gap within a group of players. In most games, the players with least experience may usually lose, but at least they have been playing their own way. There is a danger with Lord of the Rings that the less experienced players will simply be steamrollered through the game by their more experienced associates, all of whom will have their own idea about how to win. I cannot think of a worst time to be had than when you are sitting at a game table, simply doing things other people tell you to do without necessarily understanding why or what for. To get over this requires a group with the sensitivity to act in a deliberately inclusive manner. In my experience, however, such a touchy-feely group-hug sort of approach is alien to most games players, whose urge to win will usually overcome any sense of social responsibility. Or am I projecting… Since I am in this sort of mood, the rulebook is not the best, either. It is very pretty, but it is badly organised, is sometimes not clearly worded and suffers from blind spots. This where there is an important rule in there, but for some reason the eye doesn’t catch it when you scan through. It’s not the worst I have seen by a long shot, but it could certainly be improved. That’s the negative out of the way, now for the positive, and there is plenty of it. The system works really well. The central activity line concept is not a new one by any means (I seem to remember a recent issue of Counter which included a couple of similar types of game aimed at mountain climbing and marathon running) although it is probably mostly associated with solitaire games. The players v the system has also been used several times before. Most notably for me in Republic of Rome, and stretching back as far as Sorceror’s Cave, and probably further if I could be bothered to check my Encyclopaedia of Game Design. In making the game co-operative, Knizia has also paid due homage to the key ingredient of role playing games, which, in turn, owe much of their own genesis to the heroic fantasy genre. So the elements of the game may not be new, but the way in which Knizia has moulded them together and then superimposed several abstract play mechanisms, which still manage to convey the theme, is really quite masterful. Remember, most of the game is played through the use of generic cards with abstract symbols, which can only have a limited number of effects: most of which simply mean advancing one or two spaces down a track. For example, All Aragorn will do for you is take you two spaces down the fighting line. Big deal. But the fact is it really can be a big deal, particularly if you are close to the end of the track and desperate to get it finished before another event tile comes along and finishes you off. The same goes for the feature cards, which bring in other elements of the story, translating them into simple game effects. The way Gandalf is handled is excellent – I think it would be pretty difficult to get through without him, but his powers must be used sparingly. The same can be said of the power of the Ring. Even Gollum, while only a card, will often play a major role. Gollum is the only card that can take you three spaces along a track. Unfortunately, to use it also means risking one of those buttock clenching die rolls, which can often mean the end of the game if it goes really pear-shaped. Most important of all, the game is a real challenge and requires some clever plays for a group to get through to the end. Even then, there are enough variants to keep the game fresh once this initial challenge is met. These include a more difficult starting position on the corruption track, and a competitive game designed to produce an individual winner. This version has a lovely twist where the Ringbearer can opt for a solo victory by deserting the party and joining up with Sauron! I am not sure if there is an optimum number of players for this game. I suspect you have a better chance of success with five players rather than two, but there are balances within the game to give smaller parties some benefits. Most notably in that smaller parties will find it easier to collect the requisite number of Life tokens to protect them from losing too many spaces at the end of each scenario. You will either love or hate this game. You should know enough by now to recognise which category you will fall into. Just bear in mind that you should not take your previous relationship with Reiner Knizia into account when making your choice. It looks like a Reiner, it smells like a Reiner, it is a Reiner, but somehow… Rating 9 (it will be interesting to see if this changes when I finally destroy the Ring!)
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Lord
of the Rings is as big budget as it comes in the world of ‘German’
games. Part of the unflagging Tolkien franchise – due for a big boost
when the new film comes out – put together by one of the game industry’s
most famous and most prolific designers and published (in the UK, US and
Australasia at least) by Hasbro, the Coca Cola of games companies. Lord of
the Rings aims at a much wider market than the one occupied by regular game
players. I do not know who is distributing it elsewhere, but here in the
UK the major retail rights are in the hands of WH Smith. When one of the
High Street giants starts selling German games, you know something is
happening. Just think of all those potential new gamers waking up on Christmas morning to find this hefty square box at the bottom
of the bed. (And imagine their disappointment when they discover it is
not a Playstation 2.)