Unwelcome Dental Advice

My wife and I play a lot of boardgames. I think it started with me teaching her Cribbage, a staple in the Midwest. After a while, we got tired of beating each other into submission in competitive games, so we opted to find something where we had to work together. Our first cooperative boardgame was Alien: Fate of the Nostromo, which has since become my favorite boardgame of all time. We began collecting several others, finding many we liked and many we didn’t. Now we have a whole coat closet full to the brim with both competitive and cooperative games (with some old school stuff and party games thrown in for good measure). Naturally, being a couple nerds who love the Lord of the Rings books and movies, I bought us the Lord of the Rings Adventure Book game by one of our favorite game and puzzle producers.

Ravensburger has had a really good track record with us. They made the Alien game we love, and they produced all of the Horrified games which are generally good (we don’t discuss Horrified: World of Monsters in this house though). The Lord of the Rings game is really eight games in one. It’s broken up into chapters, and each chapter is reminiscent of an iconic scene, or series of scenes, from the books and movies (this is technically based on the movies, but you get where I am going). It claims it’s meant for one to four players, but my wife and I have had to “bend the rules” a bit to get the game to be enjoyable. Let me set up how the game works and you can judge for yourself what I’m trying to say.

As mentioned before, there are eight chapters. The first chapter mixes Sam eavesdropping on Frodo and Gandalf and quickly turns into escaping Hobbiton and making your way to Bree to meet up with Strider and then heading to Weathertop. This is all a single chapter. Each of the components to this chapter have requirements that need to be met, whether it be having characters in specific locations and using Story Cards (I’ll explain in a minute) to complete said objective, or merely avoiding confrontation with the dark riders on your way to Bree or Weathertop. Each of the specific requirements are outlined for the chapter on the side of the game board.

Sounds simple enough, right?

So, here is the order of how things go.

Set up your chapter according to the specifications. This means setting out characters, obstacles, and preparing your card decks. You have a Plot Deck, which is a small deck of cards with numbers on them. These numbers are bounced against a Plot Chart at the end of each turn to determine what happens. These are 90% bad. There’s a Story Deck, which is full of cards that have one of six different symbols: Courage (the Horn of Gondor), Mystery (Light of Elendil), Adventure (Bilbo’s door), Insight (Palantir), Warfare (Aragorn’s Sword), and the One Ring. You shuffle these and hand our four to each player at the beginning of each chapter. It is mentioned that you put the cards face up so people can see what you have, as it’s allowed to trade between players on your turn. You also have Corruption Cards and Special Cards, which are used considerably less often, and I’ll get into those later.

With the board set up and the Story Cards handed out, you can begin playing. On your turn, you may move any number of characters you wish along the board, but you only get two “free” movements. Anything beyond that will cost you cards from your hand. You can use the Story Cards as you see fit to move along the board but know that certain actions require specific Story Cards. For example, Aragorn can attack orcs and goblins in some chapters, and this requires him to discard Warfare cards. If you don’t have any of those cards (and  you may not because it’s completely random), you may not get to attack with him. Cue the One Ring cards. One Rings can be used as a “wild card.” While each chapter has a specific use for the One Ring card listed, you can also use it in place of any other Story Card. However, using a One Ring card in any capacity causes your Corruption Track to advance. The Corruption Track, which only has 15 spots, has an effect every three times you gain Corruption and is drawn from the Corruption Deck. These effects can be anything from drawing fewer Story Cards at the end of your turn to drawing more than one Plot Card at the end of your turn. They are all bad.

Once a player has made all their moves, they draw two Story Cards to add to their hand (fewer if you had a Corruption Card tell you to do so), and then they draw a Plot Card (or two if a Corruption Card indicates such). The Plot Card, as specified earlier, is merely a number bounced against a chart and something happens based on that number. In Chapter One, for instance, the Dark Riders can move one or more spaces based on the Plot Card drawn, or a hobbit may be forced into the hiding place (which, in Chapter One, if there is ever more than one hobbit in the hiding place, the game is over). When the Plot Deck runs out and players haven’t finished all the chapter requirements, the game is over. Each Chapter has two methods of losing: Running out of Plot Deck and Chapter-specific circumstances, like the hobbits in the hiding place for Chapter One.

Once your turn is over, control is given over to the next player, and the cycle continues. At any point during any player’s turn, you may give advice or offer trades for cards that the current player may find beneficial. This doesn’t sound terribly difficult when you read my understanding of the game, yet the game is incredibly difficult, nonetheless. Aside from the mere randomness of pulling Story Cards you need, the action economy versus the number of Story Cards you’re initially given and allowed to have in your hand at any time (which is six – anything above six and you have to discard, and discarding One Rings comes with a Corruption cost) makes the game almost impossible to win at times.

The issue is mostly with playing one and two player games. With only four cards to start and six to play with at any time, you’re going to be starved for Story Cards while racing against the ticking down of both the Plot Deck and the Corruption Track, especially when it comes to certain actions. In some cases, you’re required to have two of certain Story Cards to accomplish something that is mandatory to proceed with or lose the game immediately. For instance, in one chapter, you need two of each character’s specific items (Aragorn uses the Warfare cards, Gimli uses the Insight, etc.) to kill orcs/goblins, all the while, requiring you to move three to four characters along 12 or more spaces (which will require more Story Cards to do). Worse still are the chapters where you have to move Gandalf along a separate path, because he requires doubles to do a lot of his actions.

Some of this can be alleviated by use of Special Story Cards which are offered by completing some of the tasks in each chapter. These cards can offer boons like drawing extra Story Cards, skipping the Plot Card phase, or moving characters along the board for free. But you get these cards only a handful of times during the course of playing that it almost feels as though you have to hoard them for the really tough chapters in order to best make use of them.

The other major issue is that some chapters offer zero reprieve from bad things happening. Most of the time, the Plot Deck will have one to three cards that offer you a breather. The chapter where you fight the Cave Troll, for instance, has a few cards where the Cave Troll regenerates a hit made against it, which sounds bad, but if you kill the Troll before you draw that card, it essentially does nothing. Other chapters have Plot Cards that place orcs based on the number you draw, and if you draw a card that has a number of orcs to place that is more than are available to place, it automatically counts as a loss. A good game will offer some form of reprieve in every chapter of the game. Having a deck of nothing but bad things leads to sour gameplay.

I do absolutely love the concept of the game. Going through the entire Lord of the Rings saga in a single game is such a good idea. It reuses some aspects from previous chapters in latter ones, making the total number of pieces that come with the game far more manageable than other games I’ve played (I’m looking at you The Thing boardgame!), and the plastic miniatures that come with it are incredibly detailed for being, well, plastic. But the game suffers from a lack of Story/Action Card economy and breathing room in some of the latter chapters, making it difficult to complete without coming up with a set of house rules. Our house rule is that you always start with six cards instead of four, and sometimes we give Special Story Cards at the end of the chapter, even when they aren’t otherwise given.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I give this game a solid 2.75.

Gameplay: Great concept, but action economy can ruin the experience with punishing card requirements and excessive randomness.

Story: It’s Lord of the Rings! Of course the story is amazing!

Artwork: The art throughout the book/board itself are great, and the detail on the minis and the smaller game pieces is better than a lot of games I’ve played.

Replayability: I guess this really depends on how well your first playthrough goes. If it went well, you’ll probably want to play again. If it went poorly, you might find the game too punishing to want to try again. The great part, in my eyes, is that if you hate a chapter, you can simply skip it. I would make adjustments accordingly, like don’t give yourself Special Cards and adjust the Corruption Track to assume you played a previous chapter. In that regard, the game has a ton of replayability.

Fun Factor: This is a point of contention because some chapters are just so badly done that it’s impossible to enjoy them all.

In the end, it’s a good game, it just suffers some design flaws. I suggest, if you’re considering giving this game a try, playing with the maximum number of players to up the chance that you’ll draw what you need to complete scenarios. This is for people who don’t want to “cheat” and play the game as it was meant to be played. If you don’t have four people, consider making House Rules for the game, like my wife and I have. Draw six cards initially, instead of four. Give yourself extra Special Story Cards for doing hard tasks. Or go backward on the Corruption Track a couple spaces at the end of a chapter as a reward for completing it. The game is really as fun as you make it, but playing the intended way may be too brutal for casual players or people who hate luck-based games.