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The game comes with a variety of counters. Almost all of them are specific to the eight chapters. Therefore, you will only use a few at a time. How to Play The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game The Goal Jay: Not only were we designing eight individual game chapters, we were designing a sequential tale that slowly increased in difficulty — and it needed to feel like The Lord of the Rings. While there are a number of differences from the other Adventure Book Games, I wanted to focus on two thematic elements in particular: The One Ring and corruption. Marcus: All my prior games live in that family-friendly space. The key challenge is choosing mechanisms and integrating them in a way that younger players can honestly be competitive at their ability level, while still making the gameplay engaging for more experienced players. Our floor is ten years old. "Can a fourth-grader (who is into Tolkien) understand and solve this?" is a lens I had to keep in mind when evaluating the puzzles we designed. We definitely skirted that edge in a couple of places, but I'm content with what we delivered.
So have your second breakfast and strap on your dagger as we see how The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game holds up. Gameplay Overview: On a scale of one to “I Dress Like Frodo at Work Holiday Parties”, I’m probably a two on the imaginary Hardcore Lord of the Rings Fan Club scale. During the game, everything is controlled by the group. So no one takes on the role of Frodo or Gandalf, but the active player gets to move the bits and make the decisions. On a player’s turn they have a few steps: We aimed to make the game as replayable as the movies are rewatchable. Each time you find something new in the experience to appreciate between the familiar story beats. In particular, the special cards you receive over the campaign are varied and numerous enough that you'll have to change your approach to completing the chapters each time. The challenges are the same, but the plot chart is constantly putting you on your heels and forcing you to reconsider moves you planned to make just before you would have made them. Humbled by Chapter Two, I looked at the rest of the line-up and realized it was far too much work for me, especially given our timeline. I told Shanon I was going to need some serious help — but I had the perfect person in mind: Marcus Ross.
There are so many events and characters in this scene that I wanted to include, but the token budget and board space limitations meant that I couldn't just throw twenty chits on the board and bash them into each other, so I localized the conflict to our character miniatures, with the advancing army represented by individual orcs facing off against them. Because of how the scene is structured, the battle takes place sequentially over a number of locations. The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game is, true to its on-the-tin name, a co-op game that follows the entire trilogy from Frodo’s first steps out of Bag End to his climactic ascent to destroy the One Ring under the gaze of Sauron’s eye in Mordor. It’s important to note here that the game is set up to be played cooperatively while also sharing the pieces in play. That means that no one is playing as Aragorn or Pippin. They are just miniatures on the board that can be manipulated by any of the players. I’m calling this out here because some kids—wink wink, MINE—will want to play as Legolas or Gimli as their character. The gameplay is also mostly based on The Princess Bride engine. While I enjoyed that game at the time, I think my appetite for it has waned some. The Lord of the Rings game started feeling somewhat repetitive by the end of the adventure. There was a lot of move here and discard these cards objectives and some chapters seemed to drag on a bit too long. By the end, I was itching to be finished with the busy work. At the end of each turn, a number card is drawn and compared to the scenario card.
Not a fan of Lord of the Rings? I think this game would be a hard pass. There’s nothing about the gameplay that shines in a way that would bring players in who aren’t pre-sold on the world of Middle-Earth. Jay: Throughout the project, I was constantly impressed with the mechanisms and gameplay Marcus designed. We are very good friends with very different approaches to design and prototyping — one of the reasons we worked so well together — and I learned a lot watching Marcus's chapters come together. Since I talked about my approach earlier, Marcus shares his thoughts.I wrote a lengthy game spec document highlighting what I felt were the key, pivotal, most dramatic moments of the full story, whether it was Gandalf warning Frodo of The One Ring's power at the very beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring or Frodo carrying The One Ring to Mount Doom while the final battle rages in Mordor in Return of the King. My first draft listed more than thirty events. I started combining some to see how much could fit together into one chapter's worth of gameplay. This got me down to about twelve events.
In the game, Sauron’s shadow has fallen across Middle-earth, and the One Ring must be destroyed. To complete their daunting quest, players will need to work together to help cherished Lord of the Rings characters journey from The Shire to the fires of Mordor, all while avoiding the Eye of Sauron. The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is a perfect game for families. I have always been a fan of cooperative games and they were great to play with my children when they were younger. I really like how this game tells the story of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and lets players play out eight of the main events. Whether or not players have read the novels or seen the movies, the game is enjoyable to play. In fact, the game may even create an interest in watching the movies or reading the books in children. While there are many games out on the market themed after The Lord of the Rings, this one is the most approachable for new and younger players and does the best job of portraying the storyline. While the suggest age is 10 years and older, children a bit younger could still enjoy this game with the help of an adult or older sibling. The cooperative nature makes it very easy to teach this game and help younger players get into it.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is epic, so capturing it across eight chapters came as a challenge. Ravensburger Game Development Manager Shanon Lyon told Nerdist, “We started by having one of our designers, Jay Little, sketch out the beats of the book, looking for the moments fans would expect and want to see and the ones we’d need to make it feel cohesive so that players really feel like they’re playing through the story. Chapter 8 was one of the most difficult in terms of design. In the movies, there is so much going on. Our designer, Marcus Ross put a lot of hard work into making sure the chapter evokes the same feeling but also makes sense mechanically and narratively.” There’s nothing outright innovative about this as a board game design, but it’s a clever distillation of the many narrative heavy campaign games currently dominating the board game market. It captures some of the spark of huge crowdfunding titles like Gloomhaven or Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood, utilizing narrative and story to drive a linked session of games. But it accomplishes this with an approachable ruleset that nearly anyone can immediately understand. The rest of the ideas from that original list didn't go to waste. A lot of them are sprinkled through the game as special cards, showcased in the art, or featured as quotes throughout the game. The Lord of the Ring’s immersive story world unfolded perfectly in our adventure book board game format,” said Shanon Lyon, Game development manager at Ravensburger. For an adventure book game, you gave a fantastic amount of components that are made to a very high quality. Inside the box, you’ll find:
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