kellee's blog

Last night my roomate and I played Lord of the Rings, the board game, designed by Reiner Knizia. You might know Knizia best as the designer of Carcassone, but check out his ludography on his site and you will probably recognize a number of his titles from your closet back home.

I had been interested in playing the game for awhile, ever since I read Knizia's essay on creating the game in "Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals," by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen. If you haven't ready his essay, I highly reccommend it, In it, Knizia outlines his process of translating a novel into a board game, and the challenges associated with creating a game based on a story well-known to some, but still unknown to many.

The game got off to a very shaky start. Even though the gigantic instruction book had many diagrams and images of how to set up the game, there was still a lot of confusion about what went where, mostly due to what I thought were awkward semantics, and too-similar card design. There were "Feature Cards" that looked like "Hobbit Cards" except for a minor change in design; "Hobbit Cards" didn't really have anything to do with hobbits, and "Feature Cards" weren't really features, there were Event tiles and Event spaces, but the two related to each other only sometimes.

The instruction book wasn't very clear on how to win. Tim and I figured it out as we played, and that very well could be the only way to learn, but it was frustrating at the start because we had no strategy whatsoever. (Should we play a card now? Why shouldn't we?) Maybe they could have learned from the designers of Settlers of Catan, in whih the instruction book repeats the same information in various ways, with different methods of organization, for easier referncing. For example, I wish I could have referenced a brief outline on how one turn is played, from start to end. Instead, that information was nested along with the explanation of the pieces, the board, and the over-arching narrative, so every time I wanted to make sure we were on the right step, I had to go hunting for it.

There was a point where Tim and I thought we would never understand it. But we forged ahead. After all, we had a ring to destroy!

Outline
The players play as the hobbits, joining together to destroy the ring and avoid getting corrupted by the darkness of Sauron. On one board, our characters begin in "the Light," and Sauron rests in "the Dark." Sauron is represented by this black, monolithic piece with a red spot on it. (I really liked the design of this piece, as it has a heavy weight to it game pieces don't usually have, really accenting the element of dark evil that Sauron represents.) On another board is the current "scenario", which changes over the course of the game, as you move your way towards Mordor. Depending on the outcome of game play, the characters and Sauron move closer or farther away from each other. If your character ends up with Sauron, that hobbit has been fully corrupted by the Darkness(meaning Evil, not the rock band), and that player is dead. If the ring bearer (which can change hands in the course of gameplay) gets corrupted, the game is over and everyone loses.

The idea is that all of the players need each other to win the game, and so it is completely cooperative. You can't show each other the cards you are holding, but you can talk about them as much as you want and discuss strategy. Each character has special attributes, and the ring bearer has added abilities as well. The group can also call on the help of Gandalf in case of an emergency, adding to the narrative of the game.

Our Game
As I said before, Tim and I had no strategy to begin with, but we managed to get through Moria and Helm's Deep without too much trouble. Shelob's Lair was dicey, but we eventually got through on our wits to the final destination - Mordor. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make it to the volcano, and our ring bearer was corrupted by the darkness of Sauron. By the end, I know we didn't even get to certain game mechanics, but the ones we did tackle in our first run through, we had a MUCH better sense of by the end of the game. Once we figured out the rythm to each turn, we were better able to get into the swing of things and were able to acutally strategize.

Critiques
As I stated earlier, the semantics made figuring out the game an uphill battle. Also, I can imagine that once I've played the game a number of times I might have the icons on the cards memorized, but for the most part they were too abstract, and I kept having to look them up every single time. Again, this made figuring out the rules to the game an uphill battle, when maybe it didn't have to be.

However, it is fun to play a cooperative board game for a change. And even if we didn't know all the rules, at least we knew we were in it together. I would like to play the game more, to see if it continues to be interesting even after I've figured out all of the mechanics and strategy. There are many elements of chance embedded in the game, but I wasn't able to tell the first time out how much randomness these elements change the game play.