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.

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 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 The use of chapter-specific tokens are nice touches, and I’m guessing this also helped keep the price reasonable. And, for the most part, The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game delivered that thematic experience. It does a great job of taking players through the plot points of the movies and somewhat telling the story along the way. Each chapter is themed around specific parts of the quest and is broken down into challenges that further reinforce the source material. For example, the Last March of the Ents chapter has three challenges: A gathering, release the river, and the battle of Isengard. That’s pretty much what you’d expect from that plot arc of the book.To get into the right mindset, first I re-watched the entire extended edition movie trilogy — nearly twelve hours — pausing to jot down quotes, mark the time stamp for a memorable moment, or note a significant plot point I hoped to include in the game. It was fun telling the kids, "Want to help dad do some research right now? Grab the popcorn." If you don’t have anyone else to play with, you can also play solo. The solo rules follow all the normal rules with the exception that there is an additional hand of six story cards with which the player can trade. Since trading is an important part of completing challenges, this is a great way to provide that opportunity to the solo player. In fact, I found the solo game a bit more challenging since that additional hand of six cards does not draw or discard cards during the game. It instead acts as a way to access some cards at the start and then save cards for later so they don’t fill up your hand. This works great when you need those cards for later challenges and don’t want to risk discarding them and not being able to get them again later.

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. The game comes with seven detailed miniatures, each in a different color. They represent some of the main characters you will be using during the various chapters of the game. They include Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli The adventure book is the gameboard. Photo by Michael Knight. While we didn't initially know what we could do, Shanon's experience helped define what we couldn't do. She calculated the actual production costs and developed realistic combinations of possible components; if we want X number of cards, we need to cut out Y pieces of cardboard. Settling on components was one of the hardest challenges and was something constantly being tweaked along the way as we understood what each Chapter needed versus what we wanted. 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. 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.

Where to Buy

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. Despite some quibbles, I enjoyed the Princess Bride Adventure Book Game. I never tried the Wizard of Oz one (not a huge fan of the IP), but I was really looking forward to trying out The Lord of the Rings one. While there is no shortage (at all) of games based on this IP, it’s always nice when a game embraces its source material instead of pasting on the theme to simply appeal to fans. Every time a ring card is used or discarded, your corruption rises. 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 actually required a lot more research than I expected. The previous Adventure Book Gamess each had six chapters while The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game Book would have eight chapters. How do we break down all of that action, all of those important moments into eight cohesive parts? How do we make events from The Fellowship of the Ring feel like a natural progression to the sheer scale of The Two Towers and Return of the King? Spell casters can only learn a very limited number of spells. Some feel this is more in tune with the flavor of Tolkien's writings than other systems.