The Lord of the Rings motion pictures are well-established masterpieces. They wouldn’t scrimp on the official Lord of the Rings board video games. Right?

Imagine your self again in 2004. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King film epic has simply been launched, closing out the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s superb, visually beautiful, has wonderful storytelling, and introduced an entire new flock of individuals into the Tolkien universe of Middle Earth.

You purchase the DVDs, the posters, the figures, and the video video games and also you assume you will have each piece of Lord of the Rings merchandise. But then, sooner or later, strolling by your native sport retailer you see this beautiful masterpiece of field artwork.

Straight from the film, the field artwork seems to be dramatic and thrilling. Not solely that, the entire trilogy is there! It’s acquired the official stamp from New Line Cinema, so it’s acquired to be legit!

Without a second thought, you seize all three video games and rush house to arrange the sport. Immediately you’re shocked by the sport parts.

You’re using this hype practice all the way in which to Barad-dûr, which additionally seems to be unbelievable!

You’re so excited to play. You put the films on the TV, set the soundtrack within the background, set out the Lembas snacks, name up a bunch of buddies and inform them to buckle in since you’re going to be having the best Lord of the Rings sport evening ever!

You Know How This Ends

The sport is terrible. Terrible. Dreadful. Atrocious. Thesaurus.

So a lot potential wasted.

The sport is actually nothing greater than a “roll and hope you win” kind of sport. You roll to maneuver, you roll for the encounters, you roll to find out your rating, and also you roll for every part. So let’s dive into the Lord of the Rings board video games and discover out why they’re so horrible.

Lord of the Rings Board Games Gameplay

While every sport is thematically completely different, they’re, in very literal phrases, the identical sport.

The sport tells you which ones participant makers to put throughout setup. The markers signify the characters within the motion pictures: Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, and so on… But additionally for Ringwraiths and another villains. They additionally include character playing cards that exhibit their stats.

Speed is used to find out how far a personality strikes when they’re moved. The participant rolls a die and provides their Speed then strikes that many areas. And already, let’s cease and look nearer in any respect this.

1. During a participant’s flip, they transfer any of the characters. Any one among their selecting. You’re not taking part in as Legolas, everyone seems to be. You’re all working collectively to get the characters to the top, however it’s not a cooperative sport. Yes. It’s as unusual because it sounds.
2. Despite the way it could look, the sport board is a single path. There are not any decisions for motion. You’re simply following the sequence of occasions that happen throughout the story. This leads into…
3. Any time a personality lands on an area with a numbered ring, they cease and have that correspondingly numbered encounter. These areas are so frequent (severely, scroll up and take a look at the board. They are each 4 areas), that rolling a die to maneuver is meaningless. On high of the EIGHT you get so as to add to your motion roll if you’re Legolas.

Power, Wisdom, and Magic are used in the course of the encounters.

Again, it’s simply random cube rolling and seeing what occurs. Plus, many of the occasions require rolling even or odd numbers to find out their final result. So having a +8 to Power is mathematically simply nearly as good as a +0. So all these stats are pointless! Like every part else on this blasted sport!

You may discover the occasions point out including Good and Evil factors. What’s that, you marvel? Well, it’s the victory situation!

The admittedly fairly cool scorekeeper is one other fuddled mess added to this waste of time and house. Each participant begins their rating on 67. I don’t know why. If anybody studying is aware of why the rating begins at 67 or goes from 62 to 89, please let me know within the remark beneath. I’m at a loss.

As you undergo these occasions, your rating will modify primarily based on the end result. At the top of the sport, whichever participant has the best rating wins!

However, in case your rating reaches an ‘S’ (which stands for Sauron, clearly), you roll a die and transfer that many areas again towards the center of the observe. So…. in the event you get too evil, you get barely much less evil. But additionally, you possibly can’t be too good both. Also, if you need the best rating, it’s important to land at precisely 87, then achieve 2 factors, then by no means achieve any extra factors.

The entire system shouldn’t be solely silly however needlessly difficult. Who got here up with this?! How?! Why?! I’ve so many questions!

Final Thoughts

There are extra issues I might speak about explaining why these Lord of the Rings board video games are so terrible, however actually, it’s extra bother than it’s price.

The guidelines don’t clarify how the unhealthy guys transfer across the board. They don’t clarify how the small handful of things really perform. The few objects that do exist are both actually pointless or supply a threat vs. reward that’s by no means definitely worth the threat. Per instance, the One Ring enables you to keep away from any encounter by gaining 2 Evil factors. But each encounter provides at most 2 Evil factors, so there’s no purpose to make use of the ring in any respect.

The sport seems to be nice, and it truly is such a disgrace that it’s so horrible. In researching this sport, I discovered quite a lot of fan-made rule units for the sport which hopefully improves on this basis. Which, admittedly, isn’t tough given the supply materials.

So, to everybody nonetheless contemplating shopping for this sport, even after studying all this, all I can say is…

If you’re into LotR video games, take a look at the way in which higher sport, ‘War of the Ring’.

Matt has liked video games of every kind his entire life: board, video, conflict, roleplaying. He’s labored as a author for BoLS since 2017. He’s labored as freelance editor for board sport rulebooks and has designed lots of his personal video games as nicely.

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