The Lord of the Rings movies are established masterpieces. They wouldn’t cut corners on the civil servant Lord of the Rings board games. Right?
Imagine in 2004. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King movie epic has just been released, closing the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s amazing, visually stunning, has excellent storytelling and brought a whole new swarm of people to the Tolkien universe of Middle Earth.
You buy the DVDs, the posters, the characters and the video games and you think you have every piece of Lord of the Rings merchandise. But then, one day, while walking through your local game store, you see this stunning masterpiece of box art.
Straight out of the movie, the box art looks dramatic and exciting. Not only that, the entire trilogy is here! It has the official New Line Cinema stamp, so it must be legit!
Without thinking twice, grab all three games and rush home to set up the game. You are immediately amazed by the game components.
You ride this hype train all the way to Barad-dûr, which also looks fantastic!
You are so excited to play. You put the movies on the TV, put the soundtrack in the background, put down the Lembas snacks, call up a bunch of friends and tell them to cling on because you will have the best Lord of the Rings game night ever!
You know how this ends
The game is terrible. Terrible. Horrible. Awful. Synonyms list.
So much potential wasted.
The game is literally nothing more than a “roll and hope you win” type of game. You roll to move, you roll for the encounters, you roll to score and you roll for everything. So let’s dive into the Lord of the Rings board games and find out why they are so terrible.
Lord of the Rings Board Games Gameplay
While each game is thematically different, they are, in very literal terms, the same game.
The game tells you which player makers to place during setup. The markers represent the characters in the movies: Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, etc… But also for Ringwraiths and some other villains. They also come with character cards that show off their stats.
Speed is used to determine how far a character moves when they are moved. The player rolls a die and adds his speed and then moves that many squares. And already, let’s stop and take a closer look at all this.
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- During a player’s turn they move each of the characters. One of their choice. You don’t play like Legolas, that’s everyone. You all work together to get the characters to the end, but it’s not a cooperative game. Yes. It’s as strange as it sounds.
- Whatever it looks like, the board is a single path. There are no choices for movement. You just follow the sequence of events that take place in the story. This leads to…
- Every time a character lands on a space with a numbered ring, they stop and have that correspondingly numbered encounter. These spaces are so often (seriously, scroll up and look at the sign. They are every 4 spaces), that rolling a dice to move is pointless. On top of the EIGHT you may add to your movement role if you are Legolas.
During the encounters, power, wisdom and magic are used.
Again, it’s just randomly rolling the dice and seeing what happens. In addition, most events require the rolling of even or odd numbers to determine their outcome. So having a +8 to Power is mathematically just as good as a +0. So all these statistics are meaningless! Like everything else in this great game!
You may have noticed that the events mention good and bad points being added. What is that, you ask? Well, it’s the victory condition!
The admittedly pretty cool scorer is another confused mess that adds to this waste of time and space. Each player starts their score at 67. I don’t know why. If anyone reading knows why the score starts at 67 or goes from 62 to 89, please let me know in the comment below. I do not know.
As you progress through these events, your score will be adjusted based on the outcome. At the end of the game, the player with the highest score wins!
However, if your score reaches an ‘S’ (which stands for Sauron, of course), roll a die and move that many squares back to the center of the lane. So…. if you get too bad, you get something less bad. But you can’t be too good either. And if you want the highest score, you have to land exactly on 87, then earn 2 points and then never more points.
The whole system is not only stupid, but also needlessly complicated. Who invented this?! How?! Why?! I have so many questions!
Final Thoughts
There are more things I could talk about to explain why this one Lord of the Rings board games are so terrible, but honestly, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
The rules don’t explain how the bad guys move around the board. They don’t explain how the small handful of items actually function. The few items out there are literally meaningless or offer a risk versus reward that is never worth the risk. For example, the One Ring allows you to avoid every encounter by gaining 2 Evil points. But each encounter yields a maximum of 2 Evil points, so there’s no reason to use the ring at all.
The game looks great, and it’s such a shame it’s so terrible. While researching this game, I found a lot of fan-created rulesets for the game that hopefully improve on this foundation. Which, admittedly, isn’t difficult given the source material.
So, for anyone who is still considering buying this game, even after reading all of this, I can only say…
If you like LotR games, check out the much better game, ‘War of the Ring’.
Matt has loved all kinds of games all his life: board games, video, war, role-playing. He has been working as a writer for BoLS since 2017. He has worked as a freelance board game rules editor and has also designed many of his own games.
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