aka pastor guy: #17: Lord of the Rings (Mark's 100

Lord of the Rings

Mark's Ranking

Print Status

Why It's On The List

There had been cooperative games before this one... but Knizia broke the mold and created a sprawling (and gorgeous) cooperative masterpiece that reflects the tensions & storylines of the books in a highly abstracted way. And my wife likes it.

Tips & Tricks:

There are three expansions to the already meat-y base game...
Friends & Foes (which added Foes as well as two new "locations" - boards - to work through) - yes, it did make the game longer by almost half.
Sauron (which added several different ways to play the game, including a "one player - Sauron - versus everyone else" variant that works like a charm)
Battlefields (which added another board for each location... is highly abstract... and, to be completely, I've never actually played.)

Suggestion: don't combine the Friends & Foes and Sauron expansions - it's just too darn long.

I've played 50+ games of this... and will happily play it again if someone asks.

Extras

Here's what I wrote about the game for The One Hundred: both my personal entry and the group entry.

The picture at the top of the page is (sadly) not my own - with so many of my games packed into storage right now, I couldn't get to Lord of the Rings to take an appropriate picture. It's actually from a very nice review of the older edition of the game from Gaming Trend entitled "Lord Of The Rings, the Board Game by Reiner Knizia: Because Tolkien Made It Seem Too Easy".

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If you feel a need to catch up on my admittedly-aging Top 100 as of February 2012 list, you can check out:

aka pastor guy