I picked up Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings at the Game Kastle flea market last weekend for $15. Released in 2000, this game is a precursor to the wave of cooperative games that have hit the market in the last couple of years. It wasn't the first cooperative game, but it expanded on what could be done with narrative and interface design in the genre, and Matt Leacock (of Pandemic fame) mentioned it specifically as an inspiration at a talk I saw him give, and it's influence can be seen in games like Battlestar Galactica and the 2005 re-imagining of Arkham Horror.
In Lord of the Rings, up to 5 players take on the role of one of 5 Hobbits from the Lord of the Rings (the 4 you've heard of plus Fatty Bolger, who plays a small but important part in the books, but now belongs to the Tom Bombadil hall of forgotten Lord of the Rings characters). You progress through a series of 4 scenario maps (Moria, Helm's Deep, Shelob's Lair, and Mordor), using cards to fend off the increasingly nasty things the game throws at you, trying to keep at least one Hobbit alive to chuck the ring into Mount Doom.
This was our second game, and as we got only halfway through the third board on our first attempt, we kept the game set to "easy" level. Despite this, we just barely made it, with Frodo (me) managing to throw the ring into mount doom after surviving a roll of the die that forced me to discard my last two cards. In opposition to last game, we judiciously used the power of the ring to "skip" a few particularly nasty parts of the board. I felt like we mostly made good decisions, and it is frankly hard to see how this game would be beatable by 2 players at normal difficulty, much less hard.
Not to say we won't try.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment