Ravensburger Lord of the Rings Adventure Book - Immersive Family Strategy Board Games for Kids and Adults Age 10 Years Up - 1 to 4 Players

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Marcus: Our biggest departure from the previous games in the series was the addition of the corruption mechanism and its campaign-wide effects. The puzzles are designed to be beatable, but just barely. Your life would be so much simpler if you were just to use The One Ring's special powers. It's so tempting. It's right there, and somehow its super-powered effect is the perfect thing for the moment.

It’s important to note here that the game is set up to be played cooperatively while also sharing the pieces in play. That means that no one is playing as Aragorn or Pippin. They are just miniatures on the board that can be manipulated by any of the players. I’m calling this out here because some kids—wink wink, MINE—will want to play as Legolas or Gimli as their character. Ravensburger evaluates hundreds of game pitches every year, and I had recently submitted several, including a few ideas based on The Lord of the Rings. Ravensburger passed on those submissions, so I thanked them for their time and moved on. I like to think they saw something in those ideas or in my other work because they soon reached out to see whether I'd be interested in working on a different The Lord of the Rings game. The use of chapter-specific tokens are nice touches, and I’m guessing this also helped keep the price reasonable. Burdened with the quest of delivering the one ring to Mordor, you and your companions must travel across the realm of middle earth and safely destroy the one ring. All whilst avoiding the searching Eye of Sauron. Are you up to the challenge? In the game, Sauron’s shadow has fallen across Middle-earth, and the One Ring must be destroyed. To complete their daunting quest, players will need to work together to help cherished Lord of the Rings characters journey from The Shire to the fires of Mordor, all while avoiding the Eye of Sauron.No dice, kids. Everyone is playing as everyone, and on a turn, the active player typically does the thing that everyone else agrees is the best course of action, usually based on that player’s cards. Turns are a breeze—move any combination of characters two spaces, then do a mix of discarding cards to complete actions or swapping a card with another player. After that, draw two new cards (hand limit of six), then draw the next Plot card to see what the AI will do with the bad guys in play. Initially it was easier for me to start thinking about this as a product before thinking about this as a game. I had the benefit of seeing the previous Adventure Book Games and got a sense for what sort of gameplay they deliver — but more importantly for me at the time, I got to see what came in the box. I had run numbers and budgets for punchboard, cards, dice, and plastic from my time at Fantasy Flight Games, so I looked at all the bits and pieces from the other Adventure Book Games and tried to get a sense of the material costs and limitations. 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. The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game is designed for 1-4 players from ages 1 and up. With play sessions lasting anywhere from 20-160 minutes each. Meaning this is the perfect family board game for a Sunday afternoon, filled with adventure and mystery. I liked the initial idea, but the sense of scale needed to change. Looking at the story beats, I added the hobbits meeting with Aragorn, fighting the Nazgul on Weathertop, and ending with a transition to Rivendell. I wanted to design a feeling of motion. Gameplay naturally moves players from left to right, creating a sense of travel and progression across the chapters. Overall, Chapter One remained pretty close to my original idea.

Players work together to do things from the movies. In one chapter, you’ll move Frodo and his fellow hobbit friends from the Hearth to the Prancing Pony to Weathertop. Later, you’ll be asked to face off against the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm, or fight Orcs near the Seat of Seeing. No matter the scenario, players will be discarding cards matching one of the six suits from their hand to defeat monsters or complete challenges. 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.The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game needed to deliver roughly twenty-minute "units" of gameplay per chapter across eight chapters. It needed to follow previous Adventure Book Game conventions like playing cards to move figures and complete challenges. It needed to be a co-operative game. It needed to slowly increase in difficulty chapter by chapter. It needed a level of replayability. And it needed something special to feel like a The Lord of the Rings experience. Storytelling: The main thing to do here is move a character additional spaces (by discarding cards) or complete challenges. These usually require having specific characters in specific locations and/or discarding cards of a certain suit. Players may also trade a card with another player one time during this phase. 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 Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is a perfect game for families. I have always been a fan of cooperative games and they were great to play with my children when they were younger. I really like how this game tells the story of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and lets players play out eight of the main events. Whether or not players have read the novels or seen the movies, the game is enjoyable to play. In fact, the game may even create an interest in watching the movies or reading the books in children. While there are many games out on the market themed after The Lord of the Rings, this one is the most approachable for new and younger players and does the best job of portraying the storyline. While the suggest age is 10 years and older, children a bit younger could still enjoy this game with the help of an adult or older sibling. The cooperative nature makes it very easy to teach this game and help younger players get into it.

There’s nothing outright innovative about this as a board game design, but it’s a clever distillation of the many narrative heavy campaign games currently dominating the board game market. It captures some of the spark of huge crowdfunding titles like Gloomhaven or Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood, utilizing narrative and story to drive a linked session of games. But it accomplishes this with an approachable ruleset that nearly anyone can immediately understand. Story cards are used to complete challenges and can also be discarded to move characters. There are six different types of story cards: Courage, Mystery, Adventure, Insight, Warfare, and One Ring. Special cards can provide some powerful abilities to help you complete the challenges. Photo by Michael Knight. On a scale of one to “I Dress Like Frodo at Work Holiday Parties”, I’m probably a two on the imaginary Hardcore Lord of the Rings Fan Club scale. So have your second breakfast and strap on your dagger as we see how The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game holds up. Gameplay Overview: It is important to realize that this is aimed at families as well as a younger audience. I felt the most joy working through the game with my nine-year-old, the adventure book facilitating a few evenings of shared storytelling and bonding. The strategic demands are not overly complex and it will not provide the rich gameplay hobbyists tend to seek out in adult game groups, but it accomplishes everything it intends and is worthy.

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But if you come to rely on The One Ring, you'll increasingly suffer consequences up to losing the whole campaign. It's potentially our widest departure from the source material, but really immerses the players in the weight of their task. You're faced with holding and managing The One Ring cards to avoid corruption, all while they're absolutely begging you to use them. We had a ton of fun coming up with specific things The One Ring would do in each chapter, and it ended up being my favorite thing in the whole game. 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. 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.