Played the Lord of the Rings board game earlier in the week. It's from 2000, so I don't know if there's a more recent one based on the movies. It even has Fatty, which they left out of the movies. I only read The Hobbit, so all I know about Lord of the Rings is what I've seen from the movies. Note: It turns out we didn't quite play with all of the rules, we completely forgot the part where you can put the ring on! So this review might be a bit off.
It's a co-op game for up to five players, with each player taking the role of one of the hobbits. The goal of the game is to transport the ring to Mt Doom and destroy it before you become corrupted and get destroyed by Sauron.
The game follows the story pretty well, you start off in Hobbiton, and get various items, then you move on to Rivendell, show friendship and get a heap more stuff. Once you get to Moira, that's where the game really seems to start and the Scenario board comes into play.
The mechanics of the game are pretty straightforward. You have cards that have different icons on them: hiding, fighting, friendship, walking. On your turn, you draw an event card that signifies a particular event, which can range from one of the different to icon cards, or Sauron moves closer / one person moves three squares closer to Sauron, or the group must advance the event token, which means the group has to do whatever that particular tile says or Bad Stuff Happens. Then you may choose to draw two cards, play up to two cards, or move your character one square back on the corruption line.
You need to progress through the scenario board, which you do by playing cards that match that particular scenario's icon. Each scenario board also has some side quests which you can do to pick up shield tokens, or life tokens (heart, sun or ring). Shield tokens can be saved up to summon Gandalf for one of six once-off events, and they also stop you from insta-dying if you end up on the same corruption square as Sauron - though it can be a bit hard, as you need the same number of shields as the number of the square you're both on.
Acquiring hearts, rings and suns is important, because if your group reaches the end of a scenario, each player moves forward one square on the corruption line for each one of the three life tokens that they're missing (except for Merry, who only needs two). The problem for five players is that there are at most three of each life token on the board for each scenario. Even if you manage to complete all the side-quests, someone will end up becoming more corrupt.
One player also plays the role of ring-bearer, which starts as Frodo, but can pass on to other players as the game progresses. There are certain events that result in the ring bearer becoming corrupt.
I really liked the corruption mechanic. The players start at one end, and Sauron starts at the other. I've mentioned a few things that cause players to move forward, and there are a few events / cards that cause Sauron to move forward. There's also black squares scattered throughout the board, and passing through those results in a dice roll. The possible results are 1 / 2 / 3 (player moves X corruption spaces forward), player discards two cards, nothing, Sauron moves forward one space. If Sauron catches up to the ring-bearer, the party loses. If any player lands on the same square as Sauron, they also get eliminated (unless they have the required number of shields).
We had a pretty rough start, and it felt like Sauron was just charging down the board. We also got pretty unlucky with some of our forced discards, as we had to discard some pretty powerful double joker cards because that was the only joker card some players had. It was pretty telling that I was playing the game with lawyers / future-lawyers, because they all became corrupt faster than sausage rolls get eaten at a morning tea. I can't talk, by the end, I was pretty corrupt, too. You can see from the photo that Sauron was so close to us at the end. We had managed to take the ring to Mount Doom, but we all had to survive one dice roll without dying, and by the second last person, we were relying on him to get a blank (nothing) roll, which thankfully he did, so we won!
It was ridiculously close. What I really liked about the game was that even though it was a co-op game, it didn't feel like one of those games where the "good" players take over and tell everyone what to do, it actually felt co-operative. It also reminded me of Shadows of Camelot, which is another great game, but this one required a lot less explaining before we could actually start the game. I enjoyed it, and it feels like it would have decent replay value, but not something that you'd play again right after you've just finished a game.
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