Lord of the Rings Roundup!
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Transcript
All right, it's round up time, but it's Middleear round up. That's right. This is my favorite IP. Well, one of my favorite IPs. It's more It's more than an IP, right? It's a world. J.R. Tolken is a genius. The man wanted to create a world in which his language could live. The man created a language and then created a world where the people spoke the language. There is no other fantasy world like Middle Earth, Lord of the Rings, all that sort of stuff. It's just so different, so incredible. So, today we're taking a look at four, count them, four, you sure about that? Lord of the Rings, Middleear, Tolken games. Two of which a little more lighter. Two of which I've already done full reviews for that. I'm just going to link to and we're going to talk about them and kind of just the impact of Lord of the Rings games. Now, let me just tell you, three of them. I'm sorry,
liar.
Three of them already done. So, there's five total. Uh, one of them that I haven't played yet. Two of them I haven't played yet. One is an older game that you are going to beat me up for not playing. I understand that. It's War of the Ring.
How dare you?
The problem is it's two players and I don't have it. So, it's hard for me to play a two-player game like that at a con. So, one of these days I'm going to get War of the Ring. Maybe with Bonor. And then the second is Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship. Now, of course, I'm going to play that. That looks incredible, right? It looks like what it should be, right? But let's take a look right now at several games. We're going to start with the two that I shot some brief overviews for. Kind of show you how to play them roughly. I'm not teaching you a full teach. These are kind of quicker games. Anyway, we're going to go back in time a little bit. That's right. To the Lord of the Rings game by Riner Kitia. Not there and back again, but the Lord of the Rings. So, here's how you quickly overview play this game. All right. Here is a brief brief brief overview of a very old game. This is J.R.R. Tolken's The Lord of the Rings by Rand Kitia. That's right. not a game designer known for his thematic elements, but we have some fantastic old school looking art. Very 1970s art for this. Now, the game is not that old, but just really good looking stuff here of all the different things. Look at the black rider. Black riders precious.
Uh what's he saying? Uh uh uh the seed is strong. That's different. That's different. Uh that only counts as one. Uh, let's see who else we got here. That That's only conscious one. I don't think I have an argorn. I do have Get to Gandalf if we can find Gandalf.
Not all who wander also. I still miss you, babe. get it because it's Stephen Tyler's daughter. And anyway, um anyway, that's Hey, I never noticed that he sang that song for that movie. She was in that movie. Huh. Anyway, this is a rolling move. You're going to roll the dice, move across these paths. You're playing competitively. And then you'll essentially land on a spot and you'll do this little spinny deal here on a spinner. And depending on how many it lands on, that's how many of these red cubes you remove. If you remove enough cubes, you take the little token with you. You get to Mount Doom over here.
Remove all the cubes from Sauron. It is Sauron, by the way. And then you win if you have the most of these little tokens. It's really ridiculously simple. Now, that's the basic game. The advanced game has what's known as the dark towers. They're these right here. And somebody will take the palunteer and they will put in the hand. You have to guess which hand the palunteer is in. Then you start in one of the dark towers. It's a simple game, right? Art is cool. That's about all I got to say for it. And the components are nice. Now, I'm not a huge RER Kenichia fan when it comes to all of his games. I like some of his games a lot. Actually, I like modern art or classic art a lot. Uh I like San Francisco a lot. Other ones I'm fine with. Right. However, this one is weird. It's like it's almost like he threw his notebook open. You know, the legend is he's just got the notebook. They're like, "No, we don't like that game." He goes, "Okay, how about this game?" And then they're like, "Yeah, sure. What theme do you want to put on it?" And they were like, "Uh, Lord of the Rings. Let's do that."
Because the theme doesn't matter. It especially doesn't matter because what in what world are there multiple competing Hobbit teams trying to get to Mount Doom? There's one ring. That's why it's called the one ring and one fellowship. Now there's the breaking of the fellowship as we all know. Bormir sadly pouring out for him. They have a cave troll. Shawn Bean underrated actor. That's why I'm so excited about this new anemone movie coming out with Daniel D Lewis, world's greatest actor. And Shawn Bean, another fantastic actor. Anyway, uh it doesn't make sense. This game doesn't make a lot of sense. However, it's got some really cool art. It reminds me of that 1970s Ralph Baxshi and then the other one, the um the one that was like the Ralph Baxshi art, but it was the you know the Return of the King, not the Return of the King, the Lord of the Rings, right? Uh where Gollum's all like this, you know. Um if you've seen the cartoon, you know what I'm talking about. I had the weird like 2D like real people orcs kind of cut into the cartoon. Then you got the Ralph Bagshins which are fantastic where it's all like Anyway, um this art looks pretty good.
The game itself not a fan of. I'm probably never going to play this again. I got it for four bucks at uh Play and Talk and I was like oh I want that. U but you know you may like this game. It's a roll and move. Tom just said we're having a roll and move resurgence. I don't know that this is one of them. Right. This is an older game anyway, but roll a move with a split party in which you're trying to race to get cubes off of stuff to make it to Mount Doom. Not a lot of theme there, but that is Lord of the Rings by Rhonda Kitia. Keeping with the theme of Rhino Kenitia's Lord of the Rings, let's take a look at another one. I'm going to give you a super quick overview because there's actually more meat to this game than meets the eye. Uh, basically what's going to happen is mate's back on the menu, boys. Um, you're going to essentially roll and route is what I'm calling this. So, you're going to roll and write uh paths on your board to get dwarves back to Bilbo's house to get uh bag end. I don't know why that wasn't coming to me. I'm a huge Tolken fan. I love Tolken, but I don't know why Bag in didn't come to me when I was thinking of this review earlier. Anyway, getting him to bag in and then you kind of move on through the story with the trolls and stuff like that. And so, it is an interesting game.
Let's take a look at roughly how you play this game. We'll come back up talk final thoughts on this game. All right, this is there and back again. The Hobbit there and back again designed by Dr. Runner Kenitia. If you know anything about this review video you're watching already, we already touched on another Runner Kenitia Lord of the Rings game. Now, this is an unexpected party. Notice one thing about this game. The art style is very interesting. It reminds me of uh there was that little rabbit short film a few years ago or um Secret of the Kels Kelts I think. I can't remember what it's called. That's what this art style reminds me. It was actually really cool art. Um, especially for The Hobbit. Now, if this was going to be like The Lord of the Rings, I don't know that I would love the art for this, but The Hobbit is a children's story as the 5-year-old. Uh, what was the review for The Hobbit?
I think it said this book is perfect for anyone who's 5 years old or younger, I believe, was the original review of The Hobbit by a child. Try that now. Anyway, what we got here is we got bread, we got dwarfs, we got Thor and Gandalf, and then you got glory. Cuz as we all know, all about glory in the Hobbit. Uh, it is, you know, adventure, all about that kind of stuff. You know, Martin Freeman's in there and he's like, I'm here to have an adventure. My leg doesn't work and now it actually does. I don't need a cane. Right? Deep cut reference. But you're going to roll the dice. You're going to draft back and forth the dice. You don't actually roll this one. You're going to draft back and forth on these dice. These are paths. These are swords. These are bread. Swords are just kind of collectibles. You're going to collect them uh to get bonuses. And the bonuses you get, the points you get for having swords is right there. So, the more swords you have, more points you have. See? 1 to four, 5 to 9, 10 to 14, and so on. The main thing you're going to be doing is trying to connect these dwarves to Bilbo's hobbit hole. Hobbiton uh the his house that the sack Bill Baggines are trying to get their hands on the greedy sack Bill Baggins's hands. Now, how you do this is you're going to roll and draft. So, it's almost like a roll in route. I don't know if that's an official name, but I'm naming it now.
Essentially, starting from one of the doors, you can draw a path. Now, it can be twisted. These aren't good examples because they're all straight, but you could also do this. So, this is all flip-flopped. You could flip it the other direction, right? So like if Here we go. You can imagine drawing this path. You could actually rotate it 180° that way where you go up and then over one to the right instead of the left. You're going to draw these paths getting them to the hobbit. Now, a couple funky rules about like you can't draw through other dwarves. You have to have bread. So each dwarf that you connect has to have bread in order to score the maximum amount of points. Now, you can get just the dwarf points, but if you get the points for the bread, too, you're going to get a lot more points. And when you connect them, you have to have the bread already collected already in order to score the most points for those dwarves. You can't retroactively do that. Thorne and Gandalf take two bread. I don't know why Thoren does, but Gandalf, he's bigger.
He's a wizard and a star, actually. So, you're going to connect them by drawing paths, and then each mission or each part of the story will tell you how it ends. Now, that's just the basic basic version. As you go further into the story, there's a whole lot more that's going to start happening. Different things like trolls, dangerous spaces, you've got overhill and underhill, right? Goblin Town. Why in the world did we let Germa Del Toro put a song that wasn't in the original? It could have been just u the Ralph Back Chip the glasses, cracked the plates. That's a great version. Gollum. Here we go.
It's not fair.
I don't remember what he says. Something about that's not fair.
That's in my pocket.
That's not his riddle, but riddles in the dark. you played differently as well. The the points and the numbers add up differently here. Then you keep going all the way through the entire story of the Hobbit. So each one of these missions plays completely different until you fight Smog, not smog, smog. And so you're still going to have to have bread. You're going to have to have it to move. All the stuff that you would have based on the original mechanics of the earlier ones are now put into this position where you're fighting smog. The number rolled on the black dice is filled on those house and the house filled in on smog instead. So, it's you're trying to save the houses from burning down in Lake Town. And we all know that um what's the actor's name? Shoot, I can't think of the actor's name, but anyway, he was in that other movie, The Girl on the Train. Shoot Smile just in that one space where he's got a in his armor. And that is how you play The Hobbit there and back again. It is a roll and move, roll, or sorry, it is a roll and route, rolling, right? Uh essentially, you're collecting bread, swords, and pieces. you're working it through more difficult difficult things uh in the missions, but essentially rolling right with a lot of depth to it. Says 30 minutes cuz that's roughly what you're going to play each time you play the mission. So yes, it's a story, but it's not like a scenario based thing where you have to play in order, but it is pretty nice looking art. All right, that is there and back again. Now, first and foremost, the art is interesting. like it does remind me of some other kind of like newer independent uh award-winning shorts and feature films recently. So, I think it looks really interesting. Again, I would
not like to see this art style done for the whole Lord of the Rings. Certainly not the Sylmerelion. Absolutely not. But I would love to see this art style done a little bit more in a sense of The Hobbit. It works, right? I like what you do in this game in the sense of like you play through the missions. I don't I just don't love the notion of rolling to get those routes because sometimes you just get frustrated. You're like, I don't really have a good option. And I don't like being frustrated in a game like this, right? Uh where the theme is there actually. You somewhat like you're you're kind of abstracting out to where you're almost playing as the narrator versus playing as the hobbits or or the dwarves or Bilbo or anything like Bilbo. Come here, Bilbo. Um any of that kind of stuff, right? So all in all, it's a good role in right because it does different things, right? It's not just like seven wonders where you all right, mark that off. All right, mark that off. You actually have to think through what you're taking and route those routes.
But is it the greatest role in right? I don't think so. I don't know. But I like I like what you do enough, but it's still kind of just out there enough for me to where it's like, yeah, it's kind of a Lord of the Rings or Middle Earth game, but not I just don't get that feel from it cuz I feel like you could have done this with uh Princess Bride or like even like those uh Ravensburgger games where you play through the story book, right? I just didn't get that feel from this. So that is uh there and back again. Coming up next, we have Heroes of the Shire. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That's a gun. This is not is this Heroes of the Shire inspired by MMO. This is not Lord of the Rings based. Forget it. This one's out this time. Now, the next three vid the next three we're going to talk about are ones that I've already done full reviews on, but I just want to talk about them in the pantheon as it were or in the cosmir.
That's not the right word. Uh in the world building of Tolken. The first being another quick one, but it's abstracted, but it's perfection. That would be Seven Wonders Duel or sorry, Duel for Middle Earth, right? This game is incredible. Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth. It's Seven Wonders Duel, Lord of the Rings. They literally slapped the theme on it and they had Vincent Detroit art and it's phenomenal. If you haven't played this game, make sure you get your hands on a copy of this. It is just so stinking good. It the art is beautiful. Some of the best art in the board gaming, obviously. Uh plus it's it's one of the best two-player games of all time. And then it's just done so well where even the whole theme works like the blue cards doing stuff now moving the path along makes sense instead of just points. Uh you know red putting those things out there for the the Mordor versus the the men and then it just it just works to me. I think this is such a brilliant brilliant game. So if you haven't placed u Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth yet 100% on the shelf I think it's in my top 10. You'd have to go back and look and see what I get. may not have done the top 100 before we played this or after we played this. So, you may have to check, but I love this game.
Sorry. That is Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth. Coming up next is a game that is considered to be one of the greatest card games of all time. That would be Lord of the Rings the living card game. This is originally Fantasy Flight that I know of. Originally Fantasy Flight back in OG Fantasy Flight Living card games where you'd have the first edition. I played the mess out of this. There's very few games I play one player. This was one of them. I played the heck out of this game. difficult, hard, and exciting to play this living card game. And back then when you played living card games, you would kind of almost do like a monthly pack. You'd play the first scenario, then a pack would come out, then a pack would come out, then a pack would come out, and you would literally build and play almost like a subscription. That model is not quite the same anymore, but there's a ton of content for the Lord of the Rings, the card game. And then you can see my review. Uh, I'm going to link all three of these to the the actual video reviews in the con in the comments so you or the description so you can actually go and watch these my full thoughts on this. Uh, but Lord of the Rings, the living card game is one of the greatest card games of all of all time. It's just such a great game. It's so well thought out. The art is beautiful. Um, it's just really fun.
Like it's not it's slightly determined combat with a mystery, so it's not super determined. It's like you have to think ahead and plan and go, okay, do I really want to put this person out there for a fight or to defend or do I want to quest with him? It's almost a little like Lorcon borrowed a little bit from that in a much lighter way. So, Lord of the Rings living card game. Let me know what you think about that in the comments below cuz I love this game. And last but not least, we're taking a look at what could potentially be well, it's one of my favorite genres of games. This would be the Fantasy Flight app driven games. Now, the first one technically doesn't count. Well, wasn't the first one. The first one was Mansions of Mad Second Edition. top three games for me, right? It's amazing. I wish we would get more content. Yes, I know you can third party it, but Imperial Assault had it, right? But they added it on later. And then Journeys of Middle Earth came out. Now, here's why I love Journeys of Middle Earth. It does something that I like based kind of like out of Gloom Haven and a couple other games where your cards, you use them in multiple ways. You can use them for this use or you can spend them as, you know, successes towards a challenge. And to me, that's really great. Plus, what I like about Journeys of Middle Earth is because the stories of Middle Earth are so big and grandiose and ma and maximally huge, uh, to the point where there are, I think, exactly one throwaway references in all of Tolken's works or excuse me, in all his published works. I think there's exactly one reference that just doesn't have a correspondence in either the writings, the lost tales, uh, Book of Unfinished Tales or Sylmerelion or the appendices.
I think that's it in the Lord of the Rings. There's one. I can't remember exactly what he is. My friend Landry could tell me, but everything else, this is why Tolken is so great. If he references something, he's written about it. Now, maybe he's written about it once or twice and changed it up a little bit, you know, especially with like the first age stuff, second age stuff, but for the most part, it's all kind of been shaped into this one fairly cohesive story, which is why you have trouble with things like Rings of Power. It's like, well, they don't actually have the rights to the Sylmerelion, but they need to touch the Sylmerelion, but they have the appendices, so they can kind of tweak and work towards it. Do I want a similar show one day? Yes, I want them to do it. I want to see the ina Lindalay done just in beautiful artistic and maybe even like animated form and then obviously followed up with the fall of Gondolin and all that sort of I want this right so Tolken's works are massive but they're also personal right not all who wander alone not all who wander a loss right you get these amazing quotes right so do all who those who live in such times whatever it is like these amazing personal quotes that are so just philosophically theologically rich quotes. That's why Tolken's a great writer, right? But then you also have these massive battles. And so what Journeys in Middle Earth does so well with the app-driven combat and the app driven storytelling is you have these kind of like bigger map stories and then you have the smaller map stories where you're like in a fighting room or you're on a map exploring. So Journeys of Middle Earth, it is one of the greatest um kind of co-op games of all time. So let me know what your favorite Lord of the Rings game is. And if I'm if I definitely have to play War of the Ring, I want to obviously and uh Fate of the Fellowship. Let me know in the comments
below what your Lord of the Rings favorites are and uh and uh we'll talk about it. Did you know you know CS Lewis Lord of the Rings and um JR Tolken good friends great friends love their works. So Tolken massive fan always will be like deep dive Tolken professor podcast listener here. Uh love all the history and the lore and all the things that are just so magical about Tolken's work. So, let me know what your favorite Tolken game is in the comments below. I'm Brian Drake. Follow me on Instagram at X Dicearb Brian and I will see you soon on the Dice Tower Cruise.
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