The Two Masters: Book Two of the Knizia Papers

By Dan Clark

The history of Reiner Knizia's next major publishing success begins a good deal more than ten years ago, as Through the Desert did. Reiner Knizia's next masterpiece began with another masterpiece by another master. In fact, it began in 1937, when John Ronald Reuel Tolkien began work on his most famous novel, The Lord of the Rings.

Anyone reading these words must by necessity have found themselves on the Fantasy Flight Games website, and therefore one assumes that the reader is at least passingly familiar with Tolkien's fantasy epic. To say that it defined the concept of "fantasy" for an entire generation of readers is not an understatement. Dr. Knizia himself describes the novel as "Tolkien's powerful epic" in his essay "The Design and Testing of the Board Game — The Lord of the Rings."1

"This game would reach a large audience, but they would have high and very specific expectations," writes Dr. Knizia. "Even though I couldn't cover the entire story line, my aim was to stay within the spirit of the book, so that the players would experience something similar to the readers."


Lord of the Rings Board Game

When Dr. Knizia aims to do something, he does it. The Lord of the Rings is without question the most thematic Reiner Knizia title published to date. While some of the credit certainly goes to the remarkable art by John Howe, the true triumph lies in the cooperative gameplay. Whereas the novel follows Frodo and his companions on their quest to destroy the One Ring, the board game places the players in the role of Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Sam, and Fatty Bolger (remember Fatty?) on their quest to — you guessed it — destroy the One Ring. The hobbits are the core of the story, after all, and so the board game places players in those roles. As the hobbits left the safety of the Shire to undertake an impossible quest in the face of unknown dangers, so too must the players begin a struggle against unfavorable odds. Just as the hobbits in the novel worked together to survive, so too must the players support one another and act as a group to overcome the many challenges in their way.


Lord of the Rings: Friends & Foes Expansion

Other central concepts of the novel are represented in the board game as well. Sauron, the incarnation of evil and corruption, grows in power as the game progresses. Corruption, that ever-present danger, makes the hobbits more and more vulnerable to his influence. As Sauron's power grows and their trials weigh on the hobbits, one by one they may fall to the shadow. Of course, the hobbits will be aided in their quest by some familiar faces — Gandalf, Strider, members of the Fellowship, and other allies all have their role to play in the board game. The players have control over exactly when to invoke Gandalf's aid, for example, and these and other decisions dominate their group thinking as they draw ever closer to Mordor and victory (or defeat, of course).


Lord of the Rings: Sauron Expansion

Clearly, a page-by-page transliteration of the novel into board game format would be both undesirable and unworkable. Games have one important advantage over non-interactive media such as novels, which is that the element of risk can be real. In the novel, the outcome will be the same each time one reads: Frodo will succeed and the Ring will be destroyed (apologies if that was a spoiler for anyone, but if you're reading this article and haven't read the book, shame on you!). In the board game, sometimes Frodo will fail in his quest! The variable outcomes inherent in a board game format also suggest that the plot should not be fixed, either. Sometimes the Battle of Helm's Deep will go very badly for the Fellowship and the hobbits will barely escape with their lives (or not escape at all). Sometimes the hobbits will manage to navigate the mines of Moria without losing Gandalf as an ally and a guide. Dr. Knizia's design features an ideal balance between familiarity and flexibility with a novel system featuring various game boards. One master board tracks the overall progress of the hobbits and the plot, while various story boards feature the different acts of the saga. From the mines of Moria to Shelob's Lair, each story event has various event tracks along it. As the game progresses, the hobbits must balance friendship, traveling, hiding, and fighting to move on to the next act without loss.


Lord of the Rings: Battlefields Expansion

Due to its tight thematic connection and innovative cooperative gameplay, The Lord of the Rings has found an audience nearly as broad as Tolkien's original masterwork. Debuting in 2001, The Lord of the Rings Board Game happily coincided with the release of Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in a very successful trilogy of critically-acclaimed films based on the same source material. The release of the film heralded a surge of interest in all things Lord of the Rings and the board game was no exception. Of course, the release of expansions — Friends and Foes and Sauron in the years immediately following, and Battlefields in recent years — have done much both to support the life of the board game and to serve as proof of its success over the long term.


Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation

Lord of the Rings isn't even the only critically-acclaimed and commercially-successful Tolkien-inspired board game Dr. Knizia has designed! Quite apart from the aforementioned expansions, The Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation is celebrated as a marvelous two-player strategy game that neatly encapsulates, if not the complete scope of the novel, the flavor and theme of The Lord of the Rings setting. What's more, it plays completely differently from The Lord of the Rings, despite the similar subject matter. Competitive rather than cooperative, with suspense and drama inherent in the duel of nerve and wits central to the game mechanics rather than the ever-dwindling pool of group resources from Dr. Knizia's other Lord of the Rings board game - The Confrontation is a totally different animal.

Next week we'll talk about another Reinier Knizia game that's not only succeeds without the rich thematic support of an epic fantasy novel, but ingeniously does away with such frippery as theme altogether.

Read the rest of the articles in the series:
The Knizia Papers: Camels Never Tasted So Good
Simply Ingenious: Volume 3 of the Knizia Papers
The Knizia Papers, vol. 4: Days of Future Past

1: Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003.