Good morning! I don’t know if you’ve seen this trivia game that Fantasy Flight Games has produced, but it is excellent! My husband got a copy for his birthday yesterday and we played it last night until far too late. 🙂 I’m a huge LOTR fan and a huge trivia fan, and this game satisfied both aspects completely!
The questions are very specific, for one thing, which I really enjoy. They’re often taken word for word from Tolkien’s text. And there’s a good range from mildly difficult to bang-your-head-against-the-wall stumpers. Best of all, you can customize the game depending on how skilled the players are! Each question has 4 multiple choice answers, one of which is right and one of which is in brackets. If you want an easy game, you skip the answer in brackets so the person only has 3 answers to choose from. If you want it a little harder, you offer all 4 answers for the person to choose from. And for the real expert, you can just read the question, without giving the possible answers at all… 🙂
There’s also a game board and tokens, if you want to play the actual game instead of just firing questions at each other. 🙂 I’m not usually impressed with game boards for trivia games, because they often seem contrived and pointless, but in this game, they really do quite a good job of recreating the challenges involved in the quest of the book. And it’s illustrated by Ted Nasmith, so it’s visually stunning as well.
You take the role of Frodo, and the game board shows all the major locations you go through on your quest. You have to pay “resource” tokens to move to the next area (fighting tokens, walking tokens, One Ring tokens), and when you get there, you have to answer trivia questions or pay more resources or both. There are also gift tokens, which you can use to counteract the effect of getting a question wrong or having to pay extra resources. Slightly convoluted to explain, but once you’re into the game, it flows very smoothly and is quite intuitive in its rule structure.
If your only exposure to LOTR is the movies, you’re probably in for a frustrating time, because so many of the questions are nit-picky about something that was only mentioned once in the book (i.e. the name of Nimrodel’s lover.) But if you’ve read the books at least once or twice, you’ll enjoy this game a lot. And if you’ve read them more than 4 times, you’ll really enjoy this game a lot. 🙂 HIGHLY recommended, and apparently it’s now available in game stores. It’s certainly made it to the Greater Toronto Area!
Here’s a link to the game-maker’s site. http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/lotrtrivia.html
Cheers!
TorontoStrider
