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

Posted in:

• Old Special Reports

Share:

Rob Daviau from Hasbro Games recently responded to a post on Usenets Rec.games.board inquiring about a Lord of the Rings RISK expansion pack. This is what he had to say:

“Sorry to disappoint you but it will NOT be a two-player expansion.
The new game will replace the game on shelf. It will have two more panels to the game to incorporate Gondor and Mordor. It will have a third deck of territory/adventure cards. It has a totally rewritten rulebook. It has new rules for “Alliance Play” and “Team Play”. It cleans up confusion on the cards. It clarifies rules in the game. It contains more pieces to account for the larger number of spaces.

The only thing I have not been able to do is figure out to get just
the pieces you need if you already own the first version. Unfortunately, you would need:
The new board
The new rulebook
The third card deck
All the pieces again (since they are bagged in one bag, we can’t just send the extras)

Then I realized that you need the first two card decks since the copy has been clarified and modified. Then I realized that the card backs will be blue, not red, so you need all three decks. (The blue is keeping with the ROTK style guide and to ensure that the correct decks are put in the game on the assembly line.)

I also realized that the vacuum-formed tray is different to account
for the larger number of pieces and cards.

So the only thing that carries over is the ring and the dice. Everything else is significantly new.

So it is a re-release. On shelf in December.”

Posted in:

• Old Special Reports

Share:

One of the stars of the Lord Of The Rings films is preparing to make his Edinburgh International Festival debut. Billy Boyd, who plays Pippin in the films, is to appear on stage in the play San Diego. It opens at the Royal Lyceum Theatre today for a limited run over the weekend. [More]

Posted in:

• Old Main News

Share:

Ever want to see Peter Jackson’s version of The Hobbit a little too badly? [More]

Posted in:

• Old Main News

Share:

Much of the success for the Lord of the Rings trailer campaigns can be attributed to the great musical cues used in each trailer.

The first Web-only preview for ‘Fellowship of the Ring’, assembled by The Cimarron Group and downloaded more than a million times the first day it appeared on www.lordoftherings.net, boasted a Middle-earth-shattering cue fashioned after Karl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’, a piece called “Gothic Power” by Christopher Field. (The same music was used in the final theatrical trailer and various tv spots).

‘The Two Towers’ trailer then used another original reorchestration, this time by Dan Nielsen based on Clint Mansell’s “Requiem for a Dream” score.

Posted in:

• Old Special Reports

Share:

Jen the Hobbit writes: Every Saturday evening, a film will be shown on the silver screen at the Piazza (Downtown Renton), located on South 3rd Street between Burnett Avenue South and Logan Avenue South. TTT is playing this Saturday night at dusk. Prior to every film, a band will perform to entertain and warm-up the crowd. There will also be food, soft drinks and popcorn available for purchase.

Posted in:

• Old Main News

Share: