TORn Staffer Ostandan recently spotted this post from someone who works for Hasbro on the usenet group rec.games.board about what’s happening with Risk for Return of the King.
Subject: Re: Attn Rob D.: LOTR Risk news Newsgroups: rec.games.board
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.
Hugh Hancock, the Artistic Director at Strange Company recently sent us an email about the ‘movies’ in the Two Towers Playstation game:
‘We’ve got something kinda unique for you: “games from films” site Machinima.com reviews not the gameplay but the “movies” in the Two Towers Playstation game.
Machinima.com is a site focused on movie-making in computer game engines. In this review, we’re looking at the way that the game blends between real footage from the Lord of the Rings movies and the “Machinima” footage from the game – Lord of the Rings moments created inside the PS2’s graphics engine.
Here’s an excerpt:
“As far as how it stands as an extension to the films, “Two Towers” does digress from the plot of the films at times, in order to fit in more battles, but is otherwise fairly faithful. The “flashback” plot mechanism is very nice, and gives the game a subtly different story arc, but the game creators do occasionally seem to be struggling to find enough action from the films to fill out their game. However, there’s nothing that really stands out as blatantly changing the story or feel of things, Gandalf’s use of very “computer game” magic in one of the levels and the “Suicide Bomber Orc” characters notwithstanding.”‘
[Ardan Nights] is a project which is dedicated to bringing a Middle-earth, that strictly adheres to Tolkien’s works, to Neverwinter Nights.
The project has been running for over four years. And progress has steadily been made. We hope to go live with our first module, Bree-land before the end of the Summer.
Bree-land encompasses the areas of Bree and the surrounding lands, including the Barrow Downs, South Downs, Old Forest, Midgewater and the Weather Hills. This comprises of roughly 151 16×16 areas and also 164 interiors.
But this is not all, that we have accomplished in the last year since NWN was released, major customisations have been made to the engine, with our own set of classes and races and replacing the NWN magic system with our system of Songs. There has been other custom content made ranging from a complete selection of new PC heads, relevant monsters and creatures from Middle-earth to a new tileset.
We are dedicated to an all encompassing Role-playing environment, so our work is not only geared to the adventurers, much work has gone into more “normal” professions in Middle-earth, including craftsmen and farmers.
We recently relaunched our website with a completely new design, which is hopefully easier to navigate and easier for a visitor to find the relevant information that they may be looking for.
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
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.
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.
