I played the Lord of the Rings board game (the big one by Reiner Knizia) for the first time in a couple of years yesterday. We started with Sauron on 15 (the easiest “difficult level”) because one of our players had never won before and ended up winning with no casualties. Had he started on 12 (“normal”) we would have taken a casualty but still prevailed. On 10, probably not.

As you’ll see if you read the reviews on BoardGameGeek, people are pretty hotly divided on the LotR board game. And with good reason. In many ways, it’s more of a group activity than a game, kind of like The Forehead Game or Telephone Pictionary.

It’s cooperative but it’s noninteractive. A cooperative game brings people together, which is cool. People like playing in teams with friends. Part of the draw of playing the game is the chance to hang out with your friends. On the other hand, there’s very little interaction between players—you move the same markers and have a couple chances to trade cards around or use them on each other. Having an extra player or one less doesn’t really matter at all.

It’s tense and challenging but you might as well be playing Solitaire. Given that all the players are working together against the game, the game had better pose a challenge; and it delivers. I’d be surprised if even one group in 10 manages to win their first game. Once players work out the strategy, it goes much better. One problem is that the strategy isn’t all intuitive. If one player is very familiar with the game, he’s likely to try to command the entire team, much to the frustration of everyone else (who resent being told what to do at every step, especially when it doesn’t make sense) and himself (who is frustrated by the many ultimately destructive plays). The rule that forbids you from showing your hand to the other players is a Band-Aid for this artery wound.

The theme is excellent but the game wouldn’t stand on its own without it. The Lord of the Rings is modern literature familiar to pretty much everyone, especially gamers, and popular with many. The game feels faithful in mood and pacing to the books, and the art is (mostly) great. On the other hand, my sense is that without the Lord of the Rings logo and Knizia’s name, nobody would give the game a second thought.

The “competitive” game is painful. Ostensibly, although everyone wins when Sauron is defeated, you count your shields up at the end to determine the winner. I’ve never seen this done. If even one player is willing to play badly just for the chance to pick up some more shields, the forces of good are doomed; if that doesn’t happen, the “winner” will be the player who doesn’t happen to need to toss in his shields for events, hiring Gandalf, or whatever’s necessary. As a result, I’ve never seen shields counted. It may be the real point of the game is proving that there’s “no ‘I’ in ‘team’”, but that removes the last factor that might have added a little spice to the game.