The Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom Board Game Review
The Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom is much more about the journey you are on and making it thematically relevant than it is on providing deep strategy. In a cooperative, family weight Lord of the Rings experience, I think that is more than OK. You’ll be guiding your group of adventurers all the way from Rivendell to Mordor to destroy the one ring, avoiding the Nazgul and the Uruk-Hai along the way. Card will be played, dice will be rolled, but will destroy the one ring to rule them all?
Kosmos, the publisher behind this The Lord of the Rings adventure, has this to say about the game:
Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom is fraught with peril. Luckily, his loyal friends protect him on his way. With a clever choice of dice, players work together to move the figures across the gameboard. Will Frodo reach Mount Doom? In this cooperative fantasy board game, players will win — or lose — together.
Players will work to guide Frodo to Mount Doom in this adventure. The gameboard is broken down into seven regions that you will travel through, with each region looking absolutely gorgeous detailed on the board. You’ll begin in Rivendell with the fellowship all together, and will slowly work your way through the various regions by working together cooperatively.
Each region has a small deck of cards that will influence how you work your way through said region, and these cards will be placed at the bottom of the gameboard in six slots; one additional card, which provides the game a little bit of change each time you play, won’t be used for this adventure. Then players roll the dice and move characters. Specific die colours are associated with specific characters. From the pool of rolled dice you will end up with two character dice and two encounter dice; encounter dice will add foes to your game, like wargs, orc hordes, or even popular enemies like Saruman.
There is some rerolling you will do to give your team some control on outcomes, but ultimately you will end up moving characters the number of pips shown on their character dice, and doing the encounter cards on the bottom of the board based on the encounter numbers rolled. Some of these encounters will be battles, and only characters on a space with Frodo and Sam, or ahead of Frodo and Sam, can fight. Roll well enough with the attack die – matching a character symbol who is eligible to fight, and you win. If you can’t do that, you lose and move the one ring down the track towards defeat. As you move across the regions, you might also land on Nazgul spaces, which makes you add Nazgul to the Minas Morgul track – fill that track and you lose!
What I like about this game is the theme, and how well it comes across. As you enter regions, you might get access to allies, which can provide some serious benefits to you while they are part of the game. Of course as you move on from a region, these allies go away, but it’s fun to use their powers to help you reroll dice, remove Nazgul, and more. Again, the theme really works here as you won’t have access to characters in places you wouldn’t expect. For example, in Rohan you will get access to Eowyn, but once you leave, so to does her benefit.
As much as I enjoy playing this with my kids and more casual gamers, there are a few things to note here. There is quite a bit of randomness and luck. You can roll so poorly you just lose, and those that love a heavily strategic experience are not going to find that here. Further, this game is prime for the Alpha-Gamer to step up and control the game. There are ways to mitigate this by not allowing players to influence what someone else does on their turn, but that also removes some of the cooperative aspects of the game that my group really enjoyed.
Either way, I think this is a great cooperative experience, but one that is obviously tailored to The Lord of the Rings fans. If you want something in this genre, though, and have a group that enjoys lighter game experiences, this is a really great thematic journey!
Article By Adam
