I'm not generally a trivia game nut, but I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan ... so picking up this one was a no brainer, despite being generally leery of the genre. And generally, I have to admit, I was very pleasently surprised.

The general idea is you have to get from Bag End to Mordor, overcoming obstacles in the way by answering trivia questions (which I'm sure you would not have guessed ). You have three resources to accomplish this task, Travelling, Fighting, and Ring disks. Each step along the way requires you to spend a certain combination of these resources, and then overcome a challenge - typically, just answering one question, either easy, medium, or hard. Each question has a resource reward for getting it right, and the neat thing is that you get to choose what stakes you are playing for - the back of each card has three lines showing various resources, usually 3 of either Fighting or Travelling, 2 of the other, and one ring (although there are variations). You pick which one you want to go for, and if you get it right, you collect the reward and may continue your turn, advancing further if you have the right combinations of resources to continue, or resting. If you don't, you move back to the square from which you started the turn (or to the most recent haven, if you moved a long way), losing the resources you paid to move, and your turn is over.

The neat part is that many of the more memorable locations (Weathertop, Rivendell, Moria, Cirith Ungol, etc.) are not simple questions, but have stacks of tiles which you must work your way through. These typically require answering harder questions, and have a nasty 'danger ahead' feature - if you correctly answer the question for a 'danger ahead' tile, you get no reward, and must continue to draw from the deck - so surviving these challenges can involve getting 2, 3, or even 4 questions right in a row; given that you are likely to get one pretty tough question in there, this can be a challenge. These are actually nicely thematic, in a minimalist kind of way - so at Moria, you may get a Cave Troll (medium question, danger ahead!), followed by some Orcs (easy question, danger ahead!), follower by the Balrog (hard question, and you're done). A nice sense of risk and accomplishment. Some tiles also have printed resource penalties, which if you can't pay, you lose the challenge and must retreat as if you had missed the question. To offset this, the friendlier locations like Rivendell and Lothlorien have tiles that you may keey and will help you out later, like Gandalf, Elven Boats, Flaming Brand, etc., which have special abilities such as allowing you to automatically defeat a challenge once the question has been read, voiding resource costs associated with a tile, voiding the cost of moving, etc.

The final gameplay item of note is that whenever you choose to rest (i.e., you voluntarily end your turn without having failed a challenge), you get to roll a special die which will grant you some combination of resources. So while you have to answer questions right to keep moving, you can acquire resources simply by passing your turn.

I kind of liked the resource management aspect of the game. It's not rocket science, so to speak, but it does have a surprisingly nice flavor - getting past Moria is a real challenge, the Weathertop site is a tough one early, and the later spots like Cirith Ungol and Mt Doom have very high costs of moving and very difficult stacks of tiles. You can use Rings as wildcards for Travelling or Fighting resources, but this is a tough choice as later movement costs and challenge tiles are very Ring-heavy, and Rings are hard to acquire. You need to plan your resource acquisition, and this makes the game more than just a trivia-fest. You still can't win if you don't know any Lord of the Rings, but players who know a lot can still lose if they screw up the resource management bits or if they manage their risks poorly.

Now, finally, we come to the big part of the game - of course, the questions. Each card has three questions, and each question can be asked in a way that makes it easy, medium, or hard. Easy, the player gets to choose which stakes to play for, and the reader asks the matching question which has a multiple-choice answer, and 3 choices to select from. Medium, and a fourth choice (in italics for the reader, so he knows which one to exclude for easy questions) is included. Hard, and the reader gets to select which of the three questions on the card to ask at medium level of difficulty.

This multiple-choice aspect is nice, as it decreases the frustration level sometimes associated with these games when you have absolutely no idea, and gives you a fighting chance without generally making things too easy. Plus, making educated guesses can keep you engaged when you otherwise might be clueless - for example, in a recent game a question came up about the Woses and the Riders of Rohan, and I could narrow it down to two choices, Stone-Wain Valley and Rock Cart Valley - which of course mean the same thing, but one can deduce which is the name that Tolkien would have used. YMMV on this point, but I liked it.

As for the difficulty of the questions, this was of some concern to me. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable on things Tolkien, and after a cursory glance at a half-dozen cards before beginning, I was concerned that the questions were too easy. This turned out not to be the case - there were plenty I was making educated guesses for, and a few I had absolutely no idea on - although not so many as to be frustrating, and I breezed through many. The more difficult ones were things like Eowyn's eye color, the aforementioned name of the valley the Woses led the Riders through, the location of Orcrist during the War of the Ring, a Pukel-Men question, the date of the new year post-Sauron, etc. There were also some ludicrously easy ones, though, ones that anyone who was semi-concious during a reading of Lord of the Rings 10 years ago should get - what was Gollum's nickname for the Ring, who was tasked with taking the Ring to Mt. Doom, etc. Sometimes the ease was associated with a weak selection of multiple choice answers; for example, I recall one answer for the question "when Aragorn said he was as weary as he had every been, what was the reason" was "a hard night of caraousing with Halbarad", with the other two non-answers being only slightly less implausible (although this level of obviousness occurred only once or twice). Nice that they chose a real Ranger of the North, though. Several moderately difficult questions could actually be answered through a fairly easy process of elimination. I found that maybe a bit less than a quarter of the questions seemed a bit easy to me (again, given I'm pretty knowledgeable on the subject), and maybe only 5% were of trivial difficulty. The real good news, though, is that none of the questions were pedantic or tedious - they were all interesting questions, with no "trick" questions (although a couple were tricky). Also, all of them were on point, so to speak - no general questions on JRR Tolkien's life, nothing on the books themselves, nothing relating to the movies specifically, nothing from the Silmarillion (or god forbid the many other books published by his son Christopher), and I haven't even run into anything from the appendicies yet - it's all from The Lord of the Rings proper, and very ocasionally the Hobbit. The only First & Second age stuff to make it in seems to be as explicitly referenced in the songs that are in Lord of the Rings. The authors have not done anything to go out of their way to make the questions gratuitously hard. For me, this is what I want.

This wouldn't be complete without the usual disclaimer, that this is a trivia game, and that means that being competitive is about knowing details about Tolkien. This should go without saying, but it's worth mentioning that while there is enough stuff in there with turning chits and managing resources that players can simply have fun with the game, players with the greater knowledge of Tolkien will have a huge advantage; and this means reading the books. Just having seen the movies will not be enough for at least two thirds of the questions, even discounting anything that applies to the Return of the King at this point.

Anyway, bottom line, I liked it and and look forward to playing again. I look forward to matching wits with the local Tolkien afficienados. It seems to me much more fundamentally sound than other trivia games I've played (not nearly as large a list as for general boardgames, admittedly), and I think it will not be nearly as daunting as, say, Trivial Pursuit to players whose knowledge is not as vast. My opinion is almost certainly colored to some degree by the fact that I have the requisite knowledge and so this is a game I am likely to be good at, so take that into account. But, if you are a Lord of the Rings fan and have read the books recently, this is definitely one to check out - I think they have done a very good job at targetting this at the level of the general Tolkien fan, rather than seriously Tolkien-immersed.

A final note, I've been considering a slightly different "handicapped" scale for easy, medium, and hard questions for more knowledgeable players. As it is now, easy is multiple choice with 3 answers, medium is multiple choice with 4 answers, and hard is just medium, but the reader chooses the question. For advanced players, I had considered increasing the difficulty of all questions by one level - with the new "extra-hard" being reader's choice, and the player must provide the answer - no multiple choice. Worth considering, I think.