Lord of the Rings Risk

You may recall a few posts back I mentioned that the family had played a game of Lord of the Rings (LOTR here after) Risk.  This got me thinking about the possibilities LOTR Risk offers.  Of course the game itself is great fun as written but the board is just screaming out to be used for a campaign of some sort.  If this sparks an interest in obtaining a copy of the game, I don't think it is available new any longer and a quick trawl through the net showed a number of different versions of the game for sale second hand, some at really rather silly prices.

The box (apologies for the poor image )

Lets start with a look at the game as written.  Opening the box finds a good quality hard backed game board, the traditional five dice two black (Defence) and three red (attack).  The playing pieces are cast in a hard (but potentially brittle) plastic.  These are in denominations of one, three and five 'battalions'.  The rules are printed in a full colour booklet and are easy to understand.  The only unclear point is with regard to sea lane attacks, but more on that later.

The game map

The map covers all of those areas of Middle Earth that feature in the books plus a couple that are simply hinted at or just shown on maps.  Apparently some early versions did not include all of the areas from the book (I think it didn't have the southern part of the map).  Thankfully I have the later edition, there was an expansion made to to extend the map for owners of the early version  but whether that is available any longer I don't know.  Like traditional Risk it is divided into regions which if a player controls the entirety of  provide bonus re-enforcements each turn.  Unlike the real world map used in normal Risk there are no easy to defend 'continents'.  The regions bordering the board corners are the nearest to safe area but there are sea lanes that allow attacks on them.  Some borders between regions are uncrossable (mountains and major rivers) although bridges do allow crossings of rivers you need a special event card to pass through a mountain range.  There are also strong holds such as Mordor and places of power such as Weathertop in a few regions.

The playing pieces the top set are 'Evil' bottom are 'Good'

There are four armies, two good and two evil so this limits the game to a maximum of four players.  There are also two leader pieces for each army who provide bonuses to combat dice rolls and can also obtain event cards if they meet certain requirements such as being present when places of power are captured. There are two packs of cards rather than the traditional one.  The first are the event cards these give special bonuses to movement or combat when played, the second are more like the traditional risk cards marked with a region, and a troop type.  They also have good or evil status noted for the region which comes into play in the deployment stage.  Other than that these cards are collected and traded in for re-enforcements just as in standard Risk. 

Deployment has a nice twist built in.  Each player gets a starting allocation of troops (45 'battalions' in the four player game).  The deployment cards are then sorted so those showing a good or evil affiliation are withdrawn from the pack .  The two good players get half of the 'good' regions drawn at random and the evil players the same from the evil side of the deck.  They then place one 'battalion in each region they have been dealt.  This creates a deployment that puts good forces in good area and vice versa for bad.  Next those cards are retuned to the deck which is shuffled and set aside, the pack plays no further part in deployment.  Instead each player in turn places one 'battalion' in an unoccupied region until all areas are claimed.  After that they continue going round the players re-enforcing regions already held by their army until all the allocated troops are deployed.  I rather liked this mechanism.

The game is now played pretty much in the normal way.  The only differences being that leaders grouped with an army give a bonus on attack or defence dice rolls and event cards can be played on the holding players turn to effect re-enforcements, combat or movement.  Traditional Risk might have similar options for all I know, my copy is from the 1960's and doesn't have there bells and whistles!  Sea lanes are more threatening than in original risk as they allow rear areas to be attacked.  The rules are unclear as to whether only one step along a sea lane is allowed or as my son insisted they allow movement past multiple ports.  Personally I prefer a single port to the next port hop and no further. 

There is one final twist the game has a limited but variable number of turns.  This is controlled by the progress of the One Ring along a path from the Shire to Mount Doom.  In most cases the ring moves forward one region along the path at the end of each player turn, but some zones are hard to leave and require a dice roll of better than three on a D6 to move on.  On average I calculate that each player would get four or five turns before the ring is cast into the fires of Mount Doom.  At that point victory is calculated by looking at the number of regions, strongholds and places of power held and completion of any quests thrown up by the event cards.  All in all a nice little game.

As I said at the start of the post the map would be really good for running a campaign on.  The obvious one being a LOTR fantasy game.  I would probably do that by playing the game as written for map movement and fighting any resulting battles as a table top game.  Still I suppose I should finish the Dark Age campaign first, after all I have only been messing about with that since the 1970's!