Pyramid: Pyramid Review: Sauron Expansion (for The Lord of the Rings Boardgame)

Pyramid Review

Sauron Expansion (for The Lord of the Rings Boardgame)

Published by Fantasy Flight Games

Designed by Reiner Knizia

Illustrated by John Howe

$24.95

A postulate, humbly submitted:

There are two types of gamers in this world: those who love the Lord of the Rings boardgame and those who hate it. (Never played it? Never heard of it? That's okay -- you still love or hate it on a theoretical level. You just don't know it yet.) All right, maybe nothing is so unambiguously polarizing, but if anything is, it's probably as unconventional, unprecedented, and unique as Fantasy Flight's purely cooperative boardgame based on Tolkein's magnum opus. The Sauron expansion for The Lord of the Rings will likely be just as polarizing for the boardgaming audience, but not in the way one might expect. The Sauron expansion makes a cooperative boardgame competitive, scripted events more unpredictable, and a friendly (though challenging) experience doubly harrowing.

To start with, though, there are probably a few things everyone can agree on about the Sauron expansion. Like the first expansion for The Lord of the Rings -- called Friends & Foes -- it is ingeniously integrated into a core game that, on its own, is carefully crafted, finely tuned, and strikingly elegant. The central mechanic of the expansion is this: there is an added player who, instead of taking the role of one of five Hobbits, plays Sauron himself, the great enemy that in the basic game is . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.

Article publication date: October 31, 2003

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