Exit the Game: The Lord of the Rings: Shadows Over Middle-earth designed by Inka and Marcus Brand and published by Kosmos
Gandalf the Grey has chosen you to help out a small band of Hobbits on a special mission. You're job is simple--distract the forces of evil while Frodo Baggins sneaks his way off to where ever it is Gandalf has sent him. Hmm...maybe it's not so simple. But it is exciting.
The game has the usual contents--instruction manual, decks of cards, game journal, and a lot of random items. Like other Exit Games, players work their way through puzzles one at a time, using a page of the journal, some cards, and some objects to find a code that shows you've found the correct solution.
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| Spoiler-free look at the contents |
Each puzzle has the players making notes on the back of a map of Middle Earth, building up to a final puzzle. The puzzles run the usual gamut from easy to difficult and we only used a hint once because it was one of those "look at things from a certain angle" puzzles that we find tedious because we can never quite get the right angle from which to look. Rather than spend way too much time trying to get it right and certainly getting frustrated, we looked at the hint card. The puzzles do move away from the initial theme of distracting the bad guys at some points which was noticeable but not distracting. It's Lord of the Rings, after all. Who doesn't want to fix the shards of Narsil or use the beacons to alert Rohan.
As a side note, we were missing some components which we only discovered in mid-play. Two of the punch-boards for mysterious items were not in the box! The Kosmos website was easy to navigate and request replacement parts. They came in less than a week! That was a very pleasant experience.
We had a good time playing this. As usual, we didn't time ourselves since we play these for the fun of the puzzles, not the speed score. A good time was had by all.
Recommended, highly for Lord of the Rings fans.
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