Kind of a late response, but I wanted to weigh in here since I game with a family of 3 (and sometimes 4) boys, and would guess represent the target audience.
Firstly, we’re all huge LOTR fans. My boys (16,11,8,4) have seen the movies dozens of times. I’ve been a fan of the books since the 80s. We’re also all big board gamers and typically play a game together at least once per week.
Ironically, this board game is one of the first non-mainstream board games we bought 6 or 7 years ago, before my three youngest played. We picked this up in a game store in the mall because of the theme. My eldest and I played a few times, but even then it never really clicked with us.
There it sat, gathering dust, as other games started to accompany it on our ever expanding board game shelf. As it happens, we just recently decided to dust it off. I think this is because one of its most recent companions, war of the ring second edition, is all the rage in the philosophist house right now, and inspired us to play this again.
On the surface it seems to have a lot going for it: it’s coop (great for families), great theme (as mentioned), and good pedigree (knizia is a big name). But this game left us cold. My boys and i were fidgeting before we even left Moria, and we bailed on this game before the end. I haven’t spent the brain cells yet to analyze what happened, but I assume that improvemente in games like pandemic, castle rqvenloft, citadels, pirates cove, small world, war of the ring, memoir 44, etc, have spoiled us.
Maybe this was our gateway board game? Not sure about that, but it definitely was our first non-mainstream board game.
