The Lord of the Rings as Convergent Game Play - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 43

lair, simply because they were not part of the original novel, the game would be
far less fun for those players (and make less sense in the game play overall).
he cooperation mechanic in he Complete Trilogy difers from the one in
LOTR . Indeed, while the majority of the players attempt to cooperate in the
game—a mechanic made obvious through the players' ability to share goods
between characters if they are on the same space—the fact that one player must
play as Sauron and control his dark forces makes the game more competitive.
As the player playing Sauron also has at his or her disposal the ability to control
hordes of diferent enemies spread throughout the board, the competitiveness of
the game is further emphasized as the end of almost every turn results in a battle
between characters. At the same time, moments from the game, especially those
related to the movements of the non-Sauron characters, deepen a feeling of
fellowship as the play commences. On each move, players have the opportunity
to move not only their own character's playing piece, but also a character that
is unclaimed by another player. In other words, on my turn, I could move both
Frodo (who was the character I was playing) and Legolas, Gimli, Boromir,
Faramir, Gandalf, or any of the other characters that were not being played by
my friends.
his multicharacter turn allows the play to commence in a cooperative
fashion: as a group we could decide to move Legolas (whom no one was oicially
playing) closer to particular enemies; Legolas's unique power is that he can
attack enemies up to four spaces away from him. Collectively, those of us on
the Fellowship side were able to make use of this particular skill on each turn,
defeating Sauron's forces as each player moved.
he result of this multiple movement, however, is that characters end up
scattered across the board in ways that deviate so completely from the trajectory
of the ilms' narratives, they seem to follow a completely new story, one cocreated
by the players themselves. 53 While Legolas may be in the Dead Marshes killing
Orcs (a place he never approached in the ilm), Gimli the dwarf may spend
many of his turns unused in Mirkwood, a location the character would avoid.
Even Boromir can survive for the entirety of the game! Such deviance from the
original ilm again coheres the players with the game. Like the ilm, the game
ofers characters a chance to explore Middle-earth in diferent paths. It is entirely
possible, then, for players that play he Complete Trilogy to attempt to replicate
the cinematic characters' journeys exactly. It is possible to emulate Frodo, Sam,
and Gollum's journey to Mount Doom; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli's light to
track the Uruk-hai as they hope to rescue Merry and Pippin from the evil Orcs;