There have been an enormous number of tabletop adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but few capture the story so well and in such an accessible fashion as Bryan Bornmueller’s The Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking Game. A version based on The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 2024, and it sees players work together with limited information to fulfill missions based on the book’s biggest moments.
Bornmueller continued the series by releasing the equally excellent The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game in January, and the trilogy will conclude with The Return of the King in February 2027. Bornmueller’s a lifelong fan of the series. His dad read him The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when he was young, and the comic book store he worked at while attending Iowa State University organized midnight showings of Peter Jackson’s films.
When Reiner Knizia’s The Lord of the Rings game was released in 2000, Bornmueller stayed up all night trying to save Middle-earth. After graduation, he went to work at board game publisher Asmodee, starting as a senior sales associate and rising to the role of innovation and sourcing director, where he works with studios to develop new board and card games. Asmodee wanted more games based on Tolkien, like the app-supported campaign game Journeys in Middle-Earth and The Lord of the Rings living card game, so Bornmueller decided to try his hand at designing his own.
For inspiration, he looked to the trick-taking card games he played growing up. These included Hearts and Doppelkopf, which he learned from a German exchange student, along with Thomas Sing’s The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, which turned each round of cards into a mission. When I played it with gamers who played a lot of card games, it worked really well.
When I taught normal people, those 10 options were too much.” Bornmueller realized he needed some sort of intro scenario to ease players in, so he decided to start the game with the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. From there, he realized he could break the entire series into chapters that would play out through rounds of the game, slowly introducing new characters with their own abilities and win conditions. He teamed up with Taylor Reiner, who runs a YouTube channel devoted to trick-taking games, to develop The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game and started work on The Two Towers as soon as they were done.
Knizia’s The Lord of the Rings was the first collaborative board game Bornmueller remembers playing, kindling a love for the genre. But the limited information aspect of a trick-taking game transforms the experience of working together. There can’t just be one smart friend who solves the puzzle for everyone.
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