Yes, we’ve gotten to the point where there are a ton of cooperative Lord of the Rings games! And this makes sense, as the Fellowship is a cooperative collective with a unifying goal! From the smaller Fellowship to the massive Armies to just the two friends Sam and Frodo, the elements of cooperation have long been persistent throughout the Lord of the Rings universe!

There are a lot of games on this list that are very different, but if you like the Lord of the Rings theme, you will likely enjoy all the games on this list! It’s just a question of how complex a game are you looking for? Each entry will also contain BGG’s weight rating to give you a sense of complexity.

Honorable Mention. Similo: Lord of the Rings

Players: 2-5
Plays Solo? No
BGG Weight Rating: 1.06/5.0

Similo is a simple game of trying to imply patterns on cards.  Are you keying of the simple idea of something simple like background color, gender,  or something more specific like the Fellowship or Sauron’s forces?  The cards chosen and cards NOT chosen are supposed to imply “something”; can you and your group figure out what?

This is a light game where we usually play at the end of the night when we want a fun, silly game.  It’s only a honorable mention because you play this without knowing much about LOTR,  but if you get a group really into LOTR, you can key off some really baroque and deep knowledge of the books!

What’s even cooler is that each card has a summary of “what might be relevant” for pattern matching!  This can be a way to learn a little more about LOTR!  See Isildur above, with a little blurb on the side of the card!

 

10. War of the Ring: The Card Game (with Solo and Cooperative Expansion)

Players: 1-4 (But probably best at 4)
Plays Solo?  Yes (but ONLY with expansion)
BGG Weight Rating: 3.47/50

This is #10 on the list for a variety of reasons.  First of all, you need the base game AND the expansion that makes the game solo and cooperative!   Also, the game “feels like” it’s probably best at 4 just because the way the game is constructed; it’s best to have 4 people playing. 

The solo game actually suffers a little from this because there is a LOT of rules and maintenance to play this solo.

But it’s still a pretty neat game!  It captures the feel of Lord of the Rings: War of the Rings (the big epic competitive 2 player game) in a smaller card game!

If you do play it, give yourself time to learn it and absorb it; it’s pretty complicated, and it’s probably best at 4 players.  It’s also the second heaviest game on our list!

9. Lord of the Rings: Dice Building Game

Players: 2-4 
Plays Solo?  Yes (but ONLY if you play 2-Handed)
BGG Weight Rating: 2.19/5.0

So, Lord of the Rings: The Dice Building Game is a retheme of the very popular (at one time) Quarriors dice-building (really, bag-building) game!  This is essentially a deck-building game, but instead of building out a deck of cards, you are building a bag with dice!  

This retheme of Quarriors is really interesting!  First of all, they made Quarriors cooperative by the players banding together to fight Sauron’s forces!  In a different twist, the ring-bearer moves as you play and whomever is the ring-bearer has to “operate” Sauron and his forces for a turn!

This is an older game and little clunky; it seems to need just slightly more tuning and a slightly better rulebook!  But we love Quarriors and we love this retheme and we love that it’s cooperative!  We had a fun time playing this!  If you really wanted a Lord of the Rings deck-building game, this is the probably the closest thing to that!

 

8. Exit: The Game. Lord of the Rings Shadow Over Middle-Earth

 

Players: 1-4
Plays Solo?  Yes (but like most Exit games, it’s better with more brains)
BGG Weight Rating: 2.26/5.0

This was a very interesting experience!  My friend Teresa and I played this over one night! It’s a strange mix of a escape room style game with a Lord of the Rings theme!  Like all Exit games, this is a one-and-done game where the game is all done once you’ve played it!  

And, like all Exit games, you tear-and-rip pieces apart so that the game looks nothing like the original box when you are done!

If you like escape room games and solving puzzles, this is the LOTR game for you!  Just be aware that you can’t play it again once you are done!

 

7. Lord of the Rings: Adventure To Mount Doom

Players: 1-4
Plays Solo?  Yes (you always play the fellowship, either solo or as a group)
BGG Weight Rating: 1.69/5.0

This game is surprisingly good considering it’s a roll-and-move game!  That’s right, roll dice-and-move like the Monopolys and Parker Brothers games of yesteryear!  But you get to choose which dice you take (which still gives you some choice)!

There’s a lot of surprisingly thematic elements in a game that’s only 50 minutes!  It captures the feel of Lord of the Rings pretty well, considering how quick and light it is!

Take a look at our review of Lord Of the Rings Adventures to Mount Doom to see if this is something you might enjoy!

 

6. Lord of the Rings (The Reiner Knizia Game)

Players: 2-5
Plays Solo?  Yes (but ONLY if you play 2 characters)
BGG Weight Rating: 2.19/5.0

This game is an important event in the history of board games; arguably, it’s the first well-known cooperative game!  There had been other cooperative games, but it was this Lord of the Rings by Reiner Knizia that helped put cooperative games on the map!

This is an older game (coming out in 2000) and it feels a little clunky and a little too random by today’s standards.  My game groups jokingly call this “Getting Killed By Sauron” because it’s so hard!  I think I’ve only won it once in all the times I have played!  Adding the Friends and Foes expansion makes the game a little easier and more palatable by adding a “minor victory” condition: Do you go for the easier victory (which only banishes the ring for 1000 years) or do you go for complete victory and bring the ring to Mount Doom?

Admittedly, some of my love for this game is nostalgia, as we have “gotten killed by Sauron” many times over the years.  It shows it’s age a little, it’s a little messy, and it’s very hard, but this is an important game you should try at least once!

 

As we head into the top 5 of the cooperative Lord of the Rings, any of these could be your or someone’s favorite game of all time!  I think any of these could be #1, but we have to put them in some order!

 

5. The Lord of the Rings: Journeys In Middle-Earth

Players: 1-5
Plays Solo?  Yes
BGG Weight Rating: 2.7/5.0

I know people who adore this LOTR game and play it all the time!  It’s basically a retheme of the epic Mansions of Madness game by Fantasy Flight Games!   For some people, this is a lifestyle game and they play it all the time!

There are two things which you will either love or hate: first, the game is controlled by an App!  If you don’t like board games with App integration, you will not like this!  There is, at the time of this writing, quite a bit of content for this!  The second problem some people have is that it’s harder to play “one-off” game; you typically have to have to keep playing a very long campaign!   They did address this issue and added some one-shot mode, but the game is essentially a long campaign with each session taking 3 hours!

If you aren’t scared by the App integration and the longer campaign sessions, this may be exactly the LOTR game you and your group are looking for! 

 

4. Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

Players: 1-4
Plays Solo?  Yes 
BGG Weight Rating: 3.58/5.0

This will shock some people that it’s “only” #4, (#4 will shock you!)  but remember, any of the top 5 games could easily be #1!   This is what’s called a Living Card Game (LCG);  there are small expansions to this, but the expansions aren’t “random”; there are static scenarios that enhance the base game.  The version I have is called The Revised Set (see above) which is currently (at the time of this writing) the most modern and up-to-date in this series, but this game has been around a while, with a 1st edition, the 2nd edition, and the revised core!

People absolutely love this game!  If you have played Marvel Champions, you’ll be surprised how similar LOTR LCG feels to Marvel Champions!  (Of course, LOTR LCG precedes Marvel Champsions by a number of years).  

My friend Teresa (who loves LOTR) and myself (who likes LOTR) played through a few games in the Revised Core set and really enjoyed it!   Like I said, be aware how much content there is for LOTR LCG!  It’s great to know that, if you really like this system, there’s so much more!  It’s also rather daunting!  But I will say they’ve done a good job with that Revised Core set: it’s seems a good place to start to see if you might like this system. And if you do like it … oh boy do you have a lot of content you can get!

This is absolutely a lifestyle game for some people.  Be aware that this is also considered the heaviest of the LOTR games by the BGG weight.

 

3. Lord of the Rings Fate Of The Fellowship

Players: 1-5
Plays Solo?  Yes (but DO NOT play with given solo mode; play 2-handed instead!)
BGG Weight Rating: 3.08/5.0

As I write this, Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship is up for cooperative board game of the year in the BoardGameGeek system!  A lot of people really like this game!  This is an evolution of the Pandemic system.  If you squint at the game, you can see the Pandemic therein (in the card system, naps system, bad news/good new system, etc).

This is a glorious and wonderfully accurate rendition of this world!  I struggled with the game a little because there are more axes of randomness than Pandemic, and I found the built-in solo mode to be less than optimal. (I strongly recommend playing 2-handed over the given solo mode).

But if you love living in this world, the game embraces LOTR whole-heartedly!  This is a good game which can be wrecked a little too easily by randomness, but it’s very thematic and can be very fun.  Some of the fun is learning how the game works, which implies you have to lose a lot.

See our review of Lord of the Rings Fate Of The Fellowship to see if this is something you might enjoy!

2. Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game

Players: 2-4 
Plays Solo?  Yes (it is a weird and different solo mode, but it works!)
BGG Weight Rating: 2.06/5.0

This is the lightest LOTR game in our top 5!  This is the third in a series of Adventure Book games (which started with The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game: see that review here).  As much as we loved that Princess Bride Adventure Book Game, the Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game is easily the best one of the series!

The game has a simple central mechanism, but it works really well!  Players play through scenarios and can choose to stop at anytime and come back (after a few well-taken pictures of the everything!)

The solo mode is weird and different but works really well!  I enjoyed playing the entire series!  And it’s not too heavy!  Like I said, this is the lightest of the LOTR here in the top 5!

The cooperation that emerges in the game is great!  The sharing in LOTR Adventure Book Game is so important!  You have to talk!  You have to strategize together!  It was such a blast playing through this game cooperatively!

Take a look at our review of Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game to see if this is something you might like!  We had such a blast playing this!  It’s simple enough (simpler than most games on our list), but thematic enough to engage you into the campaign!

1. Lord of the Rings: The Trick-Taking Game

Players: 1-4
Plays Solo?  Yes (it’s different solo mode and it works well)
BGG Weight Rating: 2.19/5.0

This game has taken all of my friends and my gaming groups by storm! It was one of the most popular games at RichieCon 2025!  See above!  It was in our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025 AND the Top 10 Solo Games of 2025! 

It was fascinating how well the solo mode worked! See above!  When I was sick over two weeks (sick enough to stay home from work to avoid getting others sick, but well enough that I could still think), I was able to play through this epic series!   It is AMAZING to me that a trick-taking game can be so very thematic!

There’s two versions of this: The Fellowship of the Rings and the Two Towers, with a third one expected at the start of 2027.  There is a campaign here, and you play as much as you want or as little.  My friends in Las Cruces played through the whole campaign in the box in just a few nights, but my Tucson group is slowly playing through it over a few months.  It works either way!

This game completely shocked us at how good and thematic it was!   See our review here to see if this is something you might like.