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.
“My proudest achievement with this game is I had multiple playtest groups tell me that they teared up a little bit when they played the last chapter, especially people who have played for a few years together,” Bornmueller told Polygon in an interview at Spiel Essen.
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.
“My original idea was going to be like the moment when the Fellowship leaves Rivendell,” Bornmueller said. “There are 10 characters, and you just play two or three hands and you see how it goes. You win or you lose. 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.
“It was one of those ideas that you have and then spend multiple years trying to actually pull off,” he said.
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.
“Everyone has to be trying all the time,” he said. “It makes it a little less casual than it could be, but I think it really adds to people’s engagement. There can’t just be one smart friend who solves the puzzle for everyone. We all have to understand how to solve this puzzle.”
Bornmueller delights in creating challenges that seem almost impossible to beat, requiring players to strategize how they could make it work before they even see the cards that they’re dealt. He did deep research into The Lord of the Rings, closely reread the books, and listened to analysis on The Prancing Pony Podcast to break down all the key characters and moments — and figure out how to translate them into game mechanics. For example, a note that “Treebeard plays slow” turned into a rule where the ent’s player always acts a turn behind, setting aside the card that will be played on the next trick.
The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game introduced the White and Black Towers as dueling trump cards, while The Return of the King adds a new crown mechanic that’s used to exchange cards. Instead of trading cards directly with other players to sculpt their hands, players will place cards under the crown and kneel to the king to take them.
The game’s mechanics are tightly intertwined with the book’s character arcs. Pippin, who joins Aragorn’s army, has to win tricks with a card matching whatever’s been placed under the crown. Denethor, the steward of Gondor, starts with a special king card that serves as the highest value card of any suit, but needs to give it away because he is Gondor’s caretaker, not its ruler. The first third of The Return of the King Trick-Taking Game focuses on the build-up to the battle of Minas Tirith, with each chapter introducing new cards and rules that come together in a big battle. It reaches its climax with Frodo destroying the One Ring, and then there are numerous endings, giving the saga not just an epic conclusion but the emotional farewells found in Tolkien’s work and Jackson’s brilliant adaptation.
“You can’t have absolutely everything in The Lord of the Rings in the game, but you just need to evoke the feeling of experiencing the story,” Bornmueller said. “People know so much about The Lord of the Rings, and you can leverage all of that knowledge and feeling with the game mechanics where it makes sense. It’s not generic fantasy. It’s kind of its own thing. The more it feels like D&D, the less it probably feels like it’s working.”
The Return of the King Trick-Taking Game will have a limited pre-release at PAX Unplugged and select U.S. game stores in December ahead of a wider release in February 2027.