There have been an enormous number of tabletop adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendary fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, but few capture the emotional weight and narrative scope of the story quite as well—or in such an accessible fashion—as Bryan Bornmueller’s acclaimed The Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking Game. A version based on The Fellowship of the Ring was originally published in 2024, inviting players to work together using limited information to fulfill specific missions based on the literary classic’s most monumental moments. Bornmueller successfully expanded the series with the equally well-received The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game in January, and the acclaimed trilogy will officially reach its emotional conclusion with the release of The Return of the King Trick-Taking Game in February 2027.
The journey to bring the final chapter to the tabletop has been a deeply personal labor of love for its designer, who has spent years fine-tuning the mechanics to ensure they honor both Tolkien’s written word and Peter Jackson’s iconic cinematic adaptation. The emotional resonance of the final box in the trilogy, in particular, is something Bornmueller highlights as one of his proudest professional accomplishments.
“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 the Spiel Essen convention.
Bornmueller’s deep affinity for Middle-earth stretches back to his childhood. His father read him The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when he was young, laying the groundwork for a lifelong fandom. Years later, while attending Iowa State University, he worked at a local comic book store that organized midnight showings of Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking film trilogy. When Reiner Knizia’s landmark The Lord of the Rings cooperative board game was released in 2000, Bornmueller stayed up all night trying to save Middle-earth alongside fellow fans. After graduating from college, he launched a career in the tabletop industry, joining board game publisher Asmodee as a senior sales associate. He steadily rose through the ranks to become the company’s innovation and sourcing director, a role that involves working closely with internal and external studios to develop new board and card games.
Asmodee had a strong desire to expand its catalog of games rooted in Tolkien’s universe, supplementing titles like the app-supported campaign game Journeys in Middle-Earth and The Lord of the Rings living card game. Recognizing an opening in the market, Bornmueller decided to try his hand at designing his own unique take on the franchise. For gameplay inspiration, he naturally looked to the trick-taking card games that he had played growing up and throughout his adult life. These included traditional favorites like Hearts and Doppelkopf—the latter of which he learned from a German exchange student—alongside modern cooperative hits like Thomas Sing’s The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, a game renowned for turning each individual round of cards into a high-stakes cooperative mission.
“My original idea was going to be like the moment when the Fellowship leaves Rivendell,” Bornmueller recalled. “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.”
Faced with this early design hurdle, Bornmueller realized he needed a more gradual onboarding process. He needed some sort of introductory scenario to gently ease players into the complex web of rules and cooperative dependencies. He ultimately decided to start the game at the very beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. From there, a broader design epiphany struck: he could break the entire sweeping narrative into individual chapters that would play out across sequential rounds of card-based gameplay, slowly introducing new characters with their own distinct abilities and win conditions over the course of the campaign.
To bring this ambitious vision to life, he teamed up with Taylor Reiner, who runs a popular YouTube channel dedicated entirely to trick-taking games. Together, they developed The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game, and Bornmueller immediately set to work on The Two Towers installment as soon as the first project wrapped up.
“It was one of those ideas that you have and then spend multiple years trying to actually pull off,” he reflected.
Knizia’s classic The Lord of the Rings cooperative game was the first of its kind that Bornmueller could remember playing, effectively cementing his lifelong love for cooperative tabletop experiences. However, he found that introducing the specific limitations of a trick-taking game fundamentally transforms the psychological and social dynamics of working together as a team. In traditional cooperative games, a single experienced or analytical player can sometimes quietly take the reins and solve the puzzle on behalf of the group, leaving others feeling like passive participants. Trick-taking mechanics change that dynamic entirely by restricting open communication and hidden card information.
“Everyone has to be trying all the time,” Bornmueller 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.”
True to his design philosophy, Bornmueller delights in creating tactical challenges that initially appear almost impossible to beat. The game demands that players strategize how they might make a scenario work before they even see the specific cards dealt to their hands. To achieve this level of fidelity, he conducted deep research into Tolkien’s legendarium, closely rereading the books and listening to exhaustive textual analysis on The Prancing Pony Podcast. His goal was to meticulously break down every major character and pivotal moment, figuring out how to translate their narrative essence directly into mechanics. For instance, a casual note during his research observing that “Treebeard plays slow” organically evolved into a core rule where the player controlling the ancient Ent must always act a full turn behind everyone else, setting aside the specific card that will be played on the subsequent trick.
Following the foundation laid by the first box, The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game introduced the White and Black Towers as dueling trump cards to reflect the escalating conflict of the war. Now, The Return of the King introduces a brand-new crown mechanic that is explicitly utilized for exchanging cards between players. Instead of trading cards directly back and forth to sculpt their ideal hands, participants must place cards under the crown and symbolically kneel to the king in order to acquire them.
These mechanics remain tightly intertwined with the characters’ respective narrative arcs throughout the final novel. Pippin, who joins Aragorn’s army in defense of the realm, is tasked with winning tricks by using a card that precisely matches whatever has been placed under the crown. Denethor, the beleaguered steward of Gondor, starts with a special king card that functions as the highest-value card of any suit, but he is forced to give it away because he is merely the caretaker of Gondor rather than its true, rightful ruler.
The first third of The Return of the King Trick-Taking Game focuses heavily on the tense build-up to the legendary Battle of Minas Tirith. Each chapter introduces fresh cards and rules that ultimately converge into a massive, cooperative trial. The experience reaches its emotional climax with the destruction of the One Ring, after which the game transitions into a series of multiple possible endings, granting the overarching saga not just an epic tactical conclusion, but the poignant, bittersweet farewells found in Tolkien’s written work and Jackson’s celebrated cinematic 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 concluded. “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 is scheduled to receive a limited pre-release at PAX Unplugged and select U.S. hobby game stores in December, ahead of its wider commercial release in February 2027.
