Not only is Rainer Knizia by far the most prolific board game designer in the hobby, but The Hobbit: There and Back Again isn't even his first (or second or third) game based on a Tolkien book for children. At first there was game 2010 where players were the hobbit's dwarf companions, helping him on his adventures and trying to escape with as much gold as possible. This was followed by two co-op games in 2013. None of them were particularly well received, especially considering how many of Knizia's games can be considered the best games of all time. So now he was back for his fourth meal at the spacious hobbit table with a completely new design.
What's in the box
The actual contents of the box are very simple. There are four large fold-out albums with dry-erase pages and an accompanying marker, one for each player. The books are a fantastic idea, they're sturdy bound and much more convenient than the mess of disjointed game sheets that dominate dry cloth games. You also get a standard 12-sided die and five custom-printed six-sided dice with different shapes and symbols. Finally, there's a sheet of tokens representing the various resources you can collect on your adventures: bread, swords, and, in a completely unnecessary reference to a famous scene from the book, pine cones.
What's more interesting to discuss is the art style. Interpretations of Tolkien tend to be meticulous and detailed, as befits the rich setting he created. But The Hobbit was originally intended to be a children's book, separate from the legendarium he created in his spare time: his inclusion in these invented myths came later. And that seems to be the inspiration for the illustrations here: chunky, cartoonish, and sometimes silly. This is likely to cause controversy – it will increase family weight appeal of the title, but may irritate fans who take their knowledge of Tolkien more seriously.
Rules and how it happens
“The Hobbit: There and Back Again” is, in essence, a depiction of a journey. collapse and write a game. No matter how many players compete, someone rolls five dice, three of which produce path symbols that draw a line, often with turns and branches, through one, two or three squares. The other two drop resources such as bread and swords. There are eight scenarios in the game, each with their own page in the included flipbook, and in most of them the goal is to use path symbols to draw a line from a starting point to an end goal, ideally hitting certain squares and avoiding others along the way.
However, this is Rainer Knizia's game, and there is much more to it than meets the eye. First, in most games of this type, all players share the results of the roll, marking them on their sheets. But this involves drawing dice, so on your turn you choose one and remove it from the pool. This instantly makes the decision more interesting, as you are not only deciding to optimize your own route, but also potentially denying it to other players. For this reason the game works best as board game for twoas it is easier to closely monitor what others are doing. The game is still interesting, but loses some of the interactivity.
Each scenario also has its own specific learning requirements. Some of them are too similar, but for the most part they're impressively varied given the relatively simple core rules. In the first, for example, you need to connect 12 starting tiles containing dwarves heading to Bilbo's surprise party with his hobbit hole in Bag End. In the second, you follow a single route through a dangerous desert full of trolls on your way to meet the elves in Rivendell. The following adventures involve selecting figures determined by a die roll to surround certain squares, completing eagles' flight paths to rescue stranded dwarves, and using paths to rescue burning houses by shooting arrows at the marauding dragon Smaug.
Further tricks are built into the scoring that determines the winner. In the first adventure, you will receive points for each dwarf you successfully bind to Bilbo's house, but will receive a bonus if you first have a ready resource of bread to feed them. Except if you take a closer look at the estimates available, you'll notice that this isn't always the best idea. You can also get extra points if you connect and feed Thorin, the leader of the Dwarves, and the wizard Gandalf, except that, crucially, the scenario ends for all players once one of them has collected the remaining 12 Dwarves. You can also get extra points for collecting sword icons, although they are useless for completing the scenario. Therefore, there is a constant temptation to give up ground in the race in search of tasty bonuses.
As you might have guessed, this setup turns any scenario into a race, but the catch is that you don't always want to finish first if falling behind will net you enough extra points to take the win. There are also mini-races with a pot of fame points available to the first player to achieve certain sub-goals, such as surrounding each puzzle symbol in the Gollum chapter. Between various chases, random dice rolls and the uncertainty of who will pull out what in the project, The Hobbit: There and Back Again is filled with excitement and uncertainty right up until the points are tallied at the end.
Where the game starts to become more frustrating is the replay value. Once you've played out a scenario and worked out the best way to implement it, the appeal of replaying starts to wane. But the game has one more trick to keep you interested: unlike most path-making games, you can partially draw on top of previous paths, using the shapes you choose to add new bends and intersections, allowing you to reach new areas of the map.
This enriches the spatial puzzle of each scenario enormously because there is no one best route and you have enormous opportunity to change your path each time. For example, when connecting the dwarves to Bilbo's hole, you can draw individual paths, but you can also connect several dwarves together and then connect them to the hole as a group. Most maps also have squares that give you bonus resources or points, as well as other squares that you are discouraged or strictly prohibited from entering. This way, even when you've tallied the score, the way the dice fall creates a new challenge and you can always look forward to the thrill of the race.
What you definitely won't get is anything other than drawing a path. You can collect wizard hat symbols to unlock extra paths or resource rewards, and if the die really has nothing to do with it, you can assign it to Bilbo the robber for a wild extra reward, but that's not deep decision making. And the game is quite minimalistic in its take on the Hobbit narrative. Each scenario pays homage to Tolkien visually and spatially, but it's quite difficult to imagine being around a troll icon and watching it turn to stone at dawn, especially when the same mechanic is used later to answer riddles.
