In any case, Playroom has two titles coming that are based on The Lord of the Rings – more specifically, on the LotR texts and not the new Hobbit or old LotR films. The first title up is a new version of Keith Meyers and Michael Stern's The Hobbit board game, first released in 2001 by Fantasy Flight Games and many other publishers around the world.
• The other half of Playroom's Lord of the Rings line-up is an English version of a 2012 Kosmos release from designer Andreas Zimmerman titled The Lord of the Rings Card Game. As with The Hobbit board game above, this design is aimed not solely at gamers but at families, which is Playroom's target audience.
• Playroom also releases a few party games each year, and the one demonstration of such that survived my ineptness is for Maureen Hiron's Words of Art.
• Designer Susan McKinley Ross briefly gives the lowdown on MindWare's Qwirkle Trio, the U.S. version of Schmidt's Qwirkle Big Box, which debuted in October 2012.
• We'll close with the fast-playing card game Stop It! from the U.S. branch of Winning Moves.