Clan Fourhman tried out the complete Lord of the Rings Board Game experience tonight: the original boxed set, plus the Friends & Foes Expansion and the new Sauron Expansion. I highly recommend this game to you. It's cooperative - which is a rarity among board games - and it's terribly hard. This game will kick your ass three times out of five.
The Sauron Expansion lets one player assume the role of the Deceiver himself. This kind of removes the randomized element of evil the game once had, but it's certainly interesting to play out. As you might expect, it makes a tough game even tougher.
When you compile all three sets, you're left with a staggering array of options and strategies. This can be very daunting as you and your Hobbit team pick through the game space by space. So to make things a little easier, I whipped up a help sheet that sort of summaries all three rulebooks... lists the actions you can take on your turn, the F&F Scenario Board progression, and some other stuff that always seems to come up during our games. I think it will prove very useful, especially if you have players who are new or just don't play it that often.
Game designer Reiner Knizia is an absolute genius. I don't know if he planned the two expansions when he designed the original game or not, but it's amazing how easily the two fit with the first rules. In fact, I don't know what is more impressive: adding two complex expansions in after the fact, or designing the whole thing at once and then paring out enough rules for separate future releases. Rhonda and I were lucky enough to meet Mr. Knizia at Origins 2002, where we each received a personalized game card from him. What he did was add cooler rules to existing cards (by scribbling on them with a gold paint pen), but only when played by a specific person! My card gives "Joe" a benefit, while Rhonda asked Mr. Knizia to design her card for my dad, a longtime Tolkien fan.
There's not too many people in the world that I feel the need to address as Mr., so you know I must think pretty highly of this game. I think they should release a mega edition (assuming there's no more expansions forthcoming!) with compiled rules and all the components from the three sets. Maybe even a version that uses images from the movies.
I'm not sure where this help sheet will land here at fourhman.com, since we don't really have a "board games" section. Probably in the card games section, which incidentally I've been wanting to re-design for quite some time now.
