Not only is Reiner Knizia certainly the most prolific designer in hobby board games, but The Hobbit: There And Back Again isn’t even his first (or second, or third) game based on Tolkien's book for children. First was a 2010 game where players were the hobbit’s dwarf companions, helping on his adventure and trying to escape with as much gold as possible. Then came two 2013 cooperative games. None were particularly well-received, especially when you consider how many Knizia titles could count among the best games of all time. So now he’s back for a fourth bite at the hobbit’s ample table, with an all-new design.
What’s in the Box
The actual box contents are very straightforward. There are four big flip-books of dry-wipe pages and an accompanying marker, one for each player. The books are a fantastic idea, sturdily bound and much more convenient than the mess of loose playsheets that dominate in dry-wipe games. You also get a standard 12-sided die and five custom printed six-sided dice bearing a variety of shapes and symbols. Finally there’s a sheet of punch out tokens representing various resources you can collect on your adventures: bread, swords and, in a wholly unnecessary nod to a famous scene from the book, pine-cones.
What’s more interesting to discuss is the art style. Interpretations of Tolkien tend toward the meticulous and lavishly detailed, as befits the rich setting he created. But The Hobbit was originally conceived as a children’s book, separate from the legendarium he was creating in his spare time: its incorporation into those invented myths came later. And this seems to be the inspiration behind the illustrations here, which are chunky, cartoonish, and occasionally silly. This is likely to be divisive – it increases the family-weight appeal of the title, but might annoy fans who take their Tolkien lore more seriously.
Rules and How It Plays
The Hobbit: There and Back Again is fundamentally a path-drawing roll and write game. However many players are competing, someone rolls the five dice, three of which will come up with path symbols that draw a line, often with turns and branches, across one, two or three squares. The other two roll resources, like bread and swords. There are eight scenarios in the game, each with its own page in the included flip-book, 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.
This being a Reiner Knizia game, however, there is a great deal more to this than first meets the eye. For starters, most games of this kind see all the players sharing the results of the roll, marking them up on their own sheets. But this involves dice-drafting so, on your turn, you pick one and remove it from the pool. Instantly this makes the decision more interesting as you’re not only picking to optimize your own route but potentially deny it to other players. For this reason the game works best as a 2-player board game, as it’s easier to keep a close eye on what others are doing. It’s still fun with more, but loses a bit of that interactive edge.
Every scenario also has its own specific requirements to explore. A couple of them are too similar, but for the most part they’re impressively diverse, given the relatively simple core rules. In the first, for example, you have to link 12 starting squares, containing the dwarfs heading to Bilbo’s unexpected party, to his hobbit-hole at Bag End. The second sees you trekking a single route across a dangerous, troll-filled wilderness on your way to the elves at Rivendell. Following adventures involve picking shapes determined by a die roll to surround specific squares, filling in flight routes for eagles to rescue stranded dwarfs, and using paths to rescue burning houses while shooting arrows at the marauding dragon, Smaug.
Further tricksiness is baked into the scoring that determines the winner. In the first adventure you’ll score points for each dwarf that you successfully link to Bilbo’s home, but get a bonus if you have a bread resource ready to feed them first. Except if you look at the available scores closely, you’ll note that might not always be the best idea. You can also get extra points if you connect and feed Thorin, the dwarf leader, and the wizard Gandalf except, crucially, the scenario ends for all players as soon as one of them collects the other 12 dwarfs. There’s also extra score available for collecting sword icons, even though they’re useless in completing the scenario. So there’s a constant temptation to cede ground in the race, fishing for those tasty bonuses.
As you can probably imagine, this setup turns every scenario into a race, with the catch being that you don’t always want to finish first, if falling behind gets you enough extra points to take the win. There are mini-races, too, with a pot of glory points available for the first player to reach particular sub-objectives, like surrounding each riddle symbol in the Gollum chapter. Between the various chases, the random dice rolls, and the uncertainty of who’s going to pull what in the draft, The Hobbit: There and Back thrums with excitement and uncertainty right down until the points are totted up at the end.
Where the game begins to get into stickier territory is replay value. Once you’re played through a scenario and worked out the best way to approach it, the appeal of going through it again begins to drop. But the game has yet another smart twist to try and maintain your interest: unlike most path-making games you can partially draw over previous paths, using your selected shapes to add new bends and junctions, allowing you to reach new areas of the map.
This enriches the spatial puzzle of each scenario tremendously, because there’s no one best route, and you have enormous scope to change up your path each time. When connecting the dwarfs to Bilbo's hole, for instance, you can draw individual paths but you can also link several dwarfs together and then connect them to the hole as a group. Most maps also have squares that give you bonus resources or points, and other squares that you’re discouraged or outright banned from entering. So even when you’ve figured out the scoring, the way the dice fall creates a novel challenge, and there’s always the thrill of the race to anticipate.
What you definitely don’t get is anything other than path-drawing. You can collect wizard hat symbols to unlock one-off extra paths or resource rewards, and if there’s really nothing to do with a die you can assign it to Bilbo the burglar for a wild extra, but this isn’t deep decision-making. And the game is pretty minimal in its evocation of the Hobbit’s narrative. Each scenario tips its hat to Tolkien in visual and spatial terms, but it’s pretty hard to imagine surrounding a troll icon as watching it turn to stone with the break of dawn, especially when the same mechanic is used later to answer riddles.
Where to Buy
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