The problem with sequels, especially in board games where sequels are mechanical artifacts first and narrative artifacts a distant second if at all, is that there isn’t necessarily more to say about them. Last year, Bryan Bornmueller’s The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game was one of my favorites. Now, as was foretold by some lady peering into a bowl of water, The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game is here.

It’s more of the same.

That’s precisely what I wanted it to be. But it doesn’t necessarily make for interesting breakfast reading.

As in the original, your deck is a treacherous thing.

If you’ve been living under a rock — or not reading Space-Biff!, which is much the same thing — then I’ll catch you up in six sentences of Elvish.

Or, fine, for those among us who refuse the allure of the golden tongue:

The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game, like The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game before it, is a trick-taker that walks us through J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece one chapter at a time. In the tradition of Thomas Sing’s The Crew, this is a cooperative affair, and much of the game revolves around selecting the proper context for the trick-taking. Picking your character is the big one. After dealing out the cards, everybody picks who they will be, which amounts to selecting one’s objective for the hand. What sets it apart from The Crew, though, is the way it furnishes the tale. It’s akin to a new translation of a familiar work, with illustrations and marginalia and a few turns of phrase that illuminate the original in unexpected ways.

Trick-taking is a peculiar genre, being both mired in tradition and perpetually reinventing itself. As one curmudgeon noted just yesterday, the phrase “trick-taking with a twist” is a redundancy. Trick-taking is twists. Small twists, layered atop the familiar.

In TTT:TTG, those twists come fast and hard. The deck composition, for one, with its auto-win pair of towers that cancel one another if played into the same trick. Every new chapter piles on additional tweaks. Early on, Bornmueller adds in a pair of orcs as playable characters; the players must hold them in tension by winning an equal number of tricks so that Merry and Pippin can escape the orcish camp. Behold: ludic narrative! Only a few chapters later, Treebeard enters the scene. His whole deal is that he speaks so slowly that his cards enter the following trick, making him the trick-taking equivalent of molasses on a cold day. Even later, the battle of Helm’s Deep becomes a multi-hand death march, additional orcs piling into the deck as the table strives to succeed with enough characters to carry the day. Of course, Gandalf can only be played in the final hand. “Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East.”

Chills. Right up the front of my thighs. I’m not even kidding.

Remember that menu? From our favorite café? The one with all the meats?

The sheer creativity on display is frankly staggering. Remember when Gandalf the White showed up and for a hot second everybody thought he might be that dork Saruman? Yep, Bornmueller has that in there, a minor hidden-character segment where two strangers in white might be either Tolkien Jesus or Tolkien Judas. Remember when Gollum was doing his multiple personalities routine? Meet Gollum and Smeagol, dueling characters whose roles might reverse mid-trick.

One of the toughest problems for Bornmueller to tackle is also mechanical, although not in the game design sense. Tolkien divvied the books into broad segments rather than interleaving the narrative, resulting in one big chunk with Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and the war for Rohan, and then another big chunk with Frodo, Sam, and Smeagol. Bornmueller follows the book rather than Jackson’s adaptation. This necessitates a slightly awkward reset mid-game, with a few cards getting set aside so that the One Ring can return to the deck, not to mention a crescendo at Helm’s Deep when a full half of the scenarios remain to be played. This, I think, was the right decision. Players are invited to get to know their deck and cast of characters, ever-expanding though it may be, rather than swapping back and forth. At the very least, preserving the trilogy’s format keeps the overhead in check.

Uh oh. Wormtongue. That guy has a nasty tongue.

But this isn’t a game for “at the very least.” It’s a maximal sort of game, offering such a bounty that it threatens to overwhelm one’s appetite. I don’t think this second volume will persuade those who didn’t get along with the first. But for those of us who appreciated what Bornmueller was going for, The Two Towers offers more, more, more. More characters, more scenery, more upsetting objectives that seem impossible until suddenly they aren’t.

I’ll offer one better, and annoy the skeptics out there for good measure. These trick-takers are a singular argument for the value of ludic translations, smaller in scope than film adaptations or radio plays or stage productions, but no less critical for how they approach one of the modern world’s greatest works of literature through the scope of play rather than narrative. To experience The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game is to revisit Middle-earth and recall what made these stories worthwhile in the first place.

A prototype copy of The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game was provided by the publisher.

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