The Hobbit: Come and Go Board Game Review

Not only Rainer Knizia He's undoubtedly the most prolific designer in the amateur board game world, but The Hobbit: Here Again isn't even his first (or second, or third) game based on Tolkien's children's books. first is a 2010 competition The player is the hobbit's dwarf companion, helping him on his adventures and trying to escape with as much gold as possible. Next up are two co-op games from 2013. No one game is particularly popular, especially when you consider how many Knizia games rank among the best of all time. So now he's back for a fourth bite on The Hobbit's wide table, and in a brand new design.

what's in the box

The Hobbit: There and Back Again

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The actual box contents are very simple. There are four large dry-erase flip books and an accompanying marker, one for each player. These books are a great idea, securely bound and much more convenient than the messy loose game sheets that dominate dry erase play. You also get one standard 12-sided die and five custom-printed six-sided dice with various shapes and symbols. There's also a punch token at the end, representing the various resources you can collect on your adventure: bread, swords, and the completely unnecessary pinecones, a nod to a famous scene from the book.

What's more worth discussing is the art style. Interpretations of Tolkien tend to be meticulous and rich in detail, which is matched by the rich backgrounds he created. But The Hobbit was originally conceived as a children's book, separate from the legends he wrote in his spare time: it was only later incorporated into those fictional myths. That seems to be the inspiration behind the illustrations here, which are chunky, cartoony, and sometimes silly. This can be divisive – it increases family weight The title is appealing, but may annoy fans who take Tolkien's lore more seriously.

Rules and gameplay

The Hobbit: Come and Gone is essentially a path drawing Scrolling game. No matter how many players compete, someone will always roll five dice, three of which will reveal path symbols, drawing a line on one, two or three squares, often with turns and branches. Two other rolling resources like bread and sword. There are eight scenarios in the game, each with its own page in the accompanying flip-book, and the goal in most of them is to draw a line from your starting point to your final goal using path symbols, ideally hitting certain blocks and avoiding others along the way.

However, this is a Reiner Knizia game, and there's a lot more to it than meets the eye at first glance. First, most games of this type have all players share the results of their rolls and mark them on their own sheets. But this involves rolling dice, so when it's your turn, you pick one and take it out of the pool. Right off the bat, this makes the decision more interesting, as you're not only choosing to optimize your own route, but potentially denying other players. Therefore, this game is best suited as Board game for 2 peoplebecause it’s easier to pay close attention to what others are doing. More content is still fun, but loses some of its interactive edge.

Each scenario has its specific exploration requirements. A few of them are too similar, but most of them are pretty diverse considering the relatively simple core rules. For example, in the first one, you have to connect the 12 starting squares (containing the dwarfs traveling to Bilbo's unexpected party) with his hobbit hole at Bag End. In the second story, you'll hike a route through a dangerous troll-filled wilderness to reach the elves of Rivendell. The adventure that follows includes choosing shapes determined by dice to surround specific squares, filling in flight paths for an eagle to rescue trapped dwarves, and using paths to rescue a burning house while shooting arrows at the marauding dragon Smaug.

There is more skill involved in the scoring that determines the winner. In your first adventure, you'll score points for each dwarf that successfully links to Bilbo's house, but you'll be rewarded if you prepare bread resources to feed them first. Unless you take a closer look at the points available, you'll find that this might not always be the best idea. You also get extra points if you connect and feed the dwarf leader Thorin and the wizard Gandalf, but best of all, once one of the players has collected the other 12 dwarves, the scenario ends for all players. Additional points are also awarded for collecting sword icons, although they are useless for completing the scenario. So there's a constant temptation to give in to the competition in order to get those tasty bonuses.

As you might imagine, this setup turns every situation into a race, but the problem is that you don't always want to finish first if falling behind can give you enough extra points to win. There are also mini-races, where the first player to reach certain sub-goals can earn massive glory points, such as surrounding each riddle symbol in Gollum's chapter. Between the various chases, the random dice rolls, and the uncertainty of who will pull what in the draft, The Hobbit: Comes and Gone is filled with excitement and uncertainty until the score is added up at the end.

Where the game starts to get into trickier territory is replay value. Once you've played through a scenario and figured out the best way to approach it, the appeal of playing it again starts to wane. But the game has another clever design to try and keep your interest: unlike most path-making games, you can partially map a previous path, adding new bends and junctions using shapes of your choice, allowing you to reach new areas of the map.

This greatly enriches the spatial puzzles of each scene, as there is no best route and you have a lot of room 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 multiple dwarves together and then connect them to the hole as a group. Most maps also have tiles that provide you with bonus resources or points, as well as other tiles that are discouraged or outright forbidden. So even if you've already calculated the score, the way the dice fall creates new challenges, and the game is always exciting.

You'll get absolutely nothing except drawing paths. You can collect wizard hat symbols to unlock one-time extra path or resource bonuses, and if it's really not tied to dice, you can assign them to Bilbo the Thief for a wild extra bonus, but it's not a deep decision. The game also evokes very little of the Hobbit narrative. Every scene pays homage to Tolkien in both visual and spatial terms, but it's hard to imagine surrounding a troll icon and watching it turn to stone as dawn breaks, especially when the same mechanics are used later to answer riddles.

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