Lord of the Rings - Knizia board game

Have just purchased Knizia's Lord of the Rings cooperative board game from the pawnbroker (of all places). Will let you know how it plays when we take on Sauron - but the concept of a 'corruption line', the artwork and the favoured status of almost anything designed by Knizia leads to good prospects.

After having read the rules and finding them somewhat intriguing because of the new possibilities opened by the group v the system approach I went for a quick google to see what sort of a game this was. I have found nothing but praise so far, but what was interesting is that I found this academic article on cooperative and collaboration game design ("Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games" - Zagal, Rick, Hsi). It uses Knizia'a LOTR as its case study of a 'collaborative' game that works, is itself an attempt to draw lessons for use by the MMORG fraternity. Worth a read, as are the archives for The Gaming Journal (which I found in the article's bibliography).

PS sorry again for delays, RK has taken over again. I'll post sometime a summary of what's happened there. Suffice to say my character is now Field Marshall of the Royal Scottish Army, married, and rather busy in the role play side of things.

As a final note, I've activated word recognition in the comments on this blog as a result of the massive spam influx on the previous post.