Create Your Own Lord of the Rings Escape Room

A new board game allows players the chance to create their very own Lord of the Rings-themed escape room at home. Kosmos and Thames has announced a new version of Exit: The Game titled Exit: Lord of the Rings – Shadows Over Middle Earth. The game tasks players with helping Sam and Frodo reach Mount Doom by visiting various locations and clearing obstacles. The game includes a mix of puzzles, riddles, and "strange items" along with a few help cards in case players get stuck along their journey. The new game will have a retail price of $19.95 and will be released in June. 

Exit: The Game is a popular franchise for Thames and Kosmos, with over twenty different stories to explore in a box. Each box acts as a live mystery in a box, with players needing to solve various puzzles and riddles in order to solve a central mystery before the time runs out. The game is one of several similar "escape room in a box" style games, but Exit: The Game also has jigsaw puzzles and is now branching out into licensed properties. 

While the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies first launched 20 years ago, both the movie franchise and the books they're based off of continue to see a steady stream of new products and games. In addition to the long-running Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game (which uses likenesses from the movies) getting a new board game adaptation that reenacts the popular Balin's Tomb Battle, Fantasy Flight Games announced that it was revitalizing its Lord of the Rings Living Card Game (which does not use likenesses from the movie) with new art and reprints of popular card sets. Additionally, Fantasy Flights also recently wrapped up their own trilogy of Lord of the Rings board games, with their Journeys in Middle-Earth releasing its Spreading War expansion last year. A new edition of the tabletop roleplaying game The One Ring also released digitally late last year. Notably, Amazon Studios is also producing a new Lord of the Rings television show that adapts parts of The Simarillion, a mythology of Middle-Earth written by JRR Tolkien.