The Reiner Knizia Alphabet – The Letter ‘L’

The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game, Complica, was released in a magazine in 1985 (although he’d self-published games before then as well).

Since then, Knizia has designed and published over 800 games and expansions, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.

To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

This time: The Letter ‘L’.

L – The Lord of the Rings (2000)

The Lord of the Rings is a landmark game in the cooperative genre.

There were, of course, cooperative board games before Knizia's The Lord of the Rings. Even in 1903, Elizabeth Magie's The Landlord's Game, the game that became Monopoly, had an alternative cooperative ruleset known as the 'Prosperity' mode (coincidentally also the name of a 2013 Knizia release). And modern greats from before 2000 include 1982's Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and 1987's Arkham Horror.

But The Lord of the Rings showed the world that the European-style games that were sweeping the hobby at the turn of…

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