LOTR Backgammon: improvement plan?

[mark12_30]

LOTR Backgammon.

It comes in a really nice wooden case, and it does have some indistinct fragments of the LOTR movie-map as a background. Then it has fifteen silvery one-rings and fifteen golden one-rings, to use as the "disks" or playing pieces.

I personally find the silver and gold one-rings difficult to distinguish color-wise; and I keep moving my opponent's peices. Mumph? (...And-- can't they count? Three rings for the elven-kings-- oh, nevermind.) So-- there really isn't that much about playing the game that really has LOTR about it. It's just... backgammon with an annoying plentitude of "One Rings".

Can't something be done about this? So I decided to try.

The goal of backgammon is to bring all your pieces "home". Home to what? I printed another Middle-Earth map (ran out of green ink! Will have to try again with new cartridge-- map has pinkish tinges now) and I'm trying to trim it, fit it, and angle it so that possible "homes" are, The Shire, Gondor or Rohan, Mordor, and maybe Ered Luin or so. And if I rotate the map just about 18 degrees, the Misty Mountains end up vertical, putting Moria and Isengard on "the bar"-- kind of a "go to jail" area. I figured that Isengard and Morai would make pretty good 'prisons'.

Then on to the playing peices. A backgammon "set" of disks is thirty disks, that is fifteen disks each for two players. I bought some cheap one-inch wooden disks at the local craft store. They came twenty-six in a bag; I bought two bags. So with 52 disks, I had enough for three sets plus some extras. Of course you'd only use two sets at a time. But I like variety...

So, one set for bad guys. My sons and I drew the Great Eye on them in red, with a black edge around the disk.

Another set of fifteen disks got green trees, for the elves. (Or I suppose, green trees could also symbolize Ents.)

The third set of fifteen disks represents men. On one side my sons & I painted the White Tree (in silver paint) on a black background, for Gondor. Flip them over, and we painted a white (or tan) horse on a green background, for Rohan.

So there are three sets of fifteen disks; obviously only two sets will be in use. And I had a few extra disks, and I decided to use those for Gandalf, Gimli, Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin.

We could do a real mix-and-match, with elves, men, hobbits and a token dwarf-and-wizard, all against the Great Eye.

Maybe I'll find some AIM Icons for the special characters. Eomer!

As another finishing touch, I'm thinking about the "triangles". Why let the triangles hide the nice Middle-Earth map? I'm thinking instead of putting down weapons instead of wedges.

Anybody else gone through this, or have any suggestions? Anybody else miodifying another game in a similar way?

[The Might]

oh, I love backgammon, and am pretty good at it...
but it's not the kind of game that could have much to do with LOTR...
of course one could theoretically even use figures like chess pawns instead of the normal small rings
the normal colours for backgammon pieces are black and white, so maybe a dark forces /good forces might make sense...
you could also decorate the pieces with tengwar/cirth runes.
if you want to choose homes I suggest The Shire and Rivendell on one side, Lorien and Anduin, Isengard and Rohan and finall Gondor and Mordor
this way the road would suggest for one player the road taken by Sam and Frodo, and for the other the road taken by the Nazgul in their Hunt for the Ring until they reached the Shire
anyway...a very nice game