An Unexpected Party product reviews

I have been a fan of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings since I was 6 or 7 years old, thoroughly enjoyed the films (though The Hobbit does have its let downs), so when I had a chance I grabbed myself a copy of this game. The game board opens up as Bag End, featuring five different rooms in the house, four of which you move between and the fifth is where your character ends up if you annoy Bilbo too much. The game comes with a token for each of the thirteen dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf, each of the dwarves is also represented by a card, which gives a special ability and a chance for bonus points at the end of the game.

In each room there are some spots which come in a range of three different symbols and reward. Each turn you must move your dwarf onto one of these spots, in any room, so long as Bilbo isn't there. You can distract him and gain a yellow token, but annoy him too much, they flip to red and when you have five red, Bilbo banishes you to the dining table and you then have to draw a new dwarf character. The aim is to collect a matching symbol tile to what is on one of the cards in your hand and drop it in the correct room, be the first and you get 2 points, any after just 1. Be careful though, as doing a piece of the song can result in annoying Bilbo, and if four items are on the floor then Bilbo comes to clean up, rather annoyed with you.

Given that you can repeat some of the song phrases, I wish there were more of the orange cards, because you can go through them quite quickly. I like that the game has two ways of ending, either Thorin joins the party or the song is completed. My biggest gripe was that the box itself, could have been a little thicker, the pieces just didn't want to fit inside the box and I don't like having to take tokens out of their stands (it starts to wear on the base of the token) and so ended up throwing away the insert to make everything fit in the box. This is a fun game, I have played it with the kids and they all though it was a hit.