Last night Shane cracked open his Risk: Lord of the Rings game that we got him for Christmas.

It took us a while to figure out how to play... the LOTR version of Risk is much different than standard Risk. The rulebook implies too many mechanics, making you read the whole book to piece together the actual rules like a puzzle. Reading reviews like the one linked to above helped fill in some gaps.

Even so, we screwed up on a few finer points of gameplay, but we had a LOT of fun. It's a hugely innovative improvement over standard Risk. Even with only 2 players it's quite enjoyable, but both of us look forward to trying the four player version.