Designed by Michael Rieneck and published by Kosmos, Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom is a fully cooperative and solitaire game for up to four players who together represent the Fellowship of the Ring. It's a very accessible game because it uses a roll & move mechanic that will be immediately familiar to anyone, even if they've not played any board game more complicated than Snakes & Ladders. That said, there's some agency and choice that mitigates the pure luck of the dice rolls: you're not just mindlessly moving pieces around at the behest of the dice!
The object of the game is to get the Ringbearer (in this case, the Frodo & Sam standee) from Rivendell to Mount Doom. That means moving along a track that winds between various locations that will be familiar to anyone who has read the books or seen the movies. For each location, there are seven cards, and six of them are laid out at the bottom of the board to correspond to the numbers 1-6 that can be rolled on the game's black dice (you always have one card left over, which you should discard without peeking at it). There may be cards here that you can take to aid you (giving you a single-use ability, after which the card is discarded) but most have a negative effect; typically involving combat which, if you lose, moves the game's ring marker down a track. If you get to the end of that track before Frodo reaches Mount Doom, it's game over and the Fellowship loses. Some cards and some spaces on the board require you to place out a Nazghul to join the Witch King on the board: if all the Nazghul are placed out then, likewise, it's game over and the Fellowship loses.
You're not entirely at the mercy of the dice because players have some choice over which dice to roll and which rolls to use. There's a different coloured standard six-sided die for Frodo & Sam (orange), Merry & Pippin (purple), Aragorn (blue), Legolas (green) and Gimli (red). On your turn you choose two of these dice and the two black dice. You roll them and decide which black die to take and which of the two Fellowship dice. You then roll the second black die, the Fellowship die you didn't previously use and any other Fellowship die. You have to accept whatever you roll with the second black die but again you choose between the two Fellowship dice rolls. In this way you end up on your turn with two back dice and two Fellowship dice to activate, the latter moving the appropriate standees.
Whenever a black die indicates a card which triggers combat, you roll a custom six-sided die. It shows a weapon and colour corresponding to each of the Fellowship. If the weapon is for a Fellowship member that's on the same space as Frodo/Sam or is ahead of them on the track, then the combat is won. For that reason, you may well decide that it makes sense to move the other members of the Fellowship ahead of Frodo/Sam; tho' the ring marker track is quite long so some may prefer the alternative strategy of having Frodo/Sam race ahead, even tho' that will inevitably mean losing all or most combat rolls...
With attractive art by Aleksander Karcz, Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom is bound to appeal to fans of the franchise. The game is easy to play - at least until you get to the last section - but it's no pushover to win. In most of our games at Board's Eye View we ended up overrun with Nazghuls. You can usually avoid landing on the spaces on the track that trigger a Nazghul but they can quickly accumulate due to unfortunate black dice rolls - especially when your card in position #6 gets removed and the default action for black 6 roll is to bring on another Nazghul. Children and some adults may find the game frustrating, but then you never want a solo or cooperative game to be too easy. Our one gripe is that this is essentially a solitaire game; it's cooperative in that several players can join in but there's no separate decision space and any single-use cards collected are fully shared by all the players.