Which board game was released first, Lord of the Rings or Castle Risk?
Lord of the Rings (board game) Lord of the Rings is a board game based on the high fantasy trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" by J. R. R. Tolkien. Published in 2000 by Kosmos in Germany, Wizards of the Coast in the U.S., and Parker Brothers in the U.K., the game is designed by Reiner Knizia and features artwork by illustrator John Howe. It won a Spiel des Jahres special award for "best use of literature in a game" and in 2004 it won the Games Magazine Games 100 Honor in the Family Strategy category. A slightly revised version was later published by Fantasy Flight Games.
Telengard Telengard is a 1982 role-playing dungeon crawler video game developed by Daniel Lawrence and published by Avalon Hill. The player explores a dungeon, fights monsters with magic, and avoids traps in real time without any set mission other than surviving. Lawrence first wrote the game as "DND", a 1976 version of "Dungeons & Dragons" for the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer. He continued to develop "DND" at Purdue University as a hobby, rewrote the game for the Commodore PET 2001 after 1978, and ported it to Apple II+, TRS-80, and Atari 800 platforms before Avalon Hill found the game at a convention and licensed it for distribution. Its Commodore 64 release was the most popular. Reviewers noted "Telengard"'s similarity to "Dungeons and Dragons". RPG historian Shannon Appelcline noted the game as one of the first professionally produced computer role-playing games, and "Gamasutra"'s Barton considered "Telengard" consequential in what he deemed "The Silver Age" of computer role-playing games preceding the golden age of the late 1980s. Some of the game's dungeon features, such as altars, fountains, teleportation cubes, and thrones, were adopted by later games such as "Tunnels of Doom".