Fantasy Flight Games plans to announce the acquisition of the Lord of the Rings board game license (formerly held by Wizards of the Coast), with distribution to be handled exclusively by Alliance Game Distributors and Diamond Comic Distributors.   The announcement is to be made at Origins International Game Expo and Fair, which starts this Thursday.  Fantasy Flight, perhaps best known for its Disk Wars products, reportedly began informing associates last Friday, June 29.  

This represents a major shift on a couple of fronts.  First, it's a major property leaving the largest company in the game category for a much smaller company with no track record of handling something of this scale.  Rumor has it that New Line was not pleased with WotC's handling of the license.  We looked for LotR on the Wizards.com website, and although we couldn't find the product listing, we did come up with a press release from this spring's Toy Fair that listed seven properties with Lord of the Rings dead last; maybe the Tolkien folks felt dissed. 

Second, this represents the second major Lord of the Rings licensee that has granted exclusive distribution rights to sister companies Diamond and Alliance, both owned by Steve Geppi.   Alliance and Diamond were reportedly brought to handle distribution in as the license was being negotiated to help Fantasy Flight convince New Line and the Tolkien estate to grant them the license.  The first LotR exclusive for Alliance/Diamond was the Lord of the Rings table-top wargame by Games Workshop (see 'Alliance/Diamond Have LotR Exclusive').  With Alliance also on an acquisition tear (see 'Alliance Acquires Berkeley Top Line and Barchetta), this represents a further consolidation of game distribution at Alliance/Diamond.