By way of answer to the original question, I was, the other week, faced in my regular games shop with both the film-based trivia game (produced by the original
Trivial Pursuit people) and a LotR trivia game based entirely on the book (produced by Fantasy Flight Games). No prizes for guessing which one I went for ...
... so I am now the proud owner of a book-based LotR trivia game. And I am pleased to report that it is actually a very good and well-thought out game. Its major plus point is the artwork, which is by Ted Nasmith. The game board comprises the main locations that Frodo passes through on his journey to Mount Doom superimposed upon a gorgeous aerial view of the route followed (cleverly angled so that Bag End at the beginning is level with Mount Doom at the end).
The aim is to move through each location using three types of tokens to move (travelling, weapon and ring). At each location, you either have to answer a question based on the events in the book or pick up a tile (which involves either gaining gifts to help you on your journey or challenges which you must overcome). A correct answer to your question gains you tokens and allows you either to move to the next location or to stop and rest to gain yet more movement tokens. But, if you answer incorrectly, you have to go back to your starting location or to the last "haven" (the "havens" are Rivendell, Lothlorien and Ithilien).
Each question gives a number of multiple choice answers. Depending on how it is asked, each question can be either easy, medium or hard. For easy questions, the player asking gives three of the mulitple choice answers (ignoring a fourth bracketed answer). For medium ones, all four multiple choice answers are given. And for difficult questions, the player asking gets to choose the question that they think is the most difficult from a choice of three on each card. The questions start out easy but become medium as the player nears Mount Doom. Difficult questions only arise as part of challenges.
The questions are actually quite difficult, unless you know the book inside out. However, since they are multiple choice, anyone who has a reasonable knowledge of the book (ie most of us here) is unlikely to be overly troubled by them. Happily, however, progress in the game is not solely dependent on answering questions correctly but also requires some strategy in deciding when to go on and when to stop and accumulate movement tokens (which are also required for some of the challenges). So, the game does present a challenge even to those of us who are very familiar with the book.
The winner is the first player to reach Mount Doom and complete the relevant challenge (which involves having plenty of ring tokens and answering one or more difficult questions).
So, if you are interested in acquring a LotR trivia game, I would heartily recommend this one. There are details of it
here at Fantasy Flight Games' website.