The game was really not that great. It was one of the very first PBM's that was profitable "I think". It was very unbalanced although it had a large player base. Alamaze came along after it and was positively reviewed in Dragon, I think it was a better game. The guy who made Earthwood made a Middle Earth PBM which played a lot like Alamaze and the game is still running out of the U.K. It's still quite popular across the world except that it retained the same unbalanced problems that Earthwood had.
    There's a new online turn based hex game that I play which was created by the same guy who designed Alamaze. It's called "Fall of Rome". It's a Kingdom building wargame which won some awards at Origins this year. If you like turn based wargames I highly suggest checking it out. You can look it up or "Kingdoms of Arcania" should also link you to the site. The Middle Earth game is called "MEPBM". The guys running MEPBM are very nice but the game needs to be overhauled IMO.

The Earthwood maps weren't so great. For the time they might have been decent, (I was 14 or so and hyborian war and other pbm maps looked better). Basically you had the map and then every turn you'd send in your orders and get the results a few days later. It was a Kingdom building game so all the turns ran at once. I think the map maybe wasn't so bad but very dated now.

The Middle Earth map I do still have copies of and they were very good maps. They designed that game off of MERP and had some kind of deal with ICE (I'm guesing) cause all of the characters and artifacts from MERP appeared in the game. MEPBM was essentially an improved version of Earthwood and Alamaze and it still plays well and is very popular. My trouble with that game is that the Dark servants agents were very overpowered as far as assassinating characters like Elrond goes. They tried to fix the problem but I still had troubles with it. They released an improved version of the game recently (I believe) so you may wanna look at it.

Fall Of Rome is a very fun online wargame that I like to play and highly reccomend checking out if you like the old Avalon Hill type games but have trouble finding opponents like I do.