When I play most of regular quests, I build in a large box of choices, strategies and stuff.

If I want to play and win riddle quest or something like this, I'm forced to build in a little-little box with almost no choices to it, compared to regular.

That's the difference. I like to build my decks for myself rather than quest building them for me.

P.S.: What makes it even worse, the riddle quest is a part of campaign. Being forced to completely rebuild your deck from scratch in the middle of a campaign is a bit of ball-kicker.

I do not get the riddle hate. All you need is a best designed to deal with it and your good. The riddle mechanism is basically just a stall. All you need is a deck that can win on any amount of turns a VERY stable one. This isn't a hard goal to design a deck for.

In France, we mostly play in group, our community is quite large, and we usually end up playing 3 or 4 players.

When you draw 6 or 8 cards, you are bound to fail riddle, and when we played Nightmare, we had 3 lost on the first turn, before ending the staging because of that. Mono sphere deck didn't help, and having only one card type or one cost type is not possible in all sphere and not recommended if you want to win after the riddle... so yes, our table was the most unlucky one, and we resign redoing it after 3 trial. Other tables (see http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/99517-national-event-parisfrance-june-1st-2014/) had serious luck and even succeed in the "name a title" riddle. Then they fail one easy riddle, using all ressources, followed by "discard 2 ressource or gollum make an attack", THE END. That's all, glorious luck, then no luck. No strategy, no deckbuilding nothing could have prevent this (unless 4 player with insane draw and 3 test of will with 3 dwarven tomb and 3 book of Eldacar... maybe ).

Better play snake and ladder, it is waaaaay better and cheaper if I want to roll difficult dice. Collectible Card Game should not be about rolling difficult dice.

I think is a bit lame to build up specific decks against specific quest. Most of the time you will win for sure and there is no surprises as well. For me deck building is like normal or nightmare. But idea if my decks to play against ant quest in right category

I don't really care if the riddle quest is difficult or easy or what. What I do care about is that it is FUN. I know that is subjective, but this quest is not fun for my group. Yes you can just build a specific deck with like all 1 cost red cards or something stupid and win most riddles (well, maybe not now with some of these nightmare mode cards) but it's a pain. And it's a deck that can't even be used practically for any other quests.

My group usually has 2 or 3 or sometimes 4 players and we all bring our decks and play a quest and then move to a new one and then another, etc. But then when we get to this quest it would throw everything off if we all delay to just build new decks for this one quest. So what ends up happening is that we just usually skip the whole Hobbit saga quests altogether because who wants to only do PART of the Hobbit saga? Which is a shame.

Just a really poorly designed quest in my opinion because of this.

I don't think people complain about the riddles because they're hard, but more so because they pretty much require a specific deck type. You can build a deck type to beat the riddles fairly reliably, but usually players don't respond too well to quests that force them into one specific mold of building decks.

I agree, but would then add that it is not only the fact that it forces a specific deck build, but also that it really still isn't a fun mechanic once the decks are built (and i have a hard time saying that because I do enjoy that quest every once in a while). Journey to Rhosgobel is a quest that sorta forces a unique build as well but it is a fun quest and has fun elements to it that go beyond randomness. I think the Riddle quest just falls too far into a random guessing game and not a strategic card game, even though you can reduce the randomness it still is just guessing.

As an aside, however, I have no idea how the designers could have gone about the riddle part of the story differently, so I can't complain too much. Does anybody else have an idea about how the riddles could have been made more fun?

There could be ton of ways to do riddles better.

While not a good example, unique location of The Watcher in the Water comes to mind. I don't remember it making my hade ache as riddles did.

It's not even that the Riddle mechanic idea itself is super horrible. It's the penalties you get for failing these random tests.

Reduce the penalties for such a random thing and it wouldn't be so bad or unfun. Like if it was just taking progress off or delaying you in some way or still plinking poor Bilbo but for only like 1 damage and he has a couple more health, etc.

Instead the penalties for failure are so bad that you probably lose the game for failing 2 riddles and there are so many riddles in the encounter deck that this loss usually happens by turn 2.