But! You could sneak attack Gandalf and then use his attack power to contribute to taking the Balrog down

Great play this past week end with The Road Darkens Campaign ...

In fact, as our third player changed his deck, we restarted from the black riders the whole campaign :

First player was playing :

Beregond/Beorn/Glorfindel (blue)

Second player changed his deck (outland deck before) to :

Idraen/Eleanor/Legolas

And I was still playing my full ladies deck :

Caldara/Eowyn/Galadriel

So yes, only two spheres in 3 decks, and yes, 7 ladies, a warrior and a Bear (considering that those elvish are so girly ).

The 3 black riders quests were pretty easy with those decks. Then watcher and Balrog were tough ennemis. However, we went through, with Balrog down (with a flame of anor on a "hobbit" Gandalf and a last attack of Legolas and a Black arrow).

We did not find the time to start the Breaking of the Fellowship due to time constraint. We should finish it soon.

MVP of these quests was almighty Caldara (with Fortune and Fate) ... All bad conditions encountered always going to her. She never received any good attachment from her companions, however she manages to always come back on board. Of course, it was her that sacrifices herself to the Balrog. No burden penalty at the end, as Caldara was back on stage ... One aspect of the quest not really funny was the 2 remaining rounds after Bally was crushed that were .... Euh .... Boring.

For the deck building aspect, I really enjoyed adding "hobbit Gandalf" to my Caldara deck ... It brings more variety and different possibility to cope with difficult situation. Of course, my partners were not playing Standard Gandalf.

The deck :

Caldara/Eowyn/Galadriel

Allies : 23

3 Gandalf

3 Zigil miner

3 Imladris Stargazer

3 Ethir Swordman

3 Emery

3 Northern Tracker

1 Elfelm

1 Treebeard

1 Arwen

1 Bilbo

1 Dwalin

Attachments : 9

3 Map of Earnil

2 Gandalf staff (used 2 times for ressources and all other times for drawing)

1 wizard pipe (combine really well with hidden cache, flame of anor and zigil miner)

1 hobbit pipe

2 unexpected Courage

Events : 18

3 Elrond Counsel

3 Hidden Cache

1 Free to choose

1 Hasty Stroke

1 Flame of Anor

2 Dwarven Tomb

3 Test of will

2 Galadrim greetings

2 Fortune or Fate

With Sting and Noble hero as boon.

At the end of the moria, I was ensuring +3 draws almost each round with Galadriel, Gandalf Staff and hobbit pipe.

Mike

PS : we are not sure to have played correctly something. We have mr. Underhill in the Campaign log so we set up it in each quest ... This seems really not fluff ... Strange to see Frodo escaping an attack from an Orc Chieftain due to his secret identity. However, we did not see why we shouldn't add it during set up, and furthermore, we thought that, if we choosed Gildor, we would have add him in the encounter deck as well. So were we wrong ?

So we finally played the breaking of the fellowship and managed to get through ... But at what costs !

Basically, we did not read anything on the quest before playing it, thus we choosed 3A stage only based on their titles (not reading 3B), and that costs us a lot in term of strategy.

I had the chance to discard frodo's choice (as a shadow card though), and we had to have my partners sacrifice themselves in order to let me escape (as Boromir in the book). But knowing the effect of the different stages 3, the choices would have been different I guess.

On the good side, I had all my heros at the end of it. But we had to use golden hairs and the lembas from Galadriel gifts.

I did not enjoy much the quest as the encounter deck is full of "surge" cards. Playing 3 players game, we had regularly 6-9 cards revealed during quest, not mentionning stage 4 where de facto you have 6 encounters cards to be revealed going up to 12 cards revealed due to different surge effects.

Conclusion : tough quest, but not really fun to me ... Need to be replayed.

Well, you just created an artificial difficulty for yourself by playing it blind.

MVP of these quests was almighty Caldara (with Fortune and Fate) ... All bad conditions encountered always going to her. She never received any good attachment from her companions, however she manages to always come back on board. Of course, it was her that sacrifices herself to the Balrog. No burden penalty at the end, as Caldara was back on stage

No, Caldera is dead. She is no more, she has ceased to be, she is bereft of life, she rests in peace.

The Balrog killed her, which is something different as triggering her action.

Played with Pippin(lore)+Sam+Merry and Glorfindel(spirit)+Aragorn(lore)+Gandalf. First one a ally heavy deck with Sam as defender and Merry as attacker. Second one a ranger and traps deck. Did very well on first two quests but got killed on third one.

Lot of fun quests and good challenge. Third one definitely the hardest.