Hello all,

I find myself at a difficult crossroad with my board gaming hobby I enjoy so much. Until recently I found LOTR LCG one of the most enjoyable experiences to play solo in the evening, or two player with my daughter. But since when I stared playing The Voice of Isengard a few weeks ago everything changed. At first I thought I just needed a better deck, and many helpful people offered some great builds they had success with. I built them and lost, so I tried easy mode, and lost. I built more decks, and lost again and again. I finally built a Dwarf swarm deck and ran To Catch an Orc for the 9 ^th time and even in easy mode, and lost! It is going down in my books as the worst designed quest I have ever played with possibly the exception of that god awful Riddle quest with Gollum.

So if I may ask some advice. I have not played the ring maker cycle and fear to even try it now. For the first time in two years I don’t even want to purchase a new pack or any more Deluxe Expansions. I have The Lost Realms sitting on the shelf because I fear if I play it I will feel the same way these Voice of Isengard quests make me feel, pissed off and down right discouraged. If Matt and Caleb continue to take the game on a course of brutality I am finding they are going in they will find this loyal player saying goodbye to one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences of my favorite hobby. I am already seeking options for another good solo game, but there isn’t much out there. Could you offer me any advice?

Catch an ork a really difficult one in 2 player game. If you will allow times counter triggered all the time doesn matter how good is your deck. You will lost. So key is when you questing ALLWAYS PUT PROGRESS ON A QUEST CARD!

Maybe you could play the game and ignore the time mechanic? I fond the Lost Realm to be better than the Voice of Isengard and the Sagas are even better than that. BUT quests are getting more difficult as player cards are getting better. Tharbad and Celebrimbor are easier quests in that cycle and they are a lot of fun. With almost sixty quests you can't like them all. Another option is to play with four heroes, and disregard the threat of one of them like in the sagas...?

For what its worth I feel you. This is an increadibly challenging game and I think everyone at some point gets stuck on a quest. I'm a relative noob still trying to get through the first cycle but Conflict At The Carrock just felt impossible for the longest time. Then just last night I had an appifiny and suddenly not only did I beat it, I'm quite certain I can beat it at least half the time and I can think of several ways to build a deck to do it.

I think the reason this game is so challenging is that each new quest is a new puzzle, introduces some new hurdle that prevents all the old tricks you learned to that point from working and you kind of have to erase your experiance and look at the quest logically and unravel its mysteries.. Its part of the fun, but can be infuriating when everything you try fails.

Suffice to say, I think sometimes you just have to put a quest down, move on to something else and tackle it again later with a fresh perspective and perhaps more experiance. I haven't tried the quest your talking so I can't advise you specifically but in my experiance with the game so far, the most important thing to always note is identifying the cause of your loss and slowly adapting (rather then building from scratch) your deck... to see if you can make improvements that get you farhter along. That way your not re-assesing the entire thing each time you try but rather slowly cutting out / adding new cards based on logical conclusions driven by the experiances gained from your recent loses. This really helped me get through Conflict At The Carrock.

Good Luck!