We were playing this saga quest this past weekend in a 4 player group and came up against an impossible result. We are on the last stage which has the text "Treachery cards gain surge." While we were doing pretty well we had enemies everywhere and a lot of locations in the staging area. But we weren't concerned since we had strong questing power and planned to just blitz through and win before getting to the next combat round. We'd ran out of cards from the encounter deck the turn before so I started to shuffle the deck while others finished their planning phase. - yes, we skip ahead a bit sometimes. When I picked up the discard pile I noticed that the entire thing - save 1 card - was all treacheries, one of which being to give all characters -1 will power and prevents us from attacking that round. It dawns on me that if we don't do something to add cards to the encounter deck, every card (except the 1 location) will get surge and we'll just repeat every card infinitely! Which begs the question -

What do you do when presented with an infinite loop of the encounter deck?

Luckily - our tactics player had a Rain of Arrows event and killed off several enemies, giving us just enough cards to NOT be stuck in the loop.

I believe the developers don't like never-ending loops as they have created an errata for encounter cards that resulted in this in the past.

Seeing as how none of the treacheries in this deck raise your threat or result in any sort of effect that will eventually lead to a loss (damage/attacks etc.), this does indeed have the potential to create an infinite loop based on my current understanding of how you resolve cards with surge. None of the locations or enemies trigger effects when a treachery is revealed that would lead to a loss either.

Since you could get stuck in an infinite loop and you've neither met the requirements to win nor lose, then I suppose you just keep revealing cards until you clean up the game and start over. If you want to win, you'll need to kill an enemy or clear a location that doesn't have surge once per turn.

I guess the developers should probably address the issue, though.

So you had every enemy and all but one location in play? Sounds like you deserved to lose anyway.

So you had every enemy and all but one location in play? Sounds like you deserved to lose anyway.

That's harsh man. Nearly every round we had the treachery come out that basically has the text "-1 WP per character and you cannot attack this round." So we just defended each turn. We'd clear 1 location, travel to the next, and then reveal 4 more cards - the treacheries in here pull enemies out of the discard pile and encounter deck and (depending on the specific treachery) either engage them or add them to the staging area. So it didn't take long to get every enemy on the board. And each treachery has surge, so in a 4 player game we seemed to get around 6 or 7 cards per quest phase. A few of the enemies have surge as well. And there are really very few locations in this set.

I've never played that quest with more than 2, but I can imagine how difficult it would be with 4. Some quests just aren't intended for the 4 player game. Since that quest rewards you for mono-sphere, I would bring a lore deck with lots of Out of the Wild, Gildor's Council, and Risk Some Light to neuter those treacheries and surges.

Yea, we lost several times on the first turn of "reveal 8 cards" and getting too many riddles wrong. But it was also still a lot of fun. We had several "laugh-instead-of-crying" moments where there were 40 cards left in the deck that would match the chosen criteria but instead they discarded a single side quest or neutral card. Statistics and probability were definitely having fun with us during those games.

Very nice. Reminds me of playing Druadan Forest 4 player and having 30-40 archery on the first turn. Sometimes you just have to laugh.

So you had every enemy and all but one location in play? Sounds like you deserved to lose anyway.

Very nice. Reminds me of playing Druadan Forest 4 player and having 30-40 archery on the first turn. Sometimes you just have to laugh.

yea. I really don't like that quest for that reason.

Four player sounds downright brutal... for certain quests at least..

Yeah. 4 players makes some quests easier and some much harder. Battle of Carn Dum is a prime example of quests that gets ridiculously hard since four players means that alot of sorcery treacheries will be drawn. We never, or at least very seldom, play with fewer than four and have to this day 12 tries on that one with no success in sight.

Another favourite is Helms Deep that gets very difficult on 4 players but is doable on solo and two.

I do not complain, we love the difficuly since victory will taste so much sweeter when it eventually comes.