Thanks a bunch for the pictures!

with more players it also becomes more difficult keeping all the enemies in the staging area until after their engagement checks

Fair point.

So, has anyone played it yet? This quest seems really difficult.

It's not too bad, we got it on our first try without really building for it. It has the makings of a very tough nightmare quest though, the only reason it's not too bad is the lack of very punishing enemies. If you game the exploration mechanic and just kinda stay safe and scout stuff ahead of time you can make very direct routes to what you need and avoid falling into the nastier stuff. Very fun though, both this and Thing in the Depths are definitely top 10 quests in my opinion!

Thanks!

Guys, what do you think about Scouting Party, to me it seems quite hard to think I could build a deck around the scout trait. Of course we might get more in the future but how long it may take to have enough? I haven't checked all the allies but there certainly are very few heroes. And I was actually thinking this might be the last cycle they release… Now I think it shall be penultimate one since the last saga won't come out before the next year… I know this is a very different topic: just renting… but really, Scouting Party? Any potential?

There are easily enough Scouts for Scouting Party to be worth it. +2 to all your questing characters gets worth it pretty fast, especially when it only costs 2.

What deck do you have in mind?

I remember there was a consensus even Lords of the Eldar (one of the strongest cards in the game, in my opinion) is not worth its 3 resources, and it gives the full all stat boost till the end of the round to all Noldor no matter what (ok, +1 willpower but still). If Scouting Party said +2 willpower to all Scout characters, I would not question it but that "if" clause seems much more plausible.

All the cards are on cardgamedb now. Watermark included.

I didn't look to see what the difficulty rating on this quest was, but a friend and I played this yesterday evening and it was really cool. It started off like we had lucked out and found one of the locations we needed in the opening setup. We started at the other location and built up while we reached the important one. Then it looked like we were going to be able to just truck along in a straight path with relatively not-terrible locations but when we got to the last row we found out that we had to go through several more locations to get to the right one. He was playing Noldor questing with Cirdan, Arwen and Erestor. I was using Ents with Beregond, Mablung and Treebeard. At no point did we feel like it was out of our control. Good draws on our part and relatively friendly locations in our way made our first run through pretty easy but still enjoyable. I'm looking forward to playing it again to see how random this experience was.

It's DL4. I haven't had a chance to play it yet though.

That makes sense. There are a few mean treacheries and potential shadow combinations, but I think they took it easy on us since they were introducing such a different way to handle locations and travelling.

It's not a hard quest but it's very unique, fun, and replayable. Nightmare mode might be good with this one.

Looking forward to this one, especially since you say it's not that hard. How would you say it compares to Three Trials in solo?

Again, I haven't played it yet - and I am going to gorge tomorrow - but Three Trials was super easy! So I hope it's a little better than that! Typically we get a softball at the third and fourth quest so not surprising.

Three Trials easy in solo? Wow, I mean it's no Carn Dum, but I thought it was fairly difficult in single player, as you can't divide the guardians among players.

Three Trials easy in solo? Wow, I mean it's no Carn Dum, but I thought it was fairly difficult in single player, as you can't divide the guardians among players.

agreed!! I've gotten lucky and beaten Carn Dum, but prob have 20 solo games against Three Trials without a win.

I stand by what I said. Three Trials was easy (for my deck obviously) in solo.

I was about to say, if you use Boromir it becomes 90% easier, but I was saying in a general sense.

Three Trials was harder. If anything this almost feels like Encounter at Amon Din to me, where the mechanic is very cool and makes up for the quest being a little bit easier. Like GrandSpleen said, Nightmare mode with this one is gonna be really cool.

Not all quests are supposed to grind your teeth into dust.

Proof of an easy quest every 3rd or 4th pack:

Shadows of Mirkwood: The Hills of Emyn Muil #4

Khazad-dum: The Long Dark #4

Against the Shadow: Encounter at Amon Din #3

The Ring-maker: Trouble in Tharbad #3

Angmar Awakened: Across the Ettenmoors #3

The Dream-chaser: Temple of the Deceived #3

No spoiler review...

This quest is long. I've played it twice now and both of them were slogs. The quest map mechanic is neat and I liked it, but the endless undead and treacheries from the encounter deck are the consequence of that. And frankly I'm still a bit tired of undead after Angmar. I know some of you really like them though. None of the treacherous really break your back, but catching the wrong one early without a cancel can make the game much harder.

And speaking of making things harder, read all the cards and the insert carefully. I took at least two extra turns because I forgot about the Gate Key ability.

Just about to play this for the first time, and somethings not quite clear to me from reading the rules insert - it says that when i travel away from the active location, after it has enough progress on it, i remove the progress and it is considered "explored". If i move back to that location later, is it still "explored", or do i need to put progress on it all over again?

It is still flipped over (you never flip it back to the Uncharted side) but it will have no progress on it, so you will have to put progress on it again.