I used Gandalf to hit him in the staging area which I assume is OK as it just says an enemy 'in play'? Then I did have to engage him to let him impale himself on the gondor spear.

About the deck size, I didn't think it really mattered for casual play?

Yup! Totally fine. I did that on one of my failed attempts. I had two sneak attacks and Gandalf in hand ready to go. Then when I turned over the bad guy cards during questing I got hit with two "1 point of damage on all exhausted character" treacheries. Wipe soon followed...

Played a few more quests with this set up, I think I need to house rule a few cards because all the Gondar related resource cards seem to break the game. Not calling it easy, but I never seem to run out and it can really make things one sided.

I like the thread that is already going about this, some good solutions in there.

Picked up Journey to Rhosgobel and Return to Mirkwood today. I haven't really played the cycles in order as I've had to wait for them to become available at my local stores.. I still can't find a copy of Conflict at the Carrock unfortunately. Rhosgobel was fun, I got lucky in that I had exactly enough plant regen for the bird to win in stage 3. Didn't see that twist coming at all, so it was pretty cool. I switched up my hero order bringing the Dale hero to shoot down the bats and crows for me. I got unlucky with a Caught in the Web right off the bat, but then I got lucky in that none of the deal damage while exhausted cards came up in the encounter deck. It was a quick win, I am going to try it again today and probably won't be as lucky.

I haven't tried Return to Mirkwood yet, I wanted to re play all of them in order first before I finished the cycle.. but I don't think I will be able to wait for Carrock. Then I will be moving on to Kazad Dum! Which seems to have even less cycle packs available.. lol. Oh the joys of joining in late!

Picked up Journey to Rhosgobel and Return to Mirkwood today. I haven't really played the cycles in order as I've had to wait for them to become available at my local stores.. I still can't find a copy of Conflict at the Carrock unfortunately. Rhosgobel was fun, I got lucky in that I had exactly enough plant regen for the bird to win in stage 3. Didn't see that twist coming at all, so it was pretty cool. I switched up my hero order bringing the Dale hero to shoot down the bats and crows for me. I got unlucky with a Caught in the Web right off the bat, but then I got lucky in that none of the deal damage while exhausted cards came up in the encounter deck. It was a quick win, I am going to try it again today and probably won't be as lucky.

I haven't tried Return to Mirkwood yet, I wanted to re play all of them in order first before I finished the cycle.. but I don't think I will be able to wait for Carrock. Then I will be moving on to Kazad Dum! Which seems to have even less cycle packs available.. lol. Oh the joys of joining in late!

luckily with the Mirkwood cycle, you can play them out of order and not feel that you are ruining the overall story. each pack kind of seems like its own separate story instead of another point in time in a continuing arch

that said, Carrock is a pretty fun quest.

i would also say that some of the earlier quests ended up being kind of trivialise by later player cards, so you may homerule some of these things now, but i wouldn't get too attached to them. you'll find the difficulty ramp up quite a bit when you enter Moria

you'll also find the story a bit more put together (imo)

Alright so I finished the Mirkwood cycle with a friend, sans Carrock as I can't find that in print just yet, and we had a blast. Every mission took us more than one try to get through, some more, besides Hunt for Gollum and Return to Mirkwood, so I was really impressed with the challenge of the game. The last mission was really fun and it was just random luck that got us through. We were playing Leadership/Tactics with Aragorn, Thalin and Theodred and Spirit/Lore with Eowyn, Eleanor and Beravor. We built our decks around canceling shadow and when revealed effects and bringing along strong allies.

We got a very un lucky deal 4 damage to a player with Gollum early (after negating the second discard 10 cards in a row) which forced me to choose between Eleanor and Beravor.. I obviously wanted the ability to counter when revealed effects to try and prevent this from happening again so I went with Beravor. The next round we got a bit of luck on our side by drawing Steward of Gondor and then after that the song to let Aragorn have a tactics sphere, this combination would basically save our bacon as my tactics/leadership side would be able to build a plethora of allies through out the scenario.

So round 1 Beravor is out and we are soldiering on, I bought a Ranger to help clear threat in the staging area as many of the locations had nasty travel effects. We soldiered on and basically just focused on questing strong and letting my tactics guy meat shield as much as possible. We had to take a few risks with some un defended attacks which put Gollum's health down a bit which was scary. We got to the stage where he attempts to escape after dealing with a Hill Troll and using Gandalf to kill the Hummerhorns, and were able to quest successfully to keep playing the game. The next round made it so my buddy couldn't quest as he was guarding Gollum, so I had been saving for Gandalf and the timing couldn't be better, him and Ewoyn combined with the other allies I had bought were able to blow through this stage in one round thankfully. So Thalin wasn't committed to the quest and we just happened to draw the bats that surge, then the warg rider that surges, lol, into a tough enemy that hits for 8. This took us to the next stage, which couldn't have worked out better as my buddy had all heroes and allies readied since he couldn't quest with them and even though we were facing a lot of enemies, he was able to kill all of them in one round (taking a few undefended attacks that worked out to Gollum finishing with 3 health). But we had various shadow card cancelling effects that we didn't even have to use (the spirit cards, the leadership ally you discard, the leadership card that came with Return to Mirkwood).

I did end up using both of my cancel when reveals and Eleanor every round,and then I used my spirit card to bring one of those cancel the when reveals back. So we were very cautious and meticulous with our planning and it paid off in the end. Controlling the surprises in the deck unsurprisingly results in a much smoother gameplay experience and now that we have so many options to do so it worked out great. We finished with me in the mid 30's for threat and my buddy who had kept Gollum most of the game (didn't see many effects to switch him over) had 45. So we had 1 more round, maybe 2 if I could lower his threat (again), but chances are we would have lost if it went that long.

Overall this cycle was a lot of fun, a good mix of challenging and fun scenarios that were all very, very thematic. We were so impressed how good of a job they do making the story come to life and keeping everything so accurate and immersive. Now the trick is figuring out where I want to go next. Do I keep following the deluxe/cycle path or do I branch off and start following the campaign? Any recommendations?

It is a tough decision to make. I think we have a few more sessions of this cycle to figure it out though as we want to try out different heroes. I feel like we had figured out the most powerful combination by the end, me alternating between Dunhere and Eleanor and my buddy alternating between Gimli and Aragorn but keeping the other two the same. It would be nice to see if we can beat the scenarios with other combinations.

Glad you enjoyed the cycle, look forward to the carrock as it is one (if not the) best pack of the cycle. Nice mirkwood playthrough. Personally I always let the 10 discard happen has the card does else if memory serves essentially doing no direct harm as you probably won't run out of cards. Of course it sucks to discard all copies of e.g. a test of will, but it could be an unneeded copy of Steward and gleowine, too.

As you have Dain Ironfood I would suggest going for Over Hill and Under Hill or Khazad-Dum next as they give you some dwarves to use Dain. Personally I went Khazad-Dum with it's cycle before the hobbit Sagas. I have great memories of nearly all 9 quests and there were so many great Player Cards that fit into many decks (though Over Hill Under Hill has These Kind of Cards too, besides it's dwarf Support). Things like Arwen or Warden of healing are till today pure value.

The cycle can prepare you for the following heirs of numenor quests (which have some terrible Encounter Cards) as Khazad-Dum and it's cycle itself have some nasty stuff (*cough* sleeping sentry *cough*).

Have fun

I also figured out why some of these quests might seem easier than normal, there are some pretty big decisions that we made where if we weren't able to tell each other what we planned to do long term things could have gone very wrong. I think ignoring the table talk room also takes away a big element of the challenge.. but I just did not have fun trying to play with it in. There is always just dumb luck, you draw one really good card early and it can tilt the whole match (Steward of Gondor, Unexpected Courage etc.). Either way I had a lot of fun.. I just .. kind of wish I got a bit more bang for my buck. I understand that I can go back and play it as many times as I want, but I more expected to fail a few times (we didn't' read the quest text or the encounter deck ahead of time) and then have to go back to the drawing board than say beat the quest in a hour.

I don't know anyone who actually follows the table talk rule. It's too easy to subvert just by using careful language that it just becomes an exercise in speaking in code.

I don't usually hear people saying that they had too easy of a time this early in the game. I suspect that you would find most of the Khazad Dum + Dwarrodelf quests to be in a similar vein, then.

If you're looking to lose a little more, you have a few options: You could skip to Heirs of Numenor, where the difficulty ramps pretty noticeably, or you could try buying the Nightmare upgrades for some of the quests you found to be too easy. I'm not 100% sure your cardpool is quite big enough to be competitive there, but I suspect with good enough decks you should be able to pull out a win. If not, then it at least gives you something to shoot for and come back to until you have the cards you need to master it.

I don't want to use the term to easy, as this game is anything but easy. I think maybe I just figured a few things out that clicked well for us on the last scenario, but there is so much luck involved that perhaps a few different card draws and we were back to the drawing board. I've made sure to move slow as well, I've watched play throughs from other people to make sure I am not missing anything important. It is easy to call something easy when you are just doing something wrong

We are going to try playing through again this weekend using different hero combinations and see what happens. We both still really enjoy the game, I just don't want to move to fast and furious and blow through 400 dollars worth of content. At what point do you start shifting your deck from Best cards I can find to actually focusing on specific words like an Eagle deck or Rohan deck etc.. ? I imagine the dwarf cycle will help build a really strong dwarf deck, then it just follows from there? Are there more eagle cards or Rohan allys coming? etc..

In my experience, I couldn't even begin to start building "thematic" or keyword-associated decks until I had 3 or 4 of the Mirkwood cycle packs, the Khazad-Dum deluxe and 3-4 of its expansion packs, and The Black Riders. I skipped the Hobbit saga boxes because I frankly just don't like dwarfs, but it's absolutely true that if you want to get good, powerful decks early in your buying cycle, it's easiest to do with dwarfs (Khazad-Dum + Return to Mirkwood + 2 Hobbit saga boxes).

Even then I wasn't building keyword-associated decks that were actually good, but they were at least functional. I bought the Heirs of Numenor and a couple of its associated packs, but I never cared for the theme, so I mostly just pooled the cards into what I already had.

The Voice of Isenguard + Ringmaker cycle had some fun, interesting character cards, but the quests were totally hit and miss. I would only buy the packs if there was something highly specific that would fill out a deck I was already planning.

Assuming you've bought most of what came before, the game really hits its stride with the Road Darkens saga box and the Lost Realm deluxe box. After that, all of those little pieces, those cards that had you thinking, "What am I going to do with this?" actually start coming together.