At the beginning of the game, if you just have 2 players, should the person who will be the hero choose just 2 heroes to play, or can he choose up to 4. The rules say to just take 2 heroes if you only have 2 players. I assume there is nothing stopping him from playing the full 4 characters, I guess you would just play using the 5 side on enemy cards. Am I right on this?

From the standpoint of game balance you do not want to play the game with 2 heroes. For plain, vanilla JitD with no expansions 3 heroes seems balanced. You would use the 4 players stats.

Using any of the expansions 4 heroes seems to be the minimum for success. So you would use the 5 players stats for that.

theumph said:

You are absolutely correct. Although the rules allow for as few as 2 heroes to enter a dungeon, doing so is madness. In practice the game is best balanced with 4 heroes, regardless of how many players there are. I might consider playing 3 heroes if there were only four players, but even then I imagine my friends and I would rather have a 4th "communal" hero anyway.

Agreed that taking more than two heroes is probably a good idea from a game balance perspective, it can be a bit rough with only 2. If you are new to the game though and the bookeeping for 4 heroes seems like a bit too much for one person, you could include some house rules for when you are playing with only two heroes. Some common ones for playing with only 2 heroes are:

Overlord only draws 1 card per turn instead of 2

Overlord only collects 1 threat per turncurse instead of 2

Heroes get to draw 2, choose 1 treasure everytime they get treasure from a chest

Possibly playing with the Spawn Marker from the Campaign game (if you don't have either RTL or SoB, basically that means that the first spawn is normal for the Overlord, every spawn after that costs 15 bonus threat).

Playing with any or all of these house rules can help make things a bit more "balanced" for the heroes if you'd only like to play 2 of them at one time. Usually I'd just go with 3 or 4 heroes, but if someone is new to the game, controlling more than 2 heroes at a time may be a bit daunting.