I just finished a 2-handed solo game of The Woodland Realm. I randomized the quest cards and the encounter sets, using the Quick Build rules. The stage 3 quest card that I got was The Forest of Great Fear, which reads:

"When Revealed: The opposing team searches the encounter deck and discard pile or an enemy, adds it to the staging area, then places a resource on an enemy in play with cost 2 or higher. While this stage is in play, the enemy with a resource gets +2attack, +2defense, and is immune to player card effects."

In my encounter deck, there no enemies with cost 2 or higher. They are all cost 0 or 1. For reference, the encounter sets in my deck are: 3, 4, 5, 7, 1, 12, 13.

So... no enemy gets a resource, I guess? Is it intended that this build is possible?

I ended up giving a resource to a 1 cost enemy, choosing the warg that can retreat to the staging area, because it would be the most annoying. And it was (although he only retreated once).

By the way, while the randomization idea is an excellent idea, in practice this creates many encounter deck "nonbos." For example, you could end up with Chieftain Uthak, who puts an orc into play when you engage him, but 0 other orcs in the encounter deck. So, a whiff. Or, you could get a location into play which adds +1 threat to all Spiders, but have only 3 spiders in the whole deck (the ones that come in the encounter set which includes that location). That sort of thing. If you want to be able to build a really easy quest, this is great. However, it also means that if you want a challenging experience, randomization is pretty much not an option.

Oh and one side-question: Thror's Key CAN be attached to unique locations, right? Somehow I thought not, but when I wanted to do that during my game, I noticed there is no text preventing it. So I did! I thought maybe there had been an errata, but I looked and didn't see one. So, legal play yes?

Thanks for responses!

Thror's Key on unique is legal -- but a lot of quests have their unique locations be immune. Enjoy.

Eliminating the possibility of whiffs would complicate quick-build immensely. With just 5-card encounter sets and a 3 point limit, creating a weak 0-point orc for Ufthak to put into play may not be practical. But even without whiffs, a random collection of encounter sets is still going to widely vary in strength as some encounter sets have synergy with others while some don't. However, the consistency of regular quests widely vary in difficulty, and any quest varies in difficulty dramatically depending on what comes out when -- I don't think quickbuild can deliver a consistent difficulty for solo play, but I don't see that as a defect. I see it as a way of providing variety....

However, I think your solution of finding the best you can instead of taking a whiff is reasonable. You could do the same with Ufthak, pulling out an enemy if lacking an orc (thematically, a warg would be the next best choice, but a troll would also be thematic.)

Another option is to make a larger meta-set and just randomly select from that

Creatures: 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13

Orcs & Wargs: 2, 5, 8, 11, 12, 14

More synergy, but with 5 sets selected from a possible six there's only six possible "orcs & wargs" quests and that'd impact the variety dramatically. But if you combined with Wizard's Quest and gave the creatures to Woodland Realm and Orcs/Wargs to Wizard's Quest, you'd end up with varied quests with consistent enemy types.

I would just suggest that encounter combos should be included within the same encounter set. Meaning, if future sets like these get developed. And/or cover your bases to prevent a total whiff. For example, include at least one 2-cost or higher enemy in 8 sets. Since there are 14 and quick build has you choose 7, this means there is no possible combination where your deck does not have a 2-cost enemy, using the quick build rules. Or things like including 1 orc for Ufthak to work with within his own encounter set. It could still whiff, but a quick build would result in a forced whiff-- just a lucky one.

This would also mean adjusting other point values, as adding a 2-cost enemy in that many sets would break the current balance, but that's just a mathematical issue to work out.

Advanced build is totally different, since you choose cards with careful planning, presumably. If you're putting a "must whiff nonbo" into your deck there, it's intentional.

Anyway, I just want to appreciate the "variety" suggested by a randomized quest like this, it's just hard when "random" sometimes results in "partially broken."

So math time: the 14 sets breakdown as follows for points:

1,2: 3 point enemy

3: 3 point location

4,5: 2 point location, 1 point treachery

6: 2 point enemy, 1 point treachery

7-11: two 1 point enemies, 1 point treachery

12,13: 1 point enemy, 2 1 point location

14: 1 point enemy, 2 1 point treachery

Since Forest of Great Fear wants 2 or higher, it can only be satisfied by 3 of 14 sets -- that's harder than I would intuitively think when picking a random seven, occurring 9.6% of the time. Still too often, I think the "2 or higher" should be omitted -- the opposing team is doing the picking, so it's not like they won't pick the toughest target without that instruction. That appears to be the only quest card that can whiff.

Ufthak wants an orc that's not in his set, that can only be satisfied by 3 of 13 remaining sets -- odds of whiffing are 12.2%, low but not rare. Including wargs as a possible target could shrink that percentage dramatically.

Massing at Night wants 0-cost enemies and doesn't include it in its own set. There are only 3 sets with 0-cost enemies, so like Ufthak there's a 12.2% chance of whiffing -- and unlike Ufthak, that's *all* the treachery does. I'm not sure what to do as a fallback here, probably surging in Quickbuild would be best.

Surprising that there are so few 2 and 3 cost enemies. Pretty decent chance for that quest card to whiff in “random” mode.

What is this 9,6%? I don't get the same result so one of us got to be wrong somewhere ^^. to me the only solution for not having this enemy is to have no set with this. So it is:
11/14*10/13*9/12*8/11*7/10*6/9. And if calculate it right it make 15%. So in 15% of decks there is no enemy with 2 or more points.

There is a lot of issue with playing this set in full cooperative mode. Mainly dealing with "the opposing team choose". You can't be objective in choosing the worst card, and it still help you to look at many encounter cards in an encounter deck that is normally unknown.

2 hours ago, Rouxxor said:

What is this 9,6%? I don't get the same result so one of us got to be wrong somewhere ^^. to me the only solution for not having this enemy is to have no set with this. So it is:
11/14*10/13*9/12*8/11*7/10*6/9. And if calculate it right it make 15%. So in 15% of decks there is no enemy with 2 or more points.

There is a lot of issue with playing this set in full cooperative mode. Mainly dealing with "the opposing team choose". You can't be objective in choosing the worst card, and it still help you to look at many encounter cards in an encounter deck that is normally unknown.

You forgot to pick a seventh encounter set. So multiply your result with 5/8 and you will get Dale's result.

It work perfectly this way ^^

13 hours ago, Rouxxor said:

What is this 9,6%? I don't get the same result so one of us got to be wrong somewhere ^^. to me the only solution for not having this enemy is to have no set with this. So it is:
11/14*10/13*9/12*8/11*7/10*6/9. And if calculate it right it make 15%. So in 15% of decks there is no enemy with 2 or more points.

There is a lot of issue with playing this set in full cooperative mode. Mainly dealing with "the opposing team choose". You can't be objective in choosing the worst card, and it still help you to look at many encounter cards in an encounter deck that is normally unknown.

One adaptation we did when playing this quest in 4-player: whenever you see "opposing team chooses," you can discard from the deck until you get the required type of card, instead of looking through the deck. Things like Caught in a Web you can still choose yourself, or make it random by rolling a die (although there is usually a clearly 'worst' choice for that kind of card). But I agree, in co-op, I don't like the ability to search through the encounter deck.

I played The Wizard's Quest last night (also on 'random' mode) and had a much better experience. No card ever whiffed, and the quest itself is just more challenging in general.

2 hours ago, GrandSpleen said:

One adaptation we did when playing this quest in 4-player: whenever you see "opposing team chooses," you can discard from the deck until you get the required type of card, instead of looking through the deck. Things like Caught in a Web you can still choose yourself, or make it random by rolling a die (although there is usually a clearly 'worst' choice for that kind of card). But I agree, in co-op, I don't like the ability to search through the encounter deck.  

I did the "random" thing in the game organized by me and my LGS, but this way the scenario is not challenging at all :/.

On 11/16/2018 at 7:28 AM, GrandSpleen said:

I just finished a 2-handed solo game of The Woodland Realm. I randomized the quest cards and the encounter sets, using the Quick Build rules. The stage 3 quest card that I got was The Forest of Great Fear, which reads:

"When Revealed: The opposing team searches the encounter deck and discard pile or an enemy, adds it to the staging area, then places a resource on an enemy in play with cost 2 or higher. While this stage is in play, the enemy with a resource gets +2attack, +2defense, and is immune to player card effects."

In my encounter deck, there no enemies with cost 2 or higher. They are all cost 0 or 1. For reference, the encounter sets in my deck are: 3, 4, 5, 7, 1 , 12, 13.

Encounterset 1 has "Ungoliant's Spawn" with 3 cost.

That was a typographical error I think on my part, meant to type set 10 or 11 I guess (I listed them in numerical order)