We've just spent the afternoon playing through Issues 1-4. For some context, we'd already commited to buying Core (which arrived recently), and while I'd watched a series of Learn To Play videos, my little brother has come in completely blind. We'd been sleeving some Core cards and just having a look at art, but not done anything. We sat down together playing solo-handed, and went through each issue in turn. Bro has absolutely enjoyed Magazines 1-4, while I stumbled over a couple of things expecting a phase / keyword resolve to happen, but the key to playing the Magazine seems to be: FORGET EVERYTHING YOU ALREADY KNOW.
Bro followed along happily while I'd occasionally have to flick back and wonder why we weren't doing a certain action/phase/resolve at a time. This is the key to that much-maligned "if you don't know, ignore it" rule in Issue 1. It works perfectly if you just go along with the scripted plays in 1 + 2. It appears cards are straight reprints from Core (and beyond? I wouldn't know yet), so keywords are on a few cards that the Magazine doesn't bring-up at any point. There's one clunky thing in each Issue, sadly. 1 refers to Pippin when it clearly means Merry in that moment; 2 tells you include three copies of a card in a deck when you've only received two of them (so we grabbed one fom core), and it refers to drawing a card that's not in the right place (still a scripted play through at that point); 3 gives you a new Pippin hero but it isn't obvious you should include THAT version rather than the one from Issue 1 - means when you draw a specific card, you can't play it as it's the wrong sphere. It often refers to adding a "progress token" to your resource pools per hero at the start of a turn too, just a silly complication. 4 basically just throws you at it with a deck from the 80-ish player cards you've gathered so far.
Few typos here and there. I'd love to see this go ahead in a few months time, hopefully the uptake on it is enough to greenlight a full-run, but it needs one more pass to smooth out some minor issues. Can't see anything that an experienced player would want from the series other than to 100% collection, but for introducing players to a brand-new game, it would draw you in. It's very thematic - we've left the shire, hunted gollum, crossed the barrow-downs, and survived Bree - and has a carrot dangling at the end of each Issue to make you want the next one.
- G&M