Hi,
a few questions for the experts.

1. in the advanced and tournament rules, a player can start with one character. In that case, the threat level will be 11-12 (in case of picking Gimli, Aragorn or Glorfindel).
a. If I've understand correctly, this means that you will not encounter the toughest enemies. Am I correct to assume that?
b. Does it impede quest progress?
c. Currently, who is the best hero?
Thank you.

Mike

mike2008 said:

A. The strongest enemies will take longer to leave the staging area of their own accord with only one character generating threat. However, you can choose to encounter them during the Player Engagement step if you wish to get them out of the staging area for questing purposes.

B. It can. With only one character, until you get some allies out you're going to have to choose to either commit to the quest or deal with enemies. You can always choose to engage the strongest enemies, but with only one hero you have to be pretty careful.

C. I couldn't say yet.

Rest were previously answered but as for C, hard to answer that until we get the chance to play it. Game is not released yet.

....But if we had to pick a best hero, it would probably be Aragorn or Glorfindel as their threat rating is the highest (12) of the core heroes.

I am skeptical about the viability of single hero strategies. Yes, strong enemies may not engage you, but they will stay in the staging area. And, is they stay in the staging area, you will quickly reach the point where you are unable to successfully quest, and start gaining up huge amounts of threat. To make matters worse, having a single hero makes combat almost impossible and slows down resource generation to a crawl, which means you want be able to clear baddies out from the staging area.

That being said, if you want a single hero, it would be hard to beat Aragorn, simply because he has the ability to unbow himself.

If you want to play with a single hero use Aragorn and 3 copys of Gandalf.It will be wiser my friend .

Unfortunately that means you'll have to wait 5 turns before you can play your first Gandalf by which point you're probably well on your way to losing. The only way I can see for a viable one-hero strategy is to have a deck full of 'generate extra resources' cards, and as yet not too many of those have been revealed.

In MECCG, playing with very few characters had advantages because it meant you would face less enemies, and a lot of hazard avoidance was dependent on small parties traveling through Middle Earth. In this game, the basic mechanic for drawing encounter cards is independent of the number of heroes so a big advantage of having small parties is taken away.

ClydeCloggie said:

Seriously i dont think if he play solo will have any chance to win with only 1 hero even with a deck based on resources.Maybe a deck based on 1 hero will work only with two or more players.Decks with only one hero at solo games will never have a chance to complete a quest (i think).

So, who will be the first brave (foolish?) soul to try the Nightmare variant rules starting with only one character? And how far can you get before dying horribly?

As for the infamous question #3, the best character is Gimli, because he's Gimli.

DrNate said:

Given that the third scenario requires you to imprison one of your heroes and I don't believe Allies carry over...I'd say the latest anyone could possibly last with one character would be the beginning of Escape from Dol Guldur, where they'd pretty much auto-lose.

The "Expert Challenge""Nightmare Level" rules don't really specify what you do with the cards in play after each scenario.

If you just reset everything, that makes sense, but that makes "Expert challenge" no different than playing the three scenarios one at a time at three separate sittings. Unless people plan to specifically tailor their decks to face each individual scenario. I imagined having one deck made to take on whatever gets thrown at it.

DrNate said:

Save for the fact that you are using the same combination of players, decks and heroes in each scenario, you are correct.

And its continuous so no healing in between or threat reset. I think nightmare mode will be very hard. No reset between will make it a very long grind.