Guys,

I'm really losing my nerve here. I just can't beat Scenario 2! I tried all kinds of decks / hero combinations and played easily 12 times so far. It's really frustrating.

The closest I got to success is with a tactics / spirit deck (using Gimli, Eowyn and Dunhere) but even then I never manage eventhough I defeated two Hill Trolls in a row. The main killers are usually:

1) Hill Troll

2) Surge creatures

3) Evil Storm

4) The Brown lands

5) Cluttering up of locations making questing impossible.

Firstmost I already think the set-up pretty tough:

I turn up 1 card from the encounter deck, look for the Troll. This usually leaves me with two cards in the staging area even before I start out. The I start questing and turn up another card, so by the time questing resolves I already have/had to deal with 3 encounter cards. Often I hit a surge creature that hits another creature or one of the nastier locations. And that's only turn one and I still have to deal with the troll!

Once I hit - barely alive - the second part of the quest. Enemies and locations start to clutter up the staging area and make it difficult to quest and fight/defend.

Then it goes on:

1) Beating that freak without Gandalf's help usually leaves all my heroes barely alive and uses up my resources.

2) These babies all to often clutter up the staging area and make it hard to quest because there are a) too many enemies b) too many locations.

3) After beating the troll I always end with more than 35 somehow (if not Pursued by Shadows does)...and I usually lose one or two heroes / allies to this one.

4) This card always shows up after I already travelled somewhere anyway and can't deal with it right away, making questing impossible and raising the threat bar incredibly fast. Gladden Fields is usually not so far away, too. My Northern Tracker is already buried since I had to deal with Trolls and surgers.

5) Especially in the second part of the quest this gets a serious issue.

Well, so I just set out to venture down the Anduin again, but faced a Hill Troll, Eatern Crows, Dol Guldur Orcs and an Enchanted Stream after the questing phase and just lost my motivation.

So I am really frustrated right now and just wanted to know if I am too stupid to play this game or anybody else has had similar experiences.

I beat it my first time through total dumb luck. "When Revealed" cards that impacted nothing because my threat was too low, locations drawn as shadow cards, you name it, everything went right when it came to drawing from the encounter deck. Deck was Tactics (Legolas & Thalin) plus Spirit (Eowyn), I think the low initial threat (27) was a big help.

Since then, I've played it a couple of times (Tactics + Spirit, or Leadership + Lore) and never even got close to completing it.

I'm almost wondering, because of the need to manage your threat (the troll and the race down the river can both really inflate your threat) and the need to heal damage (lots of cards that do damage out of combat, and some ugly monsters), if a Spirit / Lore deck might do better.

Yeah that one is really tough and nearly impossible in solo play unless EVERYTHING goes your way. Out of the 3 it is the hardest for solo play. It does scale really really well to 3 and 4 players though. You really need all 4 decks running at the same time to have the best chance and even then it involves a lot of luck and good draw/play on the part of the players. Those hill trolls are nasty.

One thing that's particularly nasty.. be careful when you finish the river part (2b) of the quest. If you've committed everyone to questing and move on to the last stage, enemies can engage again.. So if you've let a crapload of enemies in staging, you'll get slaughtered. I made the mistake but luckily I had enough resources to play Grim Resolve and readied everyone.

I suggest trying a multi-sphere deck, maybe spirit and leadership? With lots of Sneak Attack and discard pile-reuse you could just bounce Gandalf in and out of play Many times

That said I havnt tried that yet, thats just the deck I made after losing to the scenario 3 times in a row. I was goign to test play it later today so Ill let you know how it goes =P

I've tried this a few times and never yet got to the third quest. It is horribly hard. My next idea is a tactics & lore or Leadership and lore deck. The thing is a huge combat fest as far as I can tell. Nigh on impossible to get out from under the hill troll without a lot of wounds. Leadership and lore might work because leadership can generate the extra resources to help pay for all the healing. I suspect though that I'll just get mullered at the ambush.

I've had success with my Gimlore (Glorfindel, Beravor, Gimli) Lore/Tactics deck (with basically all the core cards except the expensive Tactics ones and no Rain of Arrows).

I let the troll hit Gimli first round to get his blood up and then use feint or forest snare to stop the thing attacking again. Gimli should kill it in a couple of rounds.

Then the journey down the Anduin can take a while, but the key is to pull as much as you can into engagement and let Gimli hit them, while everyone else is concentrating on questing (the big danger with Gimli hanging on 4 damage is the Evil Storm encounter card, so you might want to heal him a point). There's no need to rush the second quest, but you have to make sure that when you leave the boat that there are as few (preferably none) enemies as possible on the stage, or you have a snare and a couple of cannon fodder handy. With Lore's card churn, with a bit of luck you can get ahead of the game and actually prepare for the moment when you have to leave the boats.

Thanks for all the contributions! I feel kind of relieved, that everybody has a hard time not only me!

I finally did it though: I decided to give it another go with the Gimli, Eowyn and Dunhere deck. And I breezed through the quests with ease this time.

I even only one Veteran Axehand (ally) and I ended up with an used unused Gandalfs on my hand (I used him three times anyway thanks to Stand and Fight ).

What did the trick? I had Gimli with Dwarven Waraxe and 4 wounds for massive damage against the troll and then picked up Unexpected Courage and a Citadel Armor on my way. Add Feints and Quick Strikes to the mix and you can imagine what a warmonger Gimli became. Dunhere did his share to the weaklings in the staging area and I used Eowyn and Gandalf for questing.

I even shrugged off a second Hill Troll (Feint) and Chief Uthak (Quick) without ever getting wounded.

Score: 30 + 0 + 9 = 39 -18 (2x Hill Troll, Chief Uthak, 2x Gladden Fields) = 21

What I realized: I didn't turn up one Brown Lands, which probably helped keep my Threat down (along with Gandalf and The Galadhrim's Greetings).

As for the strategy: I guess it's really important to quest and get rid of locations as wes as enemies so the Threat doesn't rise to quickly. And I guess you need loads of luck on the card draw.

One question: What's your take on Banks of the Anduin? Leave it or quest it? I felt that it can slow down quite badly to always "lose" three progress tokens on a recurring location.

faith_star83 said:

Leave it, imo. It will hang there with 1 threat, but otoh, using 3 questies to get through it are resources that, with a bit of luck, could more than deal with the card you'd be drawing instead of it.

faith_star83 said:

Wow, thats an excellent score! Ill be sure to try out several decks playing Scenario 2 on my own, including this one.
Now all thats left to do is atempt the third scenario on your own eh? Think you can take out a Ringwraith? =P

I managed to succeed at the 2nd scenario yesterday. I beat by accepting that you'll take damage from the Troll for a couple turns. Use allies to block and reduce the damage and use your heroes to gang up and attack it. I was also lucky to keep drawing locations in stage 2 rather than monsters.

faith_star83 said:

Quest it but make sure to that you can get into a fight on the same turn. Then Banks of Anduin becomes a Shadow effect. However I'm not certain if the Forced would still trigger as a Shadow effect. Does being a shadow card count as being in play?

Apophenia said:

Nope, only shadow effets resolve when a card comes out of shadow! Personally I quested it only when I knew it was going to be benificial. As in, if I was afraid that it would stop progress on my quest I didnt bother (The second quest especially, with its 16 progress needed) That said it IS a great buffer sometimes!

I beat this with a Spirit/Leadership deck last night with 37 points. Not as great as some runs but it was definately epic! Luckily I didnt encounter the 2nd Troll though. I managed to control the flow of enemies so well with Aragorn + Unexpected Courage that by the time Ambush hapened there was nothing to fight really.

I've played it 21 times, now. Still no luck

I think using Leadership as part of the deck is a must. Then I mostly tried combining it with Tactics (Gimli), but the farthest I got was 13 progress in stage 2. I guess, I'll try combining Leadership with Spirit or Lore next.

I'm particularly unhappy that the neato-Gandalf combos have been revealed as non-legit. Repeatedly using Gandalf and getting the Steward of Gondor card are the only thing that gave me the feeling it might be possible to beat the scenario solo with an incredible amount of luck.

I managed to beat it yesterday using my Leadership/Spirit deck (Aragorn/Theodrid/Dunhere).

Early on I managed to reduce my threat by 6 with one of the Spirit cards, giving me a bit of breathing room before the Troll came stomping down to engage me. I played Gandalf to wound him, then once I had some Allies in play I engaged the Troll, letting him kill one of the Allies. I had just enough with my Heroes and Allies to finish him off. I was only really pestered by some Wargs in the first part, but good old Dunhere was able to attack them still after they'd scurried cowardly back to the staging area.

I was pretty lucky travelling down the Anduin, but also had masses of Allies (inc Faramir) in play which ment I made it through in two turns. The final section of the quest was easily done with only Chieftan Uthak to contend with.

I finally managed to beat this scenario solo last night after about 10 attempts! (Brutal scenario! I haven't plucked up the courage to try Escape from Dol Guldur yet!!!).

I managed it with a combined Lore / Leadership deck.

My heroes were Berevor, Denethor, and Theodred.

The low starting threat of the three heroes - 26 I think from memory - provides a bit of time to get 'tooled up' before the hill troll will engage the heroes, which I think is vital to success. I used Berevor's ability to keep picking up 2 cards in the hope that Forest Snare would leap into my hand. If you are lucky (and I was), a Forest snare will come out - I then used this to shackle the Hill Troll and prevent him from attacking.

Theodred's ability is really useful as it allowed me to give him one extra resource token each turn (I always commit him to questing) which meant I could keep his resource pool to a useful amount so I could play Leadership cards. Once Steward of Gondor comes out then the situation is even better as this gives him an extra 2 resource tokens - which means that although I only have one leadership hero I can potentially have 4 resource tokens to spend each round on Leadership cards in my hand(after the resource phase).

Lore and Leadership decks have a good number of useful (and relatively cheap) allies - getting lots of these out was also key to my success - again Berevors ability comes in handy here to quickly get these cards into your hand. I also had 3 Gandalf Cards in my deck - combined with sneak attack this was very useful - he helped keep my threat counter down an awful lot!

I did lose Denethor towards the end (quest card 3A) but by this point I had about 8 allies in play so was able to cope with the loss!

The above strategy (with a good share of luck it has to be said (i.e. forest snare arrived before hill troll, shadow card that removes attachment (e.g. forest snare) didn't hit me, steady stream of allies, timely appearance by Gandalf, etc.) resulted in a triumphant victory with a score of 44 (final threat score = 38 + 8 (dead Denethor ) + 2 damage tokens on heroes - 4 victory points (hill troll)). After about 10 failures I was more than happy with that score!!!!

I was beginning to wonder if it was actually possible to beat this scenario (playing solo) and was getting slightly disheartened with the game - I'm pleased to say that my faith in the game has been renewed - it is possible, don't give up!!!!

jhaelen said:

Which combos? and where have they been revealed as non-legit? BGG?

pumpkin said:

It was reported that the text said 'When Gandalf is played...'. Being played is defined as paying the card's cost (this is in contrast to 'put into play'), so you couldn't use Gandalf's passive ability if it was put into play by a different effect, like Sneak Attack.

Tried to put this in the right thread...

I finally beat this scenario!!! Legolas, Gimli, and Eowyn. My score only ended up being 26, but both Gimli and Legolas died in stupid ways in the second-to-last and last turns (Crows and a Treachery, respectively). I gotta say, seeing a pack of crows take down Gimli was kinda funny. Anyway, basically Gimli tanked (I still don't think that two Citadel Plates makes sense, but I can't find a rule against it), Eowyn quested, and Legolas sniped/placed progress tokens. Has anyone else had success with this hero combo?

My friend and I got clobbered on this one too last night. My friend played a lore/spirit deck and I myself used a spirit/tactics deck.

Heroes were Eleanor, Legolas, Eowyn, Glorfindel, Beravor and Dunhere. Obviously, we didn't have enough punch to beat the Hill troll (disposed of it with a few Gandalfs) and didn't produce enough resources.

Eleanors ability was very useful though. Might try the tactics/spirit deck again but with Gimli or Thalin instead of Eowyn

My problem with Eleanor is that while her ability is useful, having to exhaust a hero is just too high of a cost. Especially since Spirit has a 1 cost event that does the same thing. IMO it is nearly impossible to beat the Hill Troll in Solo without Gimli or Forest Snare.

conykchameleon said:

So far I only tried combining Tactics with Leadership using Gimli, Aragorn, and Theodred. Since I didn't include the plate armor, Gimli ends up being too fragile, since he has to tank the troll for a single round. So, combining Gimli with two Lore heroes or replacing Theodred with Legolas (and including the plate armor) might be a better way to go.

conykchameleon said:

Play all spirit deck. Keep threat down. You can play for hours without engaging troll and you can play every ally from your deck, you can gather 100 resources, you can score all possible victory points and then kill Troll with 3 gandalf strikes. When you deal final hits be sure to have another 2 gandalfs in hand (reshuffling is the key). Nothing can touch you since you have tons of counters. Just remember to not touch the troll before you are ready to win the game next turn. So far 4 out of 4 games won with this strategy. I am not sure if it will be this easy when deck grows to 50 cards, but so far this is very effective, yet boring strategy.

guciomir said:

I'm really confused by this post. You can't "play for hours without engaging troll" because you keep staging one card from the deck and you'll have to send Heroes and Allies out to quest every turn to prevent your threat from increasing. Meanwhile, stuff like Misty Mountain Goblins, Dul Guldur Orcs and Wolf Riders come attack you, so you have to handle them, too. All the while your threat automatically increases at the end of every turn. And there's no reshuffling your deck; once it's gone, it's gone.

I suggest you revisit the rules; sounds like you're getting a lot of them wrong.

jhaelen said:

Gandalf is worded "After Gandalf enters play...", so those combos with Sneak Attack, Stand and Fight, etc., still work.