We tried the 1st and 2nd quest tracks with 5 players last week. We were starting a 4 player game (w/ 3 Heroes each) last week and someone showed up last minute. Rather than make him sit in the corner, we 'dealt him in.' So two of us gave up a Hero each for a total of 2 Players- 3 Heroes each and 3 Players- 2 Heroes each. We didn't make any changes, just drew an extra encounter card during staging. In my opinion it scaled appropriately for the 2nd quest track- due to the number of X Player effects, but the 1st track was not very challenging.

Does anyone have any opinions/experimented with whether the game scales appropriately for say 5-6 Players?

You must be playing a house rule then. All hero cards are considered unique so you couldn't currently have more than 4 players until they release 3 more heroes. Other than that, I don't see why you couldn't expand it.

Edit: Sorry, I missed the part where you said you played with fewer heroes per person.

I would recommend taking two encounter decks and removing all the locations from one of them. Then combined the two. The reason I suggest this is that you could get lots and lots of locations and since you can only deal with one a turn (without Northern Trackers) you will quickly become overwhelmed with them if you just play with a standard encounter deck.

Apophenia said:

I like this idea.

As for the 5 player game, i see no reason why you cant do that. I think It will scale in the opposite direction in terms of difficulty at that point though. You will be getting more and more threats, but less heroes to deal with them. 6 would be harder than 5 and so on.

It also seems like as soon as we have 3 new heroes for every sphere the game should easily scale to as many players as you want. Assuming we also get more scenario and encounter cards along the way as well and build out some rather large custom quests.

Might be fun to play with 9 players all "Fellowship of the Ring" style.

Nice idea about the locations. The rate limiting step seems to be the active location, and they did seem to pile up. Foruntately about mid-game we had two Northern Trackers and a Lorien Guide out which made it less of a problem.

CrowOfPyke said:

The decrease in difficulty will lessen with more than four players, though, since there's only four spheres, so after the fourth player you'll just be adding 'more of the same'.

I think it worked with 5 players to some degree because even though we had the additional player, the other players were rendered less effective w/ fewer Heroes. I think if we had played w/ 3 Heroes a piece (total of 15 Heroes) it would have been broken. My hope was that the game would scale better if the total number of Heroes remained constant (e.g. easier/solo quests set to 2-3 Heroes and more difficult/team quests set to say 10-12 Heroes) and the number of Players did not matter as much as they could divide up Heroes however they choose similar to Death Angel Combat teams. I think the majority of the time this doesn't happen, and agree that the game does not seem to scale naturally (at least within the core set) with either Hero # (1-Hero teams are usually not as effective in general even with deck editing) or Player # (the game changes in overall difficulty based on number of players.)