Disapointed with this

By ffgfan, in The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

Posted at

this might be a bit off-topic, but I was just wondering how easy it is to "forget" rules and play the game wrong especially if you play solo. Player that are eager to play might just read the rules and start playing. Without double checking later on (e.g. because everything goes smoothly) there might some things be forgotten, e.g. resource matching or shadow cards, as in solo-play there is no one to remind you of the rules you forget. Thus, the game might turn out to be fairly easy for some players, resulting in a quick loss of interest. And that would be real shame....since I personally like the game a lot, despite the luck factor and its difficulty.

So even if ffg sells a lot of core sets...I wonder if there is a substantial number of players that put the game in the shelf to be covered in dust. I don't even say that forgeting rules is very bad, on the contraire, I can see how it is fairly obvious to forget about some of the stuff and I think it might be a real threat to the overall success of the game concept.

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faith_star83 said:

this might be a bit off-topic, but I was just wondering how easy it is to "forget" rules and play the game wrong especially if you play solo. Player that are eager to play might just read the rules and start playing. Without double checking later on (e.g. because everything goes smoothly) there might some things be forgotten, e.g. resource matching or shadow cards, as in solo-play there is no one to remind you of the rules you forget. Thus, the game might turn out to be fairly easy for some players, resulting in a quick loss of interest. And that would be real shame....since I personally like the game a lot, despite the luck factor and its difficulty.

So even if ffg sells a lot of core sets...I wonder if there is a substantial number of players that put the game in the shelf to be covered in dust. I don't even say that forgeting rules is very bad, on the contraire, I can see how it is fairly obvious to forget about some of the stuff and I think it might be a real threat to the overall success of the game concept.

I found I forget to raise my threat by 1 every refresh phase when playing solo >.<

That said I dont think that people finding the game easy and giving up is a real danger. Firstly I think its worth pointing out that even though the game's solo play is a great selling point the fact that its so easy to get others to join in (just give them a deck and scale up the encounters) and since the quests (especially the 3rd) in the box are designed to work better in multiplayer there will always be a very strong multiplayer following.
On top of that I dont think that easier play experiences are necisarily a bad thing, for instance there was a player on the forums a few days ago who plays with the house rule of the Questing phase being optional. This dramatically reduces the difficulty of the game but hes having a ball with it regardless! I think there will be very few people who will honestly drop the game because they missread a rule, the same could be sad for any game at the end of the day.

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I kept forgetting the raise threat by 1 as well every few rounds but usually caught myself by the end of the next round.

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Entropy42 said:

Personally, I'm disappointed with the amount of luck in this game, and I really disagree that luck is a greater factor in W:I. In this game, getting a string of non-effectual treachery cards can hand you the game. Getting nothing but locations will usually make you lose if you aren't playing Northern Tracker (conversely the game is very easy if this happens and you are). Getting Caught in the Web during setup or turn 1 of the 3rd scenario is pretty much game over, etc.

The thing I've always liked about card games (vs dice rolling) is while there is always a random element, at least if you get screwed/lucky with card draw, you know that card won't be coming up again. In dice randomness, you can just roll low all game and lose regardless of how good/bad your strategy is. This game is the same way. If all the hard locations/enemies/treacheries come up as shadow cards, you got the card out of the way and you didn't even have to suffer its effect. Basically the difficulty is a very wide range just based on what you draw. Hopefully this will be mitigated somehow with future cards, but it seems to me that its more like a core part of the game.

The second thing that is disappointing is the way they scaled difficulty for multiplayer. To me, its baffling. Why make a card like the 2nd step of the 2nd scenario. "reveal 1 additional card each quest phase" Why wouldn't that be "reveal 1 additional card PER PLAYER each quest phase"? That makes the game roughly twice as hard in solo play, buy only 25% harder in a 4 player game. I played two 4 player games this weekend, both times I was teaching 2 new players and playing with only the stock decks. We absolutely stomped the 1st scenario in 4 turns in the first game, and beat the 2nd scenario with a combined score of 100. No one's hero had damage at the end of the game, and we had about 10 allies in play.

Yes, this is easily fixed. I can just make house rules that the quest cards all scale linearly based on the # of players. I just don't understand why this wasn't done to begin with. The power of the party scales linearly with # of players, and maybe even slightly better than that (I would say 2 players are more than twice as powerful as a single player).

I think they'll have to revise a couple of rules to turn this into a game that works well no matter how many players there are. More careful quest design will help somewhat, but I don't believe it can fix all of the inherent issues (like the surge mechanism).

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We are trying a few differemt things to toughen it up a little:

1. At 3 players we dish out 4 cards on the quest, 4 players we dish out 6 cards. We found in a couple of games late that we would produce enough Willpower to knock out heaps of progress markers is we coordinated ourselves so that was the idea to take the edge off those big numbers

2. We all play Dual Sphere decks now. Still just with the starters at the moment but it means that resource management gets flagged earlier and is more limiting. For us, when more heroes get released, this is where it will be so we are doing it now. So far so good

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Koz said:

Of course, that's the point. It makes it more difficult. All that you posted is something I'm well aware of, obviously, since I mentioned that I used three core sets to build four 50 card decks. That's part of the current challenge of the game. Future expansions will add new cards that will make deck building easier, to be sure, but they will also add more challenges. Hopefully the challenges added will keep pace with the new options added to players.

Until that time though, 50 card decks are the rule for a standard game, not an optional self-imposed challenge that you can choose to use or not use. The beginner decks are just that: decks made for beginners learning the game. After playing the game a time or two, you are clearly supposed to build full decks.

As I said in my previous post, I'm not trying to attack anyone, I've just been noticing there are some people that are talking about how easy the game is, yet many of those people are using 30 card decks. It's a little like playing a video game, putting it on easy mode, then talking about how you beat the game without breaking a sweat. Well, no duh!

People need to play the game with the full rules before telling other people how easy or not easy it is. Seems self-evident really. That being said, like I mentioned in my earlier post, the game might be too easy right now. I won't know for sure until my friends all have their own stuff and build optimal 50 card decks.

Koz

I find this argument really strange. When I said, "we beat everything easily with the stock decks" I meant that to indicate that we beat the scenarios with relatively weak decks. You don't think that tuned 50 card decks will be better than the 30 card stock decks? Yes, if it was legal to build a 30 card deck it would clearly be better than a built 50 card deck. But I don't exactly get to draw my "power cards" all the time with a 30 card deck, as I have only 1 or 2 of those cards in the deck, since I'm limited to 1 core set. Each deck has only 1 Gandalf, for example. If I built a 50 card deck, it would probably have 3 of him. Making my chance to draw him go up by 80%. Same with some of the powerful attachments that are single or double copies in the core set. I'm really just surprised to hear someone say that the stock decks should be considered overpowered. I have been figuring that it would be *better* to have a legit deck composed of 3 core sets and 1-2 spheres. The session reports of people doing quest 3 solo seem to bear this out, as no one seems to be able to beat it with a pre-con, but some have had success with constructed 50 card decks.

Regardless, even if my decks were just 3 of every card released so far, the 4 player scenarios would be really easy and still not scale with the number of players.

I like the rule Carnivean mentioned, where they reveal 4 cards when they have 3 players and 6 when they have 4. That would probably make it a good challenge.

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I get the feeling that people that mentioned 30 card decks, meant built up 30 card decks with the extra Gandalfs and extra staple cards, not the stock 30 card starters. I don't think any of the starters stands much of a chance against the 2nd or 3rd quest on it's own.