I think I like that. Gives me confidence that playtesting and/or message board activity is affecting future releases. I really like that Northern Ranger so I hope they keep him from breaking the game.

Hmmm, while we should definitely take a wait and see approach in general, those two I just suggested were ideas thrown around after a game where the Trackers turned it from a VERY tight game into a cake-walk.

It is definitely a game changer though and a card we are watching as a group closely.

Also take a look at the Carrock, it is definitely going to be the final destination in terms of the quest based on it's ability with the trolls and the way you travel to the location. The "immune to player's cards" effect is there, I bet, to prevent people circumventing the quest the way it is meant to play. I cant see it being a common location power except for Location based scenarios.

The threat reduction ability of the Trackers is crazy, crazy to the point where we never travel to a Location if one is in play, as a general rule. We had about 16 threat on the board with 14 from locations and in two turns there was 2 threat in the staging area. With 2 or even 3 Carrocks out at once, the Tracker would still be removing 6-8 threat, which is massive in this game's scope.

To me the Locations are there to be a persistent threat, they are tougher to manage than creatures just because the rate at which we can negate them. The Trackers ability to nullify massive amounts of threat seems to be a little unbalanced at this stage of the game.

Wait and see for sure, but they are a massive card in the game.

I have been playtesting the 6 encounter cards for 4 players and it seems to work really well.

Anyone else?

We started doing that and it worked well, but a few of the guys felt that we were messing with the rules, so we started trying the "max 2 copies in 30 card decks" solution.

I dont think it was messing with the rules too much myself, but the 2 copies thing seems to dilute things down enough to reflect close to a 50-card deck.
From how it played for dual-sphere 30-card decks, I think we will stay with that until a few releases come out and a few more heroes.

Taking the chance of getting cards from 1/10 to 1/15 is a lot closer to the approximate 1/17 from a 50-card deck

Are there really that many 3-ofs in the base set that you want to draw all the time? I feel like I could make my pre-cons better by going down to only 2 of many of the triplicates, thus increasing my chances of drawing the more powerful single and double cards that are in there (like Gandalf).

FWIW, I've played with the 6 cards for 4 players rule, and found it to be good. We did this while also scaling up the quest cards, so if it said reveal an additional card each quest phase, we revealed 4 additional cards.

I haven't played enough games where Northern Tracker was game breaking, but I have noticed I'm always happy to get him out. His ability is unusually strong in MP. Is he unique? If not, maybe a rule to say he is would help.

Entropy42 said:

By removing the 3-ofs and going dual sphere changes it more. Just going to 2-ofs itself wouldn't make a huge difference as you say, but we haven't increased the 1-ofs. We just use the core set at the moment to try and balance it at that level. Also things like Faramir and Steward of Gondor got split between the Leadership/Spirit and the Tactics/Leadership deck. So other things got lowered just through making dual-sphere decks.

Yeah NT is not unique. But even with one he can clear a hell of a lot in 2 turns with a large portion of the Locations as they are mostly 2 progress.

And yeah I guess in MP, he ramps up quickly. We have had 4-player games where we have drawn 4 Locations on the quest.

AS a side not on scaling. I am using 50 card 2 sphere decks to hand out to my friends. I will play test again during the Dallas Games Marathon

I think diluting your deck is more about making it random, and as this is a deck building game, not of much interest to most people.

My guess is it was playetested heavily as a two player and that's it. So as was proposed 1 extra encounter card for 3 player, 2 extra for 4

Alright I have been playtesting the 6 encounter card variant for 4 players and here are the results.

Scenario 1 = beat the scenario in 3 turns, Score 134. (including Thalin being lost to an unlucky shadow effect)

Scenario 2 = beat the scenario in 4 turns, Score 126.

Scenario 3 = have failed 3 times. Last effort was the closest. 9 turns Beravor, Theodred and Dunhere Killed and all 4 players pushed over 50 threat by a nasty combo of encounter cards.

I think Scenario 3 is do-able with 6 encounter cards but it will take some luck on my part.

If you're that concerned about Northern Tracker, why not just make him put one progress token on one location in the staging area, instead of all? That way he's equivalent to Lorien Guide but with better stats for the extra cost.

Troymk1 said:

That looks similar to ours though we have only played S3 once and we scraped through. All our wins were over 110 as well but I didn't keep notes (i think one may have been like 118).

If I demo to people I get out the dual-sphere decks and run the rules as is.

If we are playing with our group, we construct and play 4/6 threat cards for 3/4 players.