Hi, I know you're not supposed to have doubles of unique heroes in play but if for the time being, that rule is ignored for casual play at home is it possible to play this with more than 4 players?

I assume you would want to draw a card for each player still so 5 additional cards in the staging area could be major. I can see how the more players you have the harder it will become to deal with location pile up. Just wanted to see what everyone's opinion is on this issue as this was the only glaring weakness in this game compared to AGoT LCG. I went with LotR and so far with two Core Sets(haven't even opened the 2nd yet) I'm having a blast.

I don't see why technically this wouldn't work, although people are generally finding the more players, the easier the game is (although you add one extra card per player, you get 3 more heroes to deal with that card, so overall, more players = easier game, generally speaking)

there are a few threads on game difficulty and scaling though which contain a few different house rules etc to try and keep the game challenging with 4 players etc, perhaps give those a read if you are considering trying with 5+ players...

Another alternative is to give each player only 2 heroes? that's probably also going to keep the challenge levels up due to the lower resource generation each deck will have..? Worth a go, maybe?

Sinnerfold:

We also have experimented with 5 and 6 player games. Our house rule is that we allow duplicates of the heroes (for now until some adventure packs expand the hero base) but their special actions can only be used once TOTAL per round. The first person to use a special abiltity negates the other copy of a duplicate hero from using the same ability. So 2 Dunheres can't each run out there and smack staging area enemies, etc. Usually no one wants to be first player but in these games they do. It's a bummer when your Gorn can't do his special "quest then ready" move because the other guy's Gorn just did it.

We also load up during the "staging" phase. Using the concept that for each player after the 2nd, we reveal 2 encounter cards per player during that step so our 6 player game reveals 10 encounter cards during staging.

Elven Archer said:

Have you yet to run into the problem where you might reveal something like two Necromancer's Reach and two Evil Storms, etc that would wipe out practically every Ally or Hero at once? Seems like that would kinda ruin the fun... any plans on how to handle that?

sinnerfold said:

More seriously, considering how easy the game gets with four players, I wouldn't do this. Instead, reduce the number of heroes per player. The rules already mention you can play with a lower number of heroes (1-3).

Lightdarker said:

We have run into this problem. We save Eleanor for things like this, we don't just let her exhaust for any treachery card. We also try to hold onto any "A Test of Will" cards to help cancel these effects as well. But once we did reveal 2 Necromancer's Reach cards and we didn't have any of the aforementioned cards in reserve. We lost lots of allies that day. Sometimes the game just knows how to fight back.