pumpkin said:

Obviously, Glaurung cares. He made his points multiple times, on this forum and others.

However, I agree with you that the "unbalance" isn't that extreme right now (at least not as extreme as Glaurung makes it sound).

Most of the "unbalanced" aspects of the game right now aren't due so much to the game mechanics themselves, but rather to the design of the quests. We've already seen multiple suggestions to reduce these irritants (some incorporated in fan-made quests) and I'm sure they'll be included in the game at some point:

- Having a "harder" sub-set of encounter cards that gets added once you advance to stage 2 or 3 of a quest could assuage the fact that the players get more and more resources at their disposal as the game progress while the encounter deck remains static.

- Reseting the player's boards as the quest progresses (for example, removing your highest cost ally once you move to stage 2, etc.).

- More cards that scale directly based on the number of players (The Hunt for Gollum already provided many of those).

- Imposing a cost (resource, card, other) on every ally "entering play" (as opposed to being played) to limit Gandalf / Sneak Attack abuse.

Also, we may end up with further deckbuiling restrictions (restricted cards, cards that you can only have 1 of, etc.) if the game keeps being "too easy" when using "expert" decks.

All that to say that once we've got to the end of the current cycle, we'll be in a much better position to evaluate the quality of the game.

It doesn't mean there aren't valid complain about it: the distribution model of the core set (with not all cards being provided in 3 of), the delays in shipping the game and it's expensions, the lack of deckbuilding options (we still can't make mono-sphere 50 cards tournament legal decks without using crap such as Power in the Earth), etc.

Glaurung: Have you tried playing in Nightmare mode? I don't remember seeing you comment on this "official" play option, which could be more suited to your research of a "harder" game experience.

SiCK_Boy said:

Yes as i say before they should to make more powerful encounter cards which will react on players power and make quests more intetresting and different on every stage. And look like they do it. I think next quest will be much more difficult. Sound very promising.

But anyway we should keep talk about what we like and what we dont to help the designers make game better.

It's a shame you have given up. It looks like this game is going along great and already peoples issues are slowly being put to rest with the expansion so far. In the future no doubt the game will become more balanced and scale better. I think Glaurung is right the more that we discuss the things we do and do not enjoy the better the game will get. I certainly hope the game grows and improves. I am looking forward to having a new adventure and deck building options each month. Crazy to think because of one delay you would deprive yourself of that posiibility. Oh well thats how it goes I guess. I do hope you are wrong that this will only be a niche game, the more the merrier!