no matter how much i try to randomise the encounter deck, im sick of getting cards from previous games come up one after the other, eg. clue card, the hunters, then clue card, hunters etc. or another one is 5 locations right on the go.

im ok at shuffling, i can properly do it the fast way- i dont really know how to explain it, but i do it like you would a deck of playing cards, but it doesnt randomise it enough. now ive gotten into the habbit of shuffling, then adding a card, then shuffling, then adding a card, just to ensure that they are properly shuffled

from my old mtg days.....

place cards face down in 2 rows with 4 piles on top row and 3 piles on bottom row (total of 7 piles). place cards from top to bottom, left to right. when out of cards, pick up piles randomly or however you want. you can do this more than once if you like.

Do you use card sleeves? When in sleeves, you can make 2 piles of cards, and push them intogether (the left side of the right pile is pushed into the right side of the left pile, so that the cards from the 2 piles are interleaving in the 1 resulting pile - I hope that's somehow understandable...)

Of course don't do this without card sleeves, it could waste the cards in no time...

richsabre said:

richsabre said:

For poker decks, cards are shuffled by first spreading the cards out on the table face down and making a circular motion with both hands, while moving cards around on the table - then gather them up and shuffle normally.

Do you use card sleeves? I do, and i use the above method to shuffle because the sleeves can make cards stick together if just shuffling the regular way.

Richsabre, I often split my cards into two rows of 5 cards. sort your cards 1 per pile until you have sorted them all into 10 small piles. now, randomly put all of these together and that usually gets a pretty good shuffle. I don't think there is any "right" way to shuffle cards though. Hopefully you will get some good shuffles soon!

When putting the encounter deck together for the first time, I normally have the various encounter sets in separate piles and then make the deck by taking consecutive cards from different piles. Then deal the encounter deck into 8 or so piles, and put those piles on top of each other again. As said above, the half cut technique is good too (but only do it with sleeves).

You'll still end up with Brown Lands and East Bight showing up one after the other, but hey, that's life.

What I find strange is that the more I shuffle, the more crazy combos the encounter deck comes up with.

It usually plays best (for the player(s)) when I divide locations, enemies, treacheries, objectives; then shuffle them together and shuffle once or twice through either the poker (latter) move or the above-described push-together one.

Anyway you do it, don't over shuffle or you can essentially unshuffle the cards. And remember its always random so you still might end up with weird runs.

thanks for the tips guys, really helped me

Take all your cards, toss them up in the air, then pick them back up 1 at a time. That'll shuffle em!

Absolute best way of randomizing:

Spread out all the cards in orderly rows.

Go to www.random.org.

Let atmospheric noise variations pick a number for you (random number generator on the right hand side of the page)

The corresponding card will be the bottom card of your deck.

Repeat until you have the deck.

I actually use random.org to pick Mirkwood stage 3 and the Dol Guldur prisoner for me. as in: you want geek, I'll give you geek.

And separating locations, enemies and treachery before randomizing does give you a nice even play of the encounter deck, but I'd call it 'making things easy for yourself', and as such any resulting win doesn't count .

ClydeCloggie said:

good ideas, but my opinion on the above is if they arent seperated after purchase and are just shuffled with the rest of the encounter sets then cases such as 3 hunters from mordor or 2 gladden fields, east bank, west bank, and bank of the anduin all coming out together arent realistic and fair play, sort spoils the game for me. im not saying that i purposefully seperate going location, treachery, enemy etc, i just make sure that cards from previous games arent just put back in together, hence making sure that no two games have identical or similar draws