We're still lagging a bit behind here in Europe, so I only got to play "A Journey to Rhosgobel" this weekend. Also opened the "Hills of Emyn Muil"-AP and used some cards from that one for my first four play-throughs.
Anyways: So, we were playing a two-player game. (We had lost the first two games against the quest and had succeeded the third time.) I played my Spirit/Tactics deck (Frodo, Eleanor and Legolas - I had switched out Eowyn, because she died the first three plays and seemed to fragile) and my partner played Leadership/Lore (Aragorn, Theodred, Denethor).
We were doing ok most of the time. I had some good allies out and my winged guardian and Legolas with a Dunedain mark took care of all the flying attackers. But we didn't find enough Athelas fast enough and also didn't make enough progress due to some nasty encounter deck effects, so Wilyador's health got worse and worse. We could heald 5 damage by using a Lore of Imladris, but sometime later he had 19 damage tokens on him and we knew that the games was as good as lost...
So, it was our last turn. We had collected three Athelas by then. My partner drew another Lore of Imladris, but was short on resources, because she had played Gandalf the turn before to help her dig for cards. We couldn't believe it... but then I noticed that there was a Mountains of Mirkwood location in the staging area with one or two progress tokens on it (due to my Nothern Tracker). So I exhausted a Riddermark's Finest to put two more progress tokens on this location... because we hoped that maybe she would draw a Steward of Gondor to put on Denethor...
Our plan worked! I think it was the first of the five cards, but there it really was: the Steward of Gondor. My partner used her two leadership resource tokens to pay for it, attached it to Denethor and played the Lore of Imladris. We then went questing and flipped over the third quest card. Using the three Athelas cards we could heald the remaining 14 damage... That was pretty close, but awesome.
I wanted to share this session report, because it pretty much sums up why I like this game so much. It's this unique way of interaction between player cards and the challenges provided by the encounter deck that keeps me coming back for more!