Just played it twice and RtM rocks! Its like Rhosgobel, Carrock and Anduin combined - you need Firepower, Healing and Questpower. The treacheries are the nastiest seen so far in the whole cycle. There are four quest stages and you have just like 10 turns time at max and you have to clear the staging area from enemies at the end in order to win.

The only drawback is that RtM is very luck dependent: if you draw only small locations/enemies from wilderlands and passage through mirkwood encounter sets, its not that difficult. If you happen to draw too many RtM-Cards and/or big enemies from wilderlands you're dead in no time.

Fun quest, the sense of danger is overwhelming. I played another 2 games and in both games encounter deck was rather merciful, no big enemies.

First game was going quite good, I was a little bit location flooded, but nevertheless I was making progress. Slow and steady wins the race? No - I got hit by treachery + 8 threat and could not really counter it... If I was making faster progress, maybe I would be able to win. A lot of what ifs...

Second game was easy (and lucky too). Once again I was getting locations from encounter deck, also wasted provisions came. I got northern tracker in play and tons of other allies, while encounter deck was attacking me with bats. The game was quick, I won in 7th turn (threat reduction played just once), score 111 with threat 45 total. I was feeling the danger every turn when I was drawing new cards from encounter deck.

Some may say that it is all luck dependant, but every turn I had to make some decisions like who should be left to block if attercop/other nasty shows up. Will I defeat the stage if 5 new threat comes from encounter deck etc?I think that early (1st or 2nd turn) beast will spell inevitable doom for me, same as two mid/end game beasts. But as far as I can see it, my deck can handle 1 big enemy if it shows mid-end game. Need to playtest more to see how reliable my tactics are....

Glaurung said:

Not impressive but I stand a chance. While Legolas and eagles can kill and defend against enemies, I still need to find athelases from the encounter deck. Usually, Radagast is like 1 free Athelas , so I try to mulligan to get him (3 in deck).. But win ratio is still bad, in many games I just do not find enough Athelas before time runs out. Since I do not use Lore sphere, I can't play Lore of Imladris and I also do not have access to encounter deck manipulation like Denethor. Maybe new neutral card from Mirkwood will help me (shadow of the past)?

Shelfwear said:

In my experience RTM is annoying and frustrating. I can see that the quest could be fun, if only you had a better chance of succeding. So far I had seven two player games and lost all of them - propably your chances would be better with three or four players. Anyway, i guess that was my last game since my main LotR partner said he doesn't want to play again and hey I am a little depressed myself. Last game we got "King Spider" (-> exausting two of our heroes) and and "Hill Troll" during setup. The first Quest phase produced another "Mirkwood Bats" -> surge -> "Attercop, Atterop" and "Mountains of Mirkwood". The Bats killed the one ally the player guarding gollum had played, "Attercop, Attercop" killed the first hero. The other player was left with only one ready hero (one went questing, one got exausted by the spider) but a troll and the spiders to block. We gave up. From our experience this wasn't even a bad draw. Too hard. No fun.

Legolas of Darkwood said: