Has anyone tried this strategy playing the Hunt for Gollum solo. I tried it a few times tonight and it seems to work fairly consistently, but I'm not sure if it gives you the best scores.

I use Denethor, Eowyn and Aragorn as Heroes and key cards in my deck are Longbeard Map-Maker, Steward of Gondor and Northern Tracker. Then for the first 4 or 5 rounds I deliberately avoid making progress on the Quest - using Denethor to view the top card so that I can commit the right characters to the quest to end up neutral or just one below to take a single threat. If Denethor reveals Hunters From Mordor I send them to the bottom of the deck. Avoiding making progress on the quest may seem counter productive, but it lets me avoid the forced action for successful questing that adds an extra card to the staging area and gives me time to build up a collection of allies and quest bonus attachments and find the key cards I need (e.g. Steward of Gondor, Northern Tracker, Longbeard Map-Maker, etc.).

Then, after 4 or 5 rounds I usually have what I need to complete the first phase of the quest in just a round or two and have built up my allies and attachments so I can finish the next couple of phases quickly (if you get LongBeard Map-Maker in play with Steward of Gondor you can blast through the phases very quickly).

My scores playing solo have been between 150 and 170 so not sure this strategy scores well, but seems to win consistently unless you run into really bad luck (e.g. one game the first 2 cards I revealed were Clue Objectives and then 2 Hunters from Mordor so hadn't even played a single round and already +12 threat in the staging area - ooof, game over...). Be interested to hear what the best scores others get playing solo to see how well this strategy does score wise.

Depends, many people play the "restricted" rule variant it seams. So if you are building a deck just for HFG, and only for HFG you can only use cards from CORE+HFG.

The idea is that power creep in the card lists make the quest degrees easier each time you add new cards, so the "restricted" rule variant is pretty simple, you can only use cards that were in the card pool at the time of release of that AP. Also if you plan on playing Quest Chains (as in all of the mirkwood cycle) you can make your decks using all those cards and core, but not the coming packs.

Anyway, this is how I play.. so I am not of much help.

Using Denathor to skry the encounter deck is very powerful, just make sure you do not scry to much. Remeber if you are sending the "Hunters From Mordor" to the bottom of the encounter deck each time (Denathor's ability dose NOT discard them) then when you get to the bottom of the deck, when you have all the clue tokens and stuff you will be drawing them one after the other. I played a game were I was kicking ass and forgot about that and suddenly I had 2 Hunters out both with 10 Threat/Attack. So it is a good idea to try and kill them mid game if you can.

Still ur strat is sound if your not playing the restricted rules as map-maker would be illegal. Either way controlling your success tokens in 1b is a good idea either way, especially if you can control your threat.

I do not normally bother recording my scores for solo play, but will do it (though I play restricted) I'll post in this thread when I am done.

I like the "restricted" rule variant and I always use that approach to win a scenario the first time, but it's also fun to go back and see how much easier a scenario is with all of the new cards available to you.

Map-maker isn't critical to this strategy, the key to winning HFG consistently as a solo player I think is to stack your deck with quest boosting attachments and allies and avoid completing the first phase until you have had time to play a strong set of allies and attachments because once you get into the second phase the extra encounter card that gets played at the beginning of each quest can quickly cause the staging area to fill up. This extra encounter card is much more crippling playing solo because it effectively doubles the encounter cards added to the staging area each quest phase so you need to be able to finish the second phase quickly.

I just played Lone Quest: HFG *RESTRICTED Solitaire with a score of 138.

You can find the Deck here
http://tinyurl.com/7ujdtwe

And I in fact recorded the game itself if you wana see the deck in action.