Unless I get brutalized by the set-up stage, I've generally been able to escape from Moria without too much trouble.

I've found Into the Pit to be far more challenging.

What have the rest of you experienced?

I'd say Conflict at the Carrock is the easiest difficulty 7 quest. I've done well with Into the Pit solo. Rarely lost. I find the swarms in the Seventh Level can be more difficult than Into the Pit playing solo.

Carrock is a joke, pure and simple, maybe a 2, not a 7 in this lifetime.

I've gotten a win and closest to a win in FfM when getting one of the parties eliminated by Blocked by Shadow's When Revealed, dropping to one card per turn just makes it a lot easier. But mostly, Wrong Turn pisses me off, going from 4 threat in the staging area to 19 threat without a single thing you can do about is just . Throw in uncancellable hero-killing Treacheries and meh, it gets old pretty fast. 2x Great Cave-Troll is always a piss-poor start.

What are people's strats for FfM? Stick around Escape from Darkness and hope the Abandoned Tools come up? So far in four plays I've seen the Tools once in the staging area, once they went poof as a Shadow card. Or go for Blocked by Shadow?

My strategy is quite simple: First you go to quest card where you can dig tools out and then got the quest card where you can use the tools. But if somehow the Balrog is geting to strong and power of staging area also grow to much and there is no time for use tools then you try Blocked by shadow but this one really risky. Anyway this quest manage to be much more difficult with the more number of players. I think for 4 players is hell same as Osgiliath.

****, I knew I made a mistake when playing FfM. I didn't realize that only the tools can place progress on "Escape from Darkness". That's why I always avoided "Blocked by Shadow".

Every time I've won solo or multi player on FfM, it's been with the tools.

Played 2 player and it felt like winning or losing was completely outside our control, then we won easily enough. We looked at each other and agreed to never play the quest again.