So far I really enjoy a lot of aspects of LOTR LCG. I have always played solo (hopefully my friend can start playing soon).

But I have concerns that all the games I've played come in two categories:

• I maul the adventure and EASILY win
• The adventure mauls me and I have NO CHANCE

There doesn't seem to be a lot of inbetween. Which means, the games aren't as exciting as they can be.

Here's the results:

• I slaughter the following: Passage Through Mirkwood, The Hunt for Gollum, The Hills of Emyn Muil, and The Dead Marshes
• I GET slaughtered by the following: Journey Along the Anduin, Escape from Dol Guldur, Conflict at the Carrock, A Journey to Rhosgobel

Granted, I'm a new player. And I only have the Core Set and the first 5 packs of the Hunt for Gollum series. I run Frodo, Eowyn, and Glorfindel as my heroes.

To be honest, I've only played Dol Guldur, Carrock and Rhosgobel once each. ;-p But I still got overwhelmed. Journey Along the Anduin I've played probably 6-8 times and never come close to beating it.

On the other side, Emyn Muil was ridiculously easy and I literally beat The Dead Marshes in about 8 minutes. :-/

Just venting I suppose.

Don't expect to beat every quest with the same deck and strategy. With those heroes I would expect you could beat Anduin, Carrock and Rhosghobel, but you probably need different decks for each one. Return and Dol Guldur are tough nuts to crack and I've never beaten either.

Hey man, your venting sounds completely normal to me! I play mainly solo myself (though just recently some friends of mine got into the game, so I have had the super fun opportunity to play some multiplayer), and I find that I can consistently beat about half of the one's released (the others slaughtering me). On the whole though, I have found that building new decks and trying the myriad strategies that are currently available can really change up my Scenario win-ratio. Do you play mainly with one particular deck, or do you change it often? Also, as you are probably well aware, as the card-pool grows, so too the game will become less repetitive. So, I encourage you to stick it out, wait for more cards (especially player cards), try different strategies and most importantly enjoy adventuring in such a beautifully illustrated game! Best wishes.

Your deck sounds like Willpower and Location Hate centered. It is not surprising that you beat quests that need high willpower and that feature a lot of locations.

Change the deck to be more balanced. As a result, the whole problem will be gone. Location heavy quests like Emyn Muil will become slightly harder, while combat heavy quests will become slightly easier. As a main rule, after you create a deck, play Anduin Journey and aim to have good results in this quest. To beat it, your deck must be balanced because you encounter both locations and enemies, plus you need some threat management. For me, this is perfect quest for early playtesting.

And finally, you can read session reports or strategy guides that tell you how to deal with every quest. For example Carrock is regarded as one of the easiest quest by some players.

The KD quests and those of the Dwarrowdwelf cycle are more challenging but also balanced, with the exception of Road to Rivendell which is an easy one. The introduction of the new heroes helps. The dwarven heroes are awesome, the elven twins also are interesting, and Loragorn's ability can change your whole apporach to a scenario. I was happy about most of the Mirkwood scenarios (except of Rhosgobel), but KD and Dwarrowdwelf increased the fun level a lot for me.

I've had some close games, one that I remember that was really doomed to failure was when I tried playing Passage through Mirkwood using the default Lore core deck. I had 0 progress tokens on the last quest and had 1 active location and one card in the staging area. If I wasn't able to complete the quest in that round I would've surely lost considering my heroes were all heaviliy damaged and 1 was already dead, I had no cards left in my deck and I was at 48 threat O.O

I had though 14 cards in my hand and the Protector of Lorien attachment on one of my heroes. I managed to win by discarding my hole hand and thus having enough will power to complete the location and quest together Final score was of 192

Anduin is easy fix - most of the games, some set ups can still smash you no matter what you do. In general, try lower threat and Dunhere. He is the master of the Anduin quest, especially part 2. Dunhere, Eowyn, Legolas (or Boromir and threat reduction) and you should be fine.

Thanks for all the replies, everyone! I wasn't sure if the post would get any responses. I like the mix of thereaputic and practical answers. Based on this, I think I will try a couple things:

1. As suggested, make my deck a bit more balanced. Maybe I'll keep Eowyn for the questing, but replace Glorfindel with a Tactics hero (maybe Boromir or Gimli). That should give me some more good, effective allies and a true combat stud.
2. I think I will also tinker more with the decks for each scenario. Previously, my mind-set has been to try to find one deck that will do well in most scenarios. Maybe I'll start customizing more.

Lepto - I think I will expand my adventures and get some more. I'm always jealous when I read about these cool dwarf heroes!!

By the way, I played three games of Passage Through Mirkwood (Difficulty 1) and LOST TWICE last night. Ugh. In the first game, I took a chance of absorbing a spider attack undefended and I drew Hummerhorns as a shadow card (with no way to cancel it). Say hello to 2 damage on each character. I lost three allies and Eowyn instantly. In the second game, I think my first 5 draws were all spiders and I got overwhelmed.

…just when I thought there was no way to lose THAT scenario.

Well, off to go customize the deck. Maybe:

• Boromir
• Eowyn
• Frodo

Have a look at "tragictheblathering" lackey games on you tube. Tap in lord of the rings card game. They will give you ideas on how to deal with some of the problems that arise in certain scenarios. His conflict at the carrock game will give you a few tips on how to beat it. I enjoyed watching them anyway, cheers.

You're not the first one to note the scaling flaw with the solo aspect of the game. As suggested earlier, cut back on the location/questing power, reduce your threat, and run more combatants - even if they are just characters that are there to block.

You are already running the two best spheres together for solo play, but you need to add the following (if you're not already using it):

Mirkwood Runner x3

Forest Snare x3

Protector of Lorien x2

I'd replace Glorifindel with Beravor, and use the Daughter of Nimrodel for healing. (There's also an event card whose name I can't recall.)

I run Dunhere with Eowyn (really you can't drop her as one of the heroes for solo as the rest of the hero options can't keep up in the early rounds, which is where the game is decided) and Bofur (or Bifur, I always get their names confused). But I know you don't have him. He's in the Khazad Dum box set.

I highly recommend purchasing The Watcher in the Water pack for Arwyn and Elrond's Counsel. They have done wonders in the deck I play.

Ted Sandyman said:

Ted - thanks. Those are a lot of fun.

How can I get that awesome deck building program he's using???

UPDATE: I finally beat Journey Along the Anduin solo for the first time - after about 15 tries!!!

Going with the Feast or Famine theme, I have been routed in most of my attempts at JOTA. Yet this morning, I KICKED ITS BUTT big time! :-) But it sure was fun. I even drew Hill Trolls in two of my first three encounter cards.

I got a great card draw and I had low starting threat (24) with Eowyn, Dunhere, and Bifur. I also splash in a few Leadership Songs and Mark of the Dunedain (which was key). I ended up with a final threat of 27, along with 14-15 victory points.

A few observations about the game:

1. Henamarth Riversong is unbelievable (fragile, but a cost of 1 and can peek at the first card of deck); he literally saved my ass many times by seeing what was coming
2. Dunhere is unbelievable when you have Unexpected Courage on him and a Dunedain Mark (or two); he almost single handedly killed two Trolls, the Hummerhorn and that Chieftain during the game while still in the staging area
3. Gleowine is awesome; I had so many cards and allies that I never ran out

It was such a luxury of riches that I had 8-10 awesome cards (including one Gandalf) that never got played.

Anyway, going with the current theme - I'll probably play it again and get slaughtered!

very good! just a tip- i dont know if youve thought of it but you could have used protector of lorien to convert those wasted cards into willpower of defense, especially with gleowine

rich

richsabre - great point you make. POL is one of those cards that, intellectually, I know is there and I should be maximizing. Yet I always somehow manage to forget to "charge" it. I don't know why.

The game this morning was such a rout that I was never threatened. But in general, I will seriously keep that card in mind.

yes, its probably my most used strategy of all time, bilbo (+2 per turn) gleowine (+1 per turn) a couple of wealth of lorien (+3)……you soon get to the point where you can easily quest with 10+ will power on one hero alone

richsabre said:

Thanks. I never considered how good that can be, especially with a card drawing machine in place. Us solo guys can use all the tips we can get! So far, I've resisted using Bilbo because of his cost and his role as a one-trick pony. But maybe I'll try him out.

What about Beravor? You can exhaust him to get two extra cards. But he's also very versatile in other ways. I've never used him. That may change.

Bifur is my Lore hero right now because (1) he is the only hero that I've seen so far that costs LESS than the sum of his stats, and (2) I love his ability; it makes for a much more versatile deck since I can include many cool Lore cards.

Rich (and others):

Is Carrock similar enough to JATA that I could possibly defeat it using a similar strategy? (very low starting threat, threat reduction, attacking into the staging area with Dunhere, drawing extra cards, etc)

I've only played Carrock 3-4 times but I've had my ass handed to me each time.

Carrock is fairly trivial to beat.. set up for low theat and run dunhere to attack into teh staging area and you should beet it 100% of the time

gvaughn1 said:

- bilbos card draw is really useful by itself- however he can be made into an absolute wall- just get (if you have the packs) 3 dunedain warnings, erebor boots, burning brand and a few fast hitches and you have a 5 defense, 3 hitpoint, shadow immune, multiple defending hobbit tank!

-carrock is one of those quest where it has a formula that when discovered, can easily be tackled- to answer your question it is similar that you need to start off low threat and get it lower, then build up with allies and attatchments- then let all hell loose……i engaged the trolls one by one and picked them all off

booored said:

I haven't had this work for me yet, but by all means, it really should. I just never seem to get any attack buffs (Dwarven Axe or Dunedain Marks) in my hand to put on Dunhere. Usually I win Carrock if I can purchase Grimbeorn the Old. Otherwise it's very tough for me.

Budgernaut said:

I'm confused about Grimbeorn. Without a leadership hero (or 2), he's nearly unobtainable - right? He needs 8 Leadership resource tokens to activate. Even if you get a Song of Kings on a non-Leadership hero, it'll take forever to accumulate 8 resource tokens. And think of all the good things those 8 tokens could be spent on.

Collect resources, wait/hope you get Oak-Wood Grove, which, when active location, allows any resources spent to count as Leadership.

Thanks Dam. That eases my concerns a bit.

themeatically you need to travel to the grove to meet him…….

Budgernaut said:

Budgernaut - I just tried Carrock and absolutely abused it! It's been a nice day. I got my first Journey Along the Anduin victory and first Carrock victory. Those have both slaughtered me in the past.

I feel bad for you when you say you never get the buffs. In this game, Dunhere was a monster! He got all 3 Dunedain Marks AND Unexpected Courage. So he was devastating the trolls in the staging area, doing 3-4 hp of damage to TWO trolls each round. Granted, that was pretty lucky. And I got a couple of Sneak Attacks (for Gandalf) and Galadrim's Greeting.

richsabre - I used your idea of Bilbo instead of Bifur and it kicked ass. I used a 60-card deck and went through the entire deck. In the last 4-5 turns, I wasn't even able to draw cards.

In short:

• Eowyn for questing (but I'm starting to consider switching her out)
• Dunhere with UC and Dunedain Marks for devastation
• Bilbo with Fast Hitch for questing & defense
• Lots of cheap allies

I don't mean to sound like I'm crowing, but it's just nice after getting my ass kicked so thoroughly by these scenarios previously.