First, the rule questions as I had to make some decisions.

1) Gloin was my captured hero, so when he was rescued from prison with 1 damage, I assumed it was also prudent for him to get one resource token.

2) The Nazgul has text that says when shadow is applied, remove a character. I assumed this meant that only if a card had a shadow effect, not every single time you performed a shadow check. That meant out of the three attacks he made, I only discarded one character (arwen) because I only had a shadow effect one time. If I broke the rule on this…then I have still failed to finish this dang quest!!

With that said, it was a two player game.

I had Loragon, the new Glorfindel, and Frodo. My son had Gloin, Gimli, and Dain.

Son had a dwarf deck with all attachments and allies catering to dwarves.

Gloin was captured, which was minimal effect and likely the best of the characters to be captured.

His cards that helped him was a dwarven axe (+2 attack) and the armor (+4 health). He was able to absorb attacks early and take damage as a result.

Loragon was able to purchase both self preservation cards. One was attached to Dain (which helped keep my son alive in the first phase) and the latter came much later and was attached to Glorfindel. Glorfindel also had the ability to quest without exhausting.

The ally we used was Arwen. I had two copies so when the first was removed due to the Nazgul effect, the other was able to come in the next turn. Also, Glorfindel had both mounted cards which allowed me to put two progress tokens on two locations. It kept the locations at bay and we did not have to travel to any and deal with its negative side effects.

The only other factor is that I was able to start with a 24 threat, and early on, Frodo absorbed all damage (sometimes undefended) until we approached 50 threat allowing Glorfindel and Loragorn to attack and defeat enemies and then Loragorn was able to reset threat back to 24.

Truly, none of this would have been possible without the latest expansion pack. The new Glorfindel along with the mounted cards was the difference.

If I played the Nazgul effect wrong, then gosh darnit, I still didn't defeat this! And, thinking back, if I had to remove a character, then it would have meant heroes would be removed and it would have resulted in my demise as Arwen was the only ally in play.

Final score was 81 with a combined threat of 90 but with objective cards reducing the number by 19 and total damage of 10 on the heroes.

Played the Nazgul right.

Asfaloth (Glorfindels Mount) is unique. So you can have only one in play at a time.

Scoring rules have changed since the rulebook first came out.

Look for the new FAQ here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=129&esem=4

Did you have no allies beside Arwen???

muemakan said:

I totally missed that unique symbol on Asfaloth…so I misplayed that component and I honestly cannot predict how that would change things. I likely would have lost due to threat because some quests would have taken longer to finish (less progress tokens).

I had other allies, my son did as well, but none were in play. It took all of our resources to get the cards we had. There were event cards such as quickstrike, feint, etc. We knew we could only use one ally so we only ever purchased one. We focused on attachments and events and by game's end, every hero had 4 or 5 attachments (ringmail, elven sword, armor, dwarven axe, Asfaloth, etc.)

Thanks for the link, I wasn't aware of the new scoring, but it makes sense. I have no clue how many rounds it took but just doing a mental assessment of the cards we had and how much they cost, we easily went 15 rounds or more. My son had 46 threat and that was after Gandalf plus a spirit card from my deck reduced his threat so it may have even been more than 15 rounds.

Ok, our victory now has an *asterisk* next to it…we shall try it again so we can remove that nasty mark!

schmoo34 said:

You can use as many as you like, but in Stage 1 of the Quest you can only play one ally per round ( both players combined ).

Also "play" is not the same as " put into play" . Playing an ally means paying it´s cost in the planning phase and put it on the table.

So if you sneak attack Gandalf or play Stand and Fight to get a ally from the discard back into play, that´s fine.

We beat escape from Dol Goldur the proper way this time. It was super easy…but we did this one differently, we played nightmare mode.

We started in mirkwood, then kept all of our damage, threat and attachments and then did journey down anduin, and finally escape from dol goldur.

By the time we made it to escape, the spirit cards from my hand reduced my son's threat to below 30 and he had so many allies, he was able to kill the nazgul and two hill trolls in one attack. Loragorn always kept my threat down to 24.

The nightmare mode allowed us to keep all of our allies and attachments and that was the kicker and we found nightmare mode to be far easier than starting over.

My son has an all dwarf deck (Gimli, Gloin, Dain) and he had two dwarven axemen + two battlemasters and two more dwarven allies (whose name eludes me). Along with some axes, etc. the battlemasters were attacking with 11 attack (each) due to all of the dwarves in play.

We weren't allowed to use more than one ally in the escape quests (1B and 2B) and Loreagon was the prisoner this time. However, we breezed through the first two quests in three turns mainly because:

Since we got to keep attachments, Glorfindel was pumping out 6 willpower, Frodo was pumping out 4 of his own, and even Gloin and Gimli were doing 5 each along with Faramir. We had so much willpower, we were able to knock out quest 1B and 2B in one turn each.

We also had Gandalf cards and $$ saved up from Journey down Anduin and were able to pull out Gandalf if needed.

All in all, it felt like cheating being able to keep all of our items as it is not very difficult to mitigate keeping threat down even over the course of three quests.

We really enjoyed stringing them together like that, however, and didn't have enough time tonight to attempt escape with a fresh deck.

Again, take a look at the FAQ from FFG. They also elaborate a bit more on the Nightmare rules, because the Rulebook lets a little to much room for interpretations.

The FAQ is now printing out…blech. Ok, so we didn't reset threat levels, we kept our money, and we didn't shuffle the allies back into the hand….all minor things.

We tried again this morning and died on Passage through Mirkwood…kept getting treachery cards that increased dmg to exhausted characters…we were too cocky about that one being easy and our death was short and quick.

Thank you for being willing to point to the same FAQ over and over again even though we swear we have read it three times!