Is it just me or are all of the quests in the Tomb of Ice SO VANILLA? Seriously, on every turn, the heroes manage to play a feat card, either to give them a boost on attacks or me a hinder so I can't damage anyone. In the quests, there's like a glyph in every room, which gives them conquest tokens like never before PLUS another feat card...

I never manage to hurt the heroes properly and we just played the ice wyrm quest...they only lost two heroes in the end and won with like 15 conquest tokens...

It really frustrated me, since buying expensive treachery doesn't pay off, since there's always a "foiled plans" coming up should I have used 10+ threats...

What the heck? Makes no sense...even the original maps are more cleverly designed! In ToI, pretty much every map is hack'n'slash meaning

1. room

2. another room, glyph

3. third room

4. fourth room, glyph...

what?

Just look at the map "the hive"...it was such a run-through for the heroes...

any advice how to even scratch them heroes??

I've only played one game with feats, and fortunately I was a Hero that game. :-) Feats are insane - in the number of them you get, to how fast you regain them, to how effective they are. On top of that they're kept hidden from the OL so they're that much stronger. They are so commonplace in those quests, that they shouldnt be called "feats" but rather "regular exhibitions of extraordinary power". I can only guess players were so annoyed at WOD quests being so challenging that the Feats were invented.

There are a slew of house rules to fix it. Instead of drawing 3, draw 1?

Instead of a glyph giving everybody a feat, it only "feat-inspires" the one hero that activated the glyph? (this adds some tactics, as you have to plan who should activate them, and not just race in a runner to do that, as the feat might be better off on someone stronger).

I haven't played a lot of ToI yet, but when I played the second quest, the heroes got totally destroyed. That involved a very important "charge" card early in the game that the heroes weren't ready for, but still...

I also destroyed the heroes in quest number 2. They were all heroes from ToI also, and those heroes are pretty good.

Also if you look at the number of glyphs in a ToI quest they are ussually less than those in the other expansions. I think the feats work fine in ToI. I'm not sure how well they work in other expansions. WoD is hard for the heroes but some quests have 6 or more glyphs with 4 heroes that is a lot of feats.

My experience with TOI has been pretty consistent with the other expansions. Sometimes the heroes get the right combo of heroes, skills, feats, and dice rolls and play smart, making life really annoying/impossible for the OL. Other times, the OL gets the right cards and the heroes leave themselves open for some well-timed beastmen spawns and it's over quickly. I've seen the same results in WoD and AoD. Feats can certainly make an already strong hero party that much more unstoppable and keep an otherwise under-powered group in the game.

I have personally OL'd 2, 4 and 6 and won all of them the first time, early in the case of 2 (before I even activated the giant), a little before midway in 4, and into the 5th area (out of 8) in 6. We replayed 6 and got to a stalemate at the very end since there are two shades with a lot of wounds and it was like 4am on a weekday so we just called it a draw. It was a very fun game.

I will admit that if you had just the jitd cards and your only treachery was from toi (no legions of dead, elite beastmen, drinkers of blood, danger, crushing blow, poison pits, extra dark charm, scything blades--these are some of my fave OL cards in non-rtl descent), that it's gonna be a pretty hard go for the OL. Customize your deck well though, and spawn a dark priest or two, and you can beat any party of heroes you come up against.