H. I was going to say D, but I think H, as much as it is a non-answer, fits the mark for me.

I play exclusively solo, with one deck, and while I own four core sets, I play with only one. But that's by the by.

The Mirkwood cycle was just tremendous fun for me, it's like this game's Golden Age. The quests were excellent, challenging, and a lot of fun. Then KD and Dwarrowdelf cycle emerged and the fun went, to be replaced by this endless orc swarm that just turned me off from the game completely. The game became a chore to get through, and I was buying expansions to just stick them on the shelf, and not play them. But then On the Doorstep arrived, and it felt like the clouds were lifting. The quests are becoming fun again! I've only played one quest from HoN so far, and only have the first pack in AtS, but it does feel like a level of enjoyability (the spellchecker tells me this isn't a word, but it should be!) is returning.

Overall, I would say it does depend on what you want from a game. What I want from this game is an enjoyable experience in Middle Earth, high theme and fun, with a bit of challenge. I don't want to be demolished from the moment I draw my starting hand, which is what it felt like for most of last year. I have high hopes for AtS, but I still fear that there will be some quests that are nothing more than the mindless "let's kill some orcs" kind of thing. Maybe there should have been an "I" option, for "it was fine, then it got tough, but now it's getting better"!

Erm, did any of this ramble actually explain my position on the game..?

yes it did, and thanks for voting and explaining. its interesting you didnt like dwarrowdelf as i thought it to be much more balanced for solo play...how did you find road to rivendell?

rich

Ah, that Road was a long one! I am a bit undecided about it to be honest. I share your oft-mentioned thoughts on 1A needing a magnificent 20 progress tokens, Rich, but the endless procession of orcs and goblins does tire me out, and there aren't enough interesting locations to keep me interested. It's a shame, as it's the pack that has Crebain in! I could take or leave it, to sum up.

Dwarrowdelf on the whole tends to be overshadowed by two quests that I find to be the ones I dislike in the entire game - Watcher in the Water, and Shadow & Flame. Redhorn Gate was pretty good, Long Dark was pretty good, and Foundations of Stone was excellent, but a blase Road to Rivendell, and those two horrible things, leave a sour taste in my mouth for the whole cycle.

I feel I should return to the Dwarrowdelf soon, though. It has been a year, and we have so many awesome dwarf cards now after the Hobbit boxes, that my opinions might change... though I doubt Shadow & Flame will ever be one to enjoy...!

yes, i also think shadow and flame is possibly the worst of all quests to date. i rather like watcher in the water, though mostly becuase i love the dark theme of the entrance to moria in the book, and of course the watcher itself is great. it is possibly a weaker quest becuase it is a little linear, but the art on the doors of durin is great (for once we having something tolkien actually did himself to work on so so it should be!)

rich

PS- thats an intriguing signature you have there spalanzani

Overall, I would say it does depend on what you want from a game. What I want from this game is an enjoyable experience in Middle Earth, high theme and fun, with a bit of challenge.

I share this sentiment. This is one of the reasons I am super excited for The Black Riders expansion.

Overall, I would say it does depend on what you want from a game. What I want from this game is an enjoyable experience in Middle Earth, high theme and fun, with a bit of challenge.

I share this sentiment. This is one of the reasons I am super excited for The Black Riders expansion.

me also

I vote "B" but only because of HoN, those were quite challenging and hard (and fun) to beat. Most of the older quests became much easier with the ever growing card pool and growing experience in deck building. I don't wanna say the game got boring but it's not much fun to play a quest for the first time and to know right from the start that you'll win at least in the second game. HoN (and Hobbit 1 in a different way) changed this imo. The quest design was taken to another level and I enjoyed them very much.

I own everything released so far (1 core) except hobbit 2 (the german release is errr not right on schedule...), the AtS quests lie around here unplayed due to lack of spare time.

B - There just arn't enough hard quests left. I can only name Dol Guldur,Return to Mirkwood, Maybe Foundations of stone, Watcher in the water, Cair Andros and although I do not own them, I suppose The 2 POD quests are hard. (although I hear MaO is getting much easier now too.) Even FFG thinks its a "B" since they are making nightmare mode. Looks like they are doing a half and half in this current cycle. First three easy, last three hard. Looks like we have plenty of hard stuff in the future. Just will take awhile. Patients............

thanks for voting.

@khamul- i wouldnt say ffg think it is B (well i wouldnt say i knew anything of what they are thinking) just becuase of nightmare mode. looking at it from the other side they are making easy mode as well. in fact it would be most interesting indeed to see what the designers and playtesters think this is.

rich

Definitely H for me. There are just too many variables, and it's always changing. Just recently, there were a bunch of posts on BGG and even here when HoN came out, saying that the game had become too hard and was alienating players. I really liked HoN, and many players seem to enjoy it more now. Of course, now some are saying the game is too easy. For me personally, it feels about right, at least from the perspective of enjoying the game. Perhaps switching away from super powerful decks to good yet entertaining mono-sphere decks has helped my experience with the newest cycle.

H for me as well and unless there will be enough variation within the various deck types (at least on Dwarven level), I will still say H.

The fact is that the player decks are getting stronger and stronger at each new release.
Would you play without Arwen in a spirit deck, would you forget Gondorian Shield when using Beregond ?
But not the quest and encounter cards (not speaking yet about NM version as not available for me).

Solo :
My feeling is that most of the quests are easy and few times (2 or 3) too easy to enjoy.
On the other hand, there is a couple of quests that are too difficult in solo mode compare to the rest (3rd of Core set and 3rd of HoN) => you need to have a deck tuned specificaly for these quests

Multiplayer :
I have the chance to have a bunch of players with whom I regularly play 4 or 3 players games.
Here the difficulty of the quests, though higher most of the time than solo, is less important for us. The deckbuilding are much more interesting (having to take into account the uniqueness limit for all and the synergies between each deck).
The experiences are richer and the fun is coming more for discussion on how to pass through and cooperation than on succeeding a difficult quest.

As a conclusion, I would say that high difficulty is probably what I would seek for solo play, considering that I can anyway easily restart 3 or 4 quests helping me to tune my deck and improve it.
But I rather play multiplayer as it is, so far, my best memories of the game. And for multiplayer games, I realy enjoy the game as it is today : various quests with different mechanisms, some realy easy, some truly hard.

Mike

I vote for C

I would say somewhere between B and C for a solo player. Most of the new quests have provided a good challenge, but the last two are quite easy for a solo play. I'll go with C for a final answer.

Pretty funny how some players think there are only a couple challenges, while a ton of posts on BGG are overwhelmed with the difficulty. There are a few 'power decks' that can handle almost any quests with a good % chance of victory, but once I use those decks a few times, I want to try something new. Luckily for me Tracker1 is an amazing deck-builder so for someone not as creative, I can grab one of those and go(currently running Legolas and his Bow, which although not worth trying certain quests(Watcher, Shadow), it is amazingly fun in others(JDtA, Redhorn, Road to Rivendell).

Overall, I would say it does depend on what you want from a game. What I want from this game is an enjoyable experience in Middle Earth, high theme and fun, with a bit of challenge.

I share this sentiment. This is one of the reasons I am super excited for The Black Riders expansion.

me also

Yes, I don't think that this game is too easy... Not in the slightest. I don't use "power decks" and I probably never will. I get bored of the decks I make VERY easily, so I'm constantly making new decks. Right now I'm playing through the Hobbit quests with another person, and I think that having 2 people play really makes a difference in difficulty and in enjoy-ability.

@Raven1015: Congrats for post 100!

@Rich: Congrats for.... Whoa... 2 more away from post 4000...

Overall, I would say it does depend on what you want from a game. What I want from this game is an enjoyable experience in Middle Earth, high theme and fun, with a bit of challenge.

I share this sentiment. This is one of the reasons I am super excited for The Black Riders expansion.

me also

Likewise

And me

thanks for voting all, the post is updated

@legolas- i know! 1 more to go!!

I vote for C because I normally tend to not include the latest cards in decks for beeting like Core Set Quests because that would make these too easy. I like the new quests but not the new player deck cards. Outlanders is not my type of playstile and the mono deck cards really suck ;-)

thanks for voting crabble

celebratory note to self- happy 4000th post !!

rich

It really depends where we are in game's printing cycle as well.

When people complained the game was too hard, we were stuck at end of cycle (shadow and flame) + PoD expansion (laketown) + Delux expansion (Heirs of Numenor).

The game needs to have a climatic ending, so end of cycle needs to be hard.

PoD scenarios are gencon specials that are developed to be hard.

Delux Expansions should be (from marketing point of view) difficult enough that you would want to buy the Cycles when it laucnhes.

At the same time, the Hobbit movies and the Saga Expansions hyped up the game a little, and there were lot of new players trying to play latest adventure packs with minimal card pools... so people with Core Set + only the latest expansion (HoN) was bound to have an unpleasant entry to the game.

Now we are in between 3rd and 4th AP of the Cycle.

We have received half the player cards that were meant to be played while playing Heirs of Numenor and Against the Shadow Cycle (as they were developed at the same time),

Adventure Cycle can't start with high difficulty, or else last adventure pack will be just too hard, so the latest adventure packs we've gotten are 'easier' packs of this Cycle.

We are given yet another keyword that is very powerful (Outlanders), so there are one more options of playing while making cutting-edge deck; so people who have refused to use dwarves for thematic reasons and found the game too hard can now have their powerhouse deck too.

As pointed out before, Steward's Fear (1st AP of Cycle) gave much better starting point for new comers than Heirs of Numenor.

In my opinion, the game always had mostly easy quests, but always one or two really tough or odd quests so one cannot simply steamroll every quests of Cycle. (like Return to Mirkwood and Journey to Rhosgobel for Mirkwood Cycle, or Shadow and Flame and Road to Rivendell/Foundation of Stone for Dwarrowdelf). So from the list, I'd say game's always been C, and will be C for the foreseeable future.

However, unless FFG times the release of upcoming Saga Expansions really well, I can almost gurantee people will go back to complaining how difficult the game is around the time next delux expansion is released.

By that time we would once again be left with Last Adventure pack of Cycle (difficult), Stone of Erech print on demand (extremely difficult), and the delux expansion (difficult) as the newest expansions, and (hopefully) have larger base of new players who got sucked into game by the release of LotR Saga Expansions.

Pretty funny how some players think there are only a couple challenges, while a ton of posts on BGG are overwhelmed with the difficulty.

Most of those posts are either from new players, who are yet to learn the game mechanics, or from players who tried the game, deemed it too hard and ran away screaming. In fact, in such threads are many players who give advice what to do.

The Mirkwood cycle was just tremendous fun for me, it's like this game's Golden Age. The quests were excellent, challenging, and a lot of fun. Then KD and Dwarrowdelf cycle emerged and the fun went, to be replaced by this endless orc swarm that just turned me off from the game completely. The game became a chore to get through, and I was buying expansions to just stick them on the shelf, and not play them. But then On the Doorstep arrived, and it felt like the clouds were lifting. The quests are becoming fun again! I've only played one quest from HoN so far, and only have the first pack in AtS, but it does feel like a level of enjoyability (the spellchecker tells me this isn't a word, but it should be!) is returning.

I agree with much of that. Khazad and Dwarrodelf quests are quite awful compared to the Mirkwood cycle. I think I must have played the latter (or former chronologically) at least 10 times as much. And I don't think I will ever replay them save perhaps the Redhorn Gate or the Watcher (which is intriguing).

Luckily, the quests got much better again with HoN, but I'm yet to play any of the AtS.

I much hope the LotR saga will be the highlight of the whole thing. I liked the Hobbit saga but it doesn't pose much replay-ability for me.

Overrall I vote E. The game is just too hard for the most part even with all the expansions giving us new cards.

I play solo for the most part with the occasional 2-3 player game and almost every time the game wins because it is far too difficult. The emphasis is too much on the threat deck and the threat ratings.

I feel like the majority of the game rests squarely in the “C” category for me, occasionally drifting into D territory but usually in areas where it’s SUPPOSED TO (Massing or Lake-Town).

There are some quests, though, that ARE too hard—largely due to some lacking game design. Back in the day it was Escape From Dul Goldor (fun for multiplayer, but ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE w/ solo w/ a single core set). In the modern era, the best example would likely be Into Ithilian. Even Druadan Forest, while not that hard for MY decks, can destroy you if you aren’t running a deck that can handle the archery.

Honestly, though—I think the biggest thing the game designers could do to help smooth out the difficulty is to give players more ways to deal w/ treacheries. They are the make or break point of most “hard” scenarios and add the greatest amount of randomness to the game.

And before someone says it—yes, I know: Eleanor. But Eleanor is a core set card that is HARD to run in a modern deck. Gondor really hasn’t helped her that much. A Test of Will is only a 2x copy unless you buy multiple core sets. And if you are planning to deal w/ them via encounter deck manipulation then you have to build a deck strategy around that—which for a lot of people (myself included) is a terribly boring/mechanical deck to run. I’m not saying we need a “when revealed” Balin, but SOMETHING would help to allow a greater variety of decks to compete against the more difficult scenarios.