Emerging from Mirkwood Forest with an urgent message for Lady Galadriel, you must now make your way south along the Anduin River in order to reach the forest of Lorien. As you leave the forest behind, you notice that you are being pursued, and thus quicken your pace...
Unlike Passage through Mirkwood, Journey down the Anduin, the second quest in the Core set, does not start off easily.
As you approach the location of a small raft stashed on the riverbank, a fearsome Hill Troll emerges from behind a grouping or rocks, and attacks!
Yup! Right off the bat, you are facing off against a Hill Troll!
It has a ton of hit points so isn't easy to kill. It can also do 6 damage with each attack so it can kill most heroes and allies in one hit. Lastly, the Hill Troll will engage if you have a threat of 30. Which isn't actually that high - so unless you deliberately picked weaker Heroes, it's entirely possible that you will be facing that Hill Troll on your first or second turn!
Interestingly enough, this actually means that your best chance of success in this quest is to actually start off with weaker Heroes. The lower starting threat gives you a couple of turns to build up your forces before you engage the Hill Troll and success or failure fully depends on you using those initial turns to setup to defeat the Hill Troll. In this regard, from the cards in the core set, it's pretty critical to have Gandalf in your hand as, without his help, it's significantly more difficult dealing with the Hill Troll.
After defeating the Troll, you are able to board the raft and embark upon a river voyage. As you depart, your enemies pursue, harassing the small vessel as you attempt to navigate the river...
As your enemies harass the raft, it is difficult to maintain balance and effectively fight them off.
The second mission is actually really fun albeit really nasty if you aren't set up properly. To progress through this mission, you need to get 16 progress tokens. The main challenge from this mission is that you are drawing an extra encounter card each round. Luckily, any enemies you encounter won't engage you on their own although you can still engage them.
The extra encounter card means that it is difficult to make quest progress as the staging area fills up quickly. More importantly, some bad luck in drawing encounter cards can location lock you and make it impossible to collect progress tokens via questing.
In this regard, Northern Tracker and Legolas are tremendous assets. Northern Tracker lets you put progress tokens on locations even without travelling to them. This is great for helping to clear locations from the staging area which helps mitigate the risk of location lock. Meanwhile, Legolas gets you 2 progress tokens each time he gets a kill. This is immensely helpful as those 2 progress tokens aren't hampered by any threat in the staging area.
The ongoing harassment from your enemies has forced your raft to the shore, and you must now confront their ambush head on. If you survive this attack, the path to the Golden Wood should be open before you...
What better way to end a quest than with an epic brawl! This last mission in the quest basically sees you being attacked by a swarm of enemies. Questing at this stage is only relevant to the extent of minimizing threat gain (and remember, you die if your threat hits 50). Progress in the mission itself is reliant on you killing all enemies!
Nothing too tricky in this last mission - its basically a straight up brawl to end the game.
Quest thoughts
This is a really fun quest. It's also quite difficult as you need a party with good questing ability to deal with Mission 2 as well as good combat ability to deal with Mission 3! Which is a great setup as it means you really think about how to setup your deck. I initially took on this quest with the party I had from the first quest and got TPKed immediately.
However, once you recognise that threat management is critical in this mission, with the initial Hill Troll as well as some encounter cards which punish you if your threat is over 35, you can build your deck differently to give yourself the best chance of victory. Which, naturally, is exactly what I did. My subsequent two games, with a customised deck purpose built to defeat this quest, managed to pull off consecutive wins.
I also love one of the location cards in this quest. Banks of the Anduin is a location card that recurs each time you clear it. Which is a brilliantly thematic way of showing your journey down the Anduin itself.
Overall, a fantastic quest which shows the importance of deck construction if you are looking to defeat the quests this game throws against you.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Lord of the Rings LCG - Passage through Mirkwood
Mirkwood has long been a dangerous place., and recently one of King Thranduil's patrols has uncovered disconcerting signs of a gathering menace in the vicinity of Dol Golder. A party of heroes, controlled by the players, has been assembled to carry a message through Mirkwood, down the Anduin, and eventually to Lorien, to warn Lady Galadriel of the imminent danger.
And with that, the core set of Lord of the Rings starts off the Shadows of Mirkwood adventure path. The core set itself only contains the first 3 quests in the adventure path - the remaining 5 quests being released via expansion packs. I'm still playing through the core set but so far, I already know that I will be buying more, more, more!!
Just so you know, the text in italics is taken directly from the game.
Passage through Mirkwood
The first quest, Passage through Mirkwood, sees you build out your party of heroes to take a warning to Lady Galadriel. This quest sees you travelling through, as the quest title suggests, Mirkwood forest.
You are traveling through Mirkwood forest, carrying an urgent message from King Thanduil to the Lady Galadriel of Lorien. As you move along the dark trail, the spiders gather around you...
The quest actually starts off pretty easily as you would expect with a quest ranked as 1 star difficulty. For reference, later quests can go up to 7 stars in difficulty (or possibly even higher in later expansions). Granted, there is a forest spider that you immediately need to deal with. With that said though, the first location you can travel to actually readies one of your characters so you can quest and immediately reuse one of your heroes to deal with the spider. Beyond that, the first mission of this quest is fairly standard with little in the way of surprises beyond the cards in the encounter deck and collecting the 8 progress tokens to complete this mission is fairly straightforward.
As you move through Mirkwood, hounded by spiders, the forest path forks before you...
And with that, the core set of Lord of the Rings starts off the Shadows of Mirkwood adventure path. The core set itself only contains the first 3 quests in the adventure path - the remaining 5 quests being released via expansion packs. I'm still playing through the core set but so far, I already know that I will be buying more, more, more!!
Just so you know, the text in italics is taken directly from the game.
Passage through Mirkwood
The first quest, Passage through Mirkwood, sees you build out your party of heroes to take a warning to Lady Galadriel. This quest sees you travelling through, as the quest title suggests, Mirkwood forest.
You are traveling through Mirkwood forest, carrying an urgent message from King Thanduil to the Lady Galadriel of Lorien. As you move along the dark trail, the spiders gather around you...
The quest actually starts off pretty easily as you would expect with a quest ranked as 1 star difficulty. For reference, later quests can go up to 7 stars in difficulty (or possibly even higher in later expansions). Granted, there is a forest spider that you immediately need to deal with. With that said though, the first location you can travel to actually readies one of your characters so you can quest and immediately reuse one of your heroes to deal with the spider. Beyond that, the first mission of this quest is fairly standard with little in the way of surprises beyond the cards in the encounter deck and collecting the 8 progress tokens to complete this mission is fairly straightforward.
As you move through Mirkwood, hounded by spiders, the forest path forks before you...
The second mission of Passage through Mirkwood is really more like a placeholder than a real mission. Requiring only 2 progress tokens to complete, you often only spend 1 round before you move onto the last mission.
The trail winds into one of the darkest, most tangled parts of the forest... You sense that a foul, dark presence is hunting you, and you move quickly in an attempt to avoid its evil.
Which brings up the first real point of interest about Passage through Mirkwood. There are actually two different Mission 3's for Passage through Mirkwood and which specific mission you deal with is random. This represents the choice of path you took in the second mission and is a nice thematic way of giving you some variation in the first quest.
Beorn's Path - You attempt to follow a secret, hidden trail to avoid the enemy.
Probably considered the easier of the 2 available options for Mission 3, this mission sees you needing 10 progress tokens to progress. This is relatively straightforward task albeit requiring several rounds to complete. The slight wrinkle to this Mission is that you can't complete it if Ungoliant's Spawn is in play.
Which is very interesting from a thematic point of view. Your team is trying to escape from Mirkwood Forest using a secret trail before they get noticed by Ungoliant's Spawn - one of the nastier creatures in the encounter deck. If you can do so, great. However, if you do get noticed by Ungoliant's Spawn, then it will hunt you and you need to deal with it before you can leave.
In the lore, Ungoliant is a massive spider deity (I think) and one of the oldest entities in Middle Earth. Shelob is probably the most famous of Ungoliant's spawn - Shelob being the massive spider that accosted Frodo and Sam in their quest to destroy the One Ring.
Don't leave the Path - The shadows grow darker, and you realise that a foul presence is aiming to draw you from the path. You must defeat it to pass this way.
It should be obvious by now but the foul presence hunting you is the aforementioned Ungoliant's Spawn. Ungoliant's Spawn is a pretty nasty creature that can potentially kill off an hero or ally with each attack. At the same time, it has a pretty high defence and 9 hit points so it can take a lot of punishment.
And you have to kill it.
Quest thoughts
All in all, as expected for the first quest that players will encounter, Passage through Mirkwood is a relatively simple quest that most players should be able to defeat relatively easily.
There aren't a whole lot of wrinkles with the quest design and a fairly straightforward approach is often enough to complete the quest. Half the time, all you need is solid questing ability. In the event where you need to deal with Ungoliant's Spawn, the use of Gandalf together with other allies is often enough to deal with Ungoliant's Spawn in one round.
Granted, there will be occasions where a run of bad draws will make things tough for you (such as drawing Ungoliant's Spawn before Mission 3 or having to encounter Hummerhorns - the other nasty enemy you might face in the encounter deck). However, overall, it's a relatively simple mission as evidenced by the fact that the mono-sphere decks in the core set can all beat this Mission.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Lord of the Rings LCG - the spheres
So, last week, I talked about Lord of the Rings LCG - the new card game that I'm currently addicted to. This week, I'm going to talk a little bit about how the spheres (ie deck types) in the game differ from each other.
I'll also be honest and say that, primarily, this is for my benefit so that I have a record of what each sphere is good at in case I ever forget. :)
One last caveat - I'm still learning the game so the notes below only represent my understanding at this moment in time. Don't take anything you see below as gospel!
Spirit
The rulebook says that the Spirit sphere is about the strength of a hero's will. And this is very clearly reflected in the deck makeup itself.
This deck is, by far, the best at questing, which uses willpower. Eowyn, one of the heroes, has a willpower of 4 - the highest of the heroes in the core set. Furthermore, her special ability allows you to discard 1 card in order to temporarily boost that willpower even higher when questing. When it comes to making actual quest progress - this sphere is hands down the best.
Other strengths of the deck include its ability to manage threat and treachery.
Threat is a measure of how dangerous you are perceived to be. If you have a low threat, you aren't considered dangerous and enemies will tend to leave you be in favour of attacking higher threat targets. Also, some event cards only trigger if your threat is high enough. Lastly, if your threat ever reaches 50, you are eliminated from the game.
From this, you can see that threat management is an important part of the game. By managing your threat, you can control when, and whether, you engage enemies. The Spirit deck has various cards which can be used to lower your threat and give you more time and options for how to deal with encounter cards.
Lastly, the Spirit deck includes options to let you cancel the effects of a treachery or shadow card when dealt from the encounter deck. Both of these cards have negative effects and the ability to cancel them can mean the difference between having your hero take damage versus having your hero die.
Lore
Lore is billed in the rulebook as the power of the mind and intellect.
From a mechanics point of view, Lore is really good at card draw. Thematically, this simulates intelligence by giving you more options. As with all card games, your options are heavily impacted by the cards you have in your hand. Card draw abilities give you a better chance of drawing the card you need to deal with the threat that is facing you.
Other strengths of this deck are healing. There are a lot of cards which can heal damage on your characters. Particularly critical as the death of a hero means that you will be getting 1 less resource per turn which in turn, impacts your ability to play any cards that you do draw. Alternatively, the healing ability an help keep your allies alive. Like all good fantasy stories, allies are critical - particularly as your 3 starting heroes will not be able to defeat the quest on their own.
Tactics
Tactics basically boils down to combat prowess and the ability of your team to hit enemies with swords, axes, bows etc.
From a mechanics point of view, this deck is probably the simplest to understand. Most of the cards are combat related - either allowing you to do a preemptive strike on enemies, increasing your damage/defence value or pumping up your hit points so that you can take more punishment.
Unfortunately, the nature of the deck also means that its a very poor choice if you are building a mono-sphere deck (at least in the core set). The problem is that it is very hard to quest using this deck. As a mono-sphere deck, your questing is almost wholly tied into Legolas ability to kill enemies (which grants quest progress). If you don't draw enemies or aren't able to kill the enemies you do draw quickly enough - events can quickly spiral out of control with defeat following soon after.
On the other hand, the nature of the deck also means that its a great complement to other decks if you are building a dual-sphere deck. For example, pairing Tactics with Spirit gives you the questing ability of Spirit together with the martial prowess of Tactics. Theoretically, this covers all your key bases while playing the game.
Leadership
Leadership is basically what it says on the tin - the ability of your heroes to lead and inspire others.
As you can expect, mechanically, there are a lot of cards which can be used to help other players. This can be in the form of defending for another player, attacking another players enemies or just helping other players with questing or resource generation.
That last point about resource generation is actually fairly critical. One of the decks key strengths is the ability to speed up resource generation (for either yourself or another player). Normally, each hero only gets 1 resource per round. With 3 heroes, this means that you often need to wait a round or two before you can use any of your high cost cards (which can cost 5 or 6 resources to play). As you can imagine, speeding up resource generation lets you put your more powerful cards into play quickly which can be critical. One of the missions in the core set in particular starts you off with a major threat and getting cards into play quickly to deal with that threat can be the difference between success or failure in that quest.
The last key ability of this deck is readying. There are various cards which let you ready your characters so that they can effectively act twice in each round. Normally, each character can only act once and that extra action - if used correctly - can make a huge difference by allowing you to continue clearing enemies from the board while still making quest progress or defending from attacks.
In the core set, this is actually one of the most powerful spheres. You would think that it would only really shine when playing with 2 players (given the number of cards which benefit other players) but in practice, even a mono-sphere Leadership deck did extremely well in the game.
I'll also be honest and say that, primarily, this is for my benefit so that I have a record of what each sphere is good at in case I ever forget. :)
One last caveat - I'm still learning the game so the notes below only represent my understanding at this moment in time. Don't take anything you see below as gospel!
Spirit
The rulebook says that the Spirit sphere is about the strength of a hero's will. And this is very clearly reflected in the deck makeup itself.
This deck is, by far, the best at questing, which uses willpower. Eowyn, one of the heroes, has a willpower of 4 - the highest of the heroes in the core set. Furthermore, her special ability allows you to discard 1 card in order to temporarily boost that willpower even higher when questing. When it comes to making actual quest progress - this sphere is hands down the best.
Other strengths of the deck include its ability to manage threat and treachery.
Threat is a measure of how dangerous you are perceived to be. If you have a low threat, you aren't considered dangerous and enemies will tend to leave you be in favour of attacking higher threat targets. Also, some event cards only trigger if your threat is high enough. Lastly, if your threat ever reaches 50, you are eliminated from the game.
From this, you can see that threat management is an important part of the game. By managing your threat, you can control when, and whether, you engage enemies. The Spirit deck has various cards which can be used to lower your threat and give you more time and options for how to deal with encounter cards.
Lastly, the Spirit deck includes options to let you cancel the effects of a treachery or shadow card when dealt from the encounter deck. Both of these cards have negative effects and the ability to cancel them can mean the difference between having your hero take damage versus having your hero die.
Lore
Lore is billed in the rulebook as the power of the mind and intellect.
From a mechanics point of view, Lore is really good at card draw. Thematically, this simulates intelligence by giving you more options. As with all card games, your options are heavily impacted by the cards you have in your hand. Card draw abilities give you a better chance of drawing the card you need to deal with the threat that is facing you.
Other strengths of this deck are healing. There are a lot of cards which can heal damage on your characters. Particularly critical as the death of a hero means that you will be getting 1 less resource per turn which in turn, impacts your ability to play any cards that you do draw. Alternatively, the healing ability an help keep your allies alive. Like all good fantasy stories, allies are critical - particularly as your 3 starting heroes will not be able to defeat the quest on their own.
Tactics
Tactics basically boils down to combat prowess and the ability of your team to hit enemies with swords, axes, bows etc.
From a mechanics point of view, this deck is probably the simplest to understand. Most of the cards are combat related - either allowing you to do a preemptive strike on enemies, increasing your damage/defence value or pumping up your hit points so that you can take more punishment.
Unfortunately, the nature of the deck also means that its a very poor choice if you are building a mono-sphere deck (at least in the core set). The problem is that it is very hard to quest using this deck. As a mono-sphere deck, your questing is almost wholly tied into Legolas ability to kill enemies (which grants quest progress). If you don't draw enemies or aren't able to kill the enemies you do draw quickly enough - events can quickly spiral out of control with defeat following soon after.
On the other hand, the nature of the deck also means that its a great complement to other decks if you are building a dual-sphere deck. For example, pairing Tactics with Spirit gives you the questing ability of Spirit together with the martial prowess of Tactics. Theoretically, this covers all your key bases while playing the game.
Leadership
Leadership is basically what it says on the tin - the ability of your heroes to lead and inspire others.
As you can expect, mechanically, there are a lot of cards which can be used to help other players. This can be in the form of defending for another player, attacking another players enemies or just helping other players with questing or resource generation.
That last point about resource generation is actually fairly critical. One of the decks key strengths is the ability to speed up resource generation (for either yourself or another player). Normally, each hero only gets 1 resource per round. With 3 heroes, this means that you often need to wait a round or two before you can use any of your high cost cards (which can cost 5 or 6 resources to play). As you can imagine, speeding up resource generation lets you put your more powerful cards into play quickly which can be critical. One of the missions in the core set in particular starts you off with a major threat and getting cards into play quickly to deal with that threat can be the difference between success or failure in that quest.
The last key ability of this deck is readying. There are various cards which let you ready your characters so that they can effectively act twice in each round. Normally, each character can only act once and that extra action - if used correctly - can make a huge difference by allowing you to continue clearing enemies from the board while still making quest progress or defending from attacks.
In the core set, this is actually one of the most powerful spheres. You would think that it would only really shine when playing with 2 players (given the number of cards which benefit other players) but in practice, even a mono-sphere Leadership deck did extremely well in the game.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is an LCG published by Fantasy Flight Games. And its a damn fine game!
I posted in the past about some of the problems I had with Magic. Despite my specific problems with Magic, one of things I liked was the feeling of building your own deck from a pool of cards and then testing that deck against other decks. This is part of the reason why I have been enjoying Hearthstone.
Lord of the Rings LCG is another great example of a game which gives me that deck construction feeling while avoiding the pitfalls that Magic has.
Land as mana
As with Hearthstone, Lord of the Rings LCG avoids the issue with having land as mana by giving you 1 resource for each Hero at the start of each round (you normally have 3 heroes although this can depend on how you build your deck). If one of those heroes dies, then you don't get resources for that hero.
Again, this removes a major source of irritation from the game while still forcing you to consider whether you will have enough resources to play the cards you want to play.
Living Card Game
The LCG format which FFG have adopted differs from CCGs like Magic in that there is no random distribution of cards. If you buy the main core boxed set, you know exactly what cards you will be getting. Similarly, each expansion of the game has the exact same cards in it.
This removes one of my biggest complaints about CCGs. I hate the idea of buying booster packs in the hope that you get a useful card.
Co-operative
And this is where we get to what makes this game fascinating for me. Unlike other CCGs, Lord of the Rings LCG is actually a co-operative game. You build your deck and then take it up against a pre-built encounter deck.
This is a brilliant idea and frankly, I'm surprised that this hasn't been done more often.
Each pre-built encounter designed by the developers can be designed to have a different challenge. This also forces you to build your deck differently for each challenge as an "uber deck" is unlikely to be structured in the right way to beat a particular challenge. At the same time, the game is open enough that you will have different ways to beat that challenge. And the LCG format of the game means that you have the cards and options that you need to defeat the game - its just a question of whether you can build the right deck (well, you also need to actually play the deck and win with it).
Overall, another great game which I have only just started to get into. The game was first published in 2011 so there are already a million expansions and adventure packs that I can choose from. All I need now is time...
I posted in the past about some of the problems I had with Magic. Despite my specific problems with Magic, one of things I liked was the feeling of building your own deck from a pool of cards and then testing that deck against other decks. This is part of the reason why I have been enjoying Hearthstone.
Lord of the Rings LCG is another great example of a game which gives me that deck construction feeling while avoiding the pitfalls that Magic has.
Land as mana
As with Hearthstone, Lord of the Rings LCG avoids the issue with having land as mana by giving you 1 resource for each Hero at the start of each round (you normally have 3 heroes although this can depend on how you build your deck). If one of those heroes dies, then you don't get resources for that hero.
Again, this removes a major source of irritation from the game while still forcing you to consider whether you will have enough resources to play the cards you want to play.
Living Card Game
The LCG format which FFG have adopted differs from CCGs like Magic in that there is no random distribution of cards. If you buy the main core boxed set, you know exactly what cards you will be getting. Similarly, each expansion of the game has the exact same cards in it.
This removes one of my biggest complaints about CCGs. I hate the idea of buying booster packs in the hope that you get a useful card.
Co-operative
And this is where we get to what makes this game fascinating for me. Unlike other CCGs, Lord of the Rings LCG is actually a co-operative game. You build your deck and then take it up against a pre-built encounter deck.
This is a brilliant idea and frankly, I'm surprised that this hasn't been done more often.
Each pre-built encounter designed by the developers can be designed to have a different challenge. This also forces you to build your deck differently for each challenge as an "uber deck" is unlikely to be structured in the right way to beat a particular challenge. At the same time, the game is open enough that you will have different ways to beat that challenge. And the LCG format of the game means that you have the cards and options that you need to defeat the game - its just a question of whether you can build the right deck (well, you also need to actually play the deck and win with it).
Overall, another great game which I have only just started to get into. The game was first published in 2011 so there are already a million expansions and adventure packs that I can choose from. All I need now is time...
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