Gandalf has requested your assistance in the search for the elusive creature known as Gollum. Your search begins in the Anduin Valley between Mirkwood Forest and the Misty Mountains. You make your way along the banks of the Anduin River, a likely place for Gollum to find food.
The quest starts off really thematically in terms of the mechanics. As you start your search for Gollum, if you quest successfully, you draw 3 cards and keep 1 of them. This card is in addition to the card per player you draw as part of the questing phase which means that you are burning your way through the encounter deck.
Mechanically though, this really works well as it really feels as if you are searching for something in the encounter deck.
While making the staging area more dangerous, it does have a minor advantage in that you can possibly dump really dangerous encounter cards. Overall, not sure if its a net positive or negative from a difficulty point of view but I love it mechanically.
Rumors have led you to the eaves of Mirkwood Forest, where the Woodmen whisper of a new terror in the night...
Mission 2B on the other hand feels really odd. The story has you going to Mirkwood Forest. However, mechanically, the only difference with Mission 1B is that you draw an extra encounter card at the beginning of the mission. This is counterbalanced by the removal of the extra card per questing phase that was present in Mission 1B.
This is further exacerbated with Mission 3B which has no additional story beats but simply introduces an additional mechanism where only Heroes who previously found a Clue to Gollums location can quest. Thematically, this could have been really interesting if the story supported the mechanics. However, the story fails hard.
In effect, you spend the entire quest searching for Gollum. You never actually find him but you spend all 3 missions searching for him - and without any story beats, the quest ultimately falls flat and feels boring.
Extra Cards
Despite the failure of the quest itself, I am glad that I bought this adventure pack. The pack comes with some extra cards - some of which are extremely fun and useful.
To start with, you get Bilbo Baggins whose power lets the first player draw an extra card. I used this ability to create a new deck focused on deck draw which has been extremely successful even with the limited cards that I have.
In addition, this adventure pack introduces a new type of card called Songs. The Song of Kings, which is available in this pack, gives the hero it is attached to the Leadership resource icon. This is pretty cool in that you can give it to a non-Leadership hero and he ends up with the ability to pay for cards from 2 different pools. When couple up with Steward of Gondor, which grants 2 extra resources per round, you can build a deck that is extremely flexible in paying for whichever card you happen to have in your hand.
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