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.
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