The Lady Galadriel of Lorien has asked you to investigate the area in the vicinity of Dol Guldar. While doing so, one of your allies was ambushed by Orcs, captured, and is now held in a dungeon cell...
As with Anduin, the last quest in the core set does not start off easily. One of your heroes starts off captured - which basically means that you can't use him/her and you don't get any resources from him. Depending on which hero gets captured, this could put a serious dent in your efforts. The quest itself involves you going in and rescuing your trapped hero before escaping from Dol Guldur.
In the first mission, you have to sneak into Dol Guldur itself. This means getting 9 progress tokens and capturing one of the 3 objectives.
It's also the first time in the game where you really benefit from playing with 2 decks instead of just 1. With just 1 deck, you only have 3 heroes and the loss of one hero is equivalent to a third of your force. A major blow. On the other hand, with 2 decks, you have 6 heroes and the loss of one hero, while a blow, is not anywhere near as significant.
It the loss of that hero that makes the first mission such a challenge. This is compounded by a limit of only 1 ally card being played each round so it isn't easy to cover the loss of that hero with ally cards. This is possibly not a huge issue if you are playing 1 deck as you probably couldn't afford more than 1 ally each round anyway but if playing 2 decks, this really slows down your progress as you have to carefully consider which ally to put into play.
No major twists beyond the above - but in fairness, the loss of one hero can be devastating depending on which hero gets captured.
Finding a hidden entrance to the dungeons of Dol Guldur at last, you attempt to make your way through the caverns beneath the hill, searching for your imprisoned friend. The denizens of this labyrinth stand in you way, while the jailors protect the prisoner.
After sneaking into Dol Guldur, you have a chance to rescue your trapped hero. This happens as soon as you put any progress onto the main mission. Rescuing your trapped hero is massively important as, the moment you rescue him/her, you get to use that hero from that point on. In other words, this lets you get back up to full strength to face the rest of the quest. Mechanically, you need to get 15 progress tokens and collect all 3 objectives to proceed to the last mission in this quest.
Naturally, the mission isn't as straightforward as that.
The moment you rescue your trapped hero, the jailer is awakened and enters the staging area. And when I say jailer, I don't mean the pitiful guard they left at the dungeon. I mean the Nazgul of Dol Guldur. This is a massively nasty beast!
The Nazgul of Dol Guldur adds 5 threat to your staging area. If you don't engage him, trying to quest past him is extremely difficult. However, he also does 4 damage and has 3 armour and 9 health - so trying to defeat him in combat isn't easy either! Even worse, if you draw a card with a shadow effect when he attacks, he gets an insta-kill of 1 of your characters. At this juncture, the only appropriate response is - OUCH!!
Granted, you don't actually have to kill the Nazgul to get to the last mission - but with a staging threat of 5, you probably find that you need to engage him simply so that you can actually make quest progress. The only positive thing is that he only engages you if you have a threat of 40 so at least you will probably be able to pick and choose when you want to engage him.
Given how dangerous the Nazgul is in combat, it shouldn't be a surprise to learn that I didn't engage it until I could play the Gandalf ally card that round.
Following a thread of sunlight you discover a cavern opening leading out through the side of the hill. Stationed outside the cave-mouth, however, is a large group of orcs.
After rescuing your trapped hero, all that remains is getting out of Dol Guldur itself. This last mission is relatively easy. All you need to do is get 7 progress tokens. Provided that the Nazgul is not in play at that point, you win the quest.
The main twist in this last mission is that an Orc Guard comes out every round. However, the Orc Guard is really more of an annoyance than a real threat. It only has 1 attack and 1 hit point so it's easy to defend against and/or kill. With that said, if you have other enemies that you are facing off against, the addition of that Orc Guard can be extremely annoying as you simply run out of characters that you can use to defend and/or fight the Orc Guard.
I suspect that the main threat in this mission was supposed to be the Nazgul itself as you can't complete the mission unless the Nazgul is not in play. Effectively, this means that you have to defeat the Nazgul sooner or later. In practice though, the high threat of the Nazgul meant that I always dealt with it during the second mission. This effectively resulted in a little of an anti-climax as this last mission always ended up being rather easy as all I had to do was go all out in getting 7 progress tokens. I could quest with every character I had and not worry about defending as I wouldn't need to go through the combat phase if I could get 7 progress tokens right off the bat.
Quest thoughts
Despite the anti-climax, this is another really fun quest with loads of thematic cards.
The way the game handles one of your heroes being captured is inspired. Literally losing one of your main heroes at the start of the quest immediately puts you on the defensive and also really makes you think about the construction of your deck. Bear in mind that losing a hero also slows down your resource pool so having expensive cards in this quest can simply mean that half your cards can't be played as you never have enough resources.
It also makes you think about which heroes you should take to the quest. I have been playing this quest with the decks I used to defeat Anduin but if I were to build a new deck, I would build a deck with all weak heroes so that it is hard to be critically impaired by the loss of a major hero. Hopefully, the reduced starting threat will give you enough time to get more allies onto the board so that you have a solid group of characters by the time you start facing off against the enemies in the game.
Interestingly enough, this means that out of the 3 quests in the core set, arguably 2 of them involve you picking "weaker" heroes to have the best chance of success in the quest. This is actually really clever design to make you think about your deck construction instead of simply auto-picking the "strongest" heroes.
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