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Wojtek Wojcik(Wojo)Poland
Kraków(Cracow)
Malopolska
I very much like designing games but I think I prefer to play them.
Metallum ... game I most proud of.
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Here is a compilation of my comments on the scenario, note that they were made some time ago and I have not edited them much so they tell a story of how my view point changed (but my current opinion may differ). They are presented chronologically in each section.
[Session Reports]
NinjaDorg's Scenario 1 - The Old Forest
NinjaDorg's Scenario 2 - The Lost Road
NinjaDorg's Scenario 3 - Forgotten Ruins
NinjaDorg's Scenario 4 - The Elven Assembly
NinjaDorg's Scenario 5 - Ungoliant's Lair
NinjaDorg's Scenario 6 - Branching Paths
Scenario 1 - Tactics/Spirit deck - As far as I remember it seems to be similar to Forgotten Ruins in terms on how difficult enemies come out etc.
Scenario 2 - Glorfindel (mono lore deck) - nice idea with a single hero. Fun and can be hard.
Pacing of Forgotten Ruins is just ideal for new players, it gives you time to prepare before attacking you hard (with Spawn and later with Nazgul), it teaches you to time completing the stages right, shows importance of allies and lower threat. I consider it to be easier then Journey down the Anduin and would recommend it for all players that finished Passage through Mirkwood.
The Elven Assembly was very easy to beat and never posed a real threat (although I was fairly lucky with my draws of the Orks that happen few times in the quest).
Ungoliant's Lair - This is what I call a one trick pony scenarios. There is a certain mechanic/restriction built to the scenario and if you are surprised by it on first try it is likely that you will loose. Once you are familiar with it then it is much easier to succeed and scenario becomes much easier.
Branching Paths - explores the concept that I find very interesting namely that your choices at the end of the scenario impact what stage you will face next. This particular quest did not fully explore the potential of this approach (as choices were quite easy) but showed that it can be done and can be very interesting.
[General Thoughts]
I played two previous custom scenarios by NinjaDorg's some time ago and I liked them quite a bit. Now I am ready to form an initial opinion on the whole series (I am still planing on trying the following scenarios as well to see how they differ). This series of scenarios should be recommended to all new players (some of them even before Passage through Mirkwood), I really think that will teach important game concepts without tossing new players into the deep water right away (I am looking at you Journey down the Anduin). There is a drawback to this namely NinjaDorg's scenarios get much easier with increased player card pool much faster then the original ones that still propose a decent challenge.
Again I want to reiterate that FFGs scenarios seem to handle repeat plays much better then the custom ones while the latter are much better suited for new players. I love the fact that people do create those as it greatly increases longevity of the game. Kudos to all people that develop them.
Nov 2012: I have not tried other custom scenarios but I am glad to see that people still develop them. It is great to know that Feonix (who created few respected ones) got a job at FFG to work on LOTR:LCG full time. Once I do catch up with current releases I might try few more custom scenarios.
Lord of the Rings:LCG - reviews and general thoughts
It all started with accepting 100 plays challenge and pledging to comment each play. Soon my thoughts outgrew the BGG comment format and also FFG's forum. I decided to post them in a form of a blog here. In time I got rid of session reports and replaced them with expansions reviews. Enjoy.
Archive for Session Reports
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Wojtek Wojcik(Wojo)Poland
Kraków(Cracow)
Malopolska
I very much like designing games but I think I prefer to play them.
Metallum ... game I most proud of.
-
Here is a compilation of my comments on the scenario, note that they were made some time ago and I have not edited them much so they tell a story of how my view point changed (but my current opinion may differ). They are presented chronologically in each section.
[Session Reports]
I attempted the third scenario (escape from Dol Guldur) again trying to apply what I have learned throughout my plays of Journey down the Anduin and was trounced by the scenario. It is very badly suited for solo play as you get 3 cards from the encounter deck right from the get go and only if you are very very lucky you have a chance to start to progress (if you start with two enemies or two locations then you are pretty much toasted). Once you get going (by clearing the staging area) then the things are looking better but ... you soon discover that you are running out of cards. Then the Nazgul comes and eats you allies faster then you can field them (especially if supported by other enemies attacking you).
NEWER:
Finally I decided to try my battle (Massing at Osgiliath) tested deck against the bane of all solo players - Escape from DG. Come on, the old core set scenario, how hard it can be? Well as you can see from my results despite the fact that my pool of cards was greatly enhanced since first attempts it is still pretty much un-winnable . I lost two or three games on setup (say two enemies amd caught in the web guarding objectives). In few others I was not able to move past the first stage of the quest. The most interesting attempts were the first one and the last one.
During the first one I got a decent hand and average encounter deck draws (some terrible some easy ones). I was able to move past stage one, have a prisoner rescued and was able to balance the threat from the staging area for several turns that allowed me to draw two sneak attacks and Gandalf. I was ready to announce that I will do it! Then I got a treachery that forced me to discard all events from my hands ... after that few enemies appeared back to back in the staging area and slowly I was overwhelmed.
Last attempt was even more successful. I was able to move past stage two and I even was ready to take the Nazgul down. Threat was very high at this point unfortunately and enemies plus shadow effects soon took me above 50. I decided to play just to see how much over I would go ... I was able "to win" with threat dial showing 58.
[General Thoughts]
This scenario should be in the core set despite the fact I think it is unbeatable with the cards from the base game (unless you will get 1-in-a-million lucky). It intrigues, it forces you to tweak your deck tons and tons of times. At the same time I understand why it lowers the value of the base game for many people. They will see it as unbeatable (solo) and claim that the game comes with only two playable scenario. I think that FFG would do much better by including fourth scenario with a difficulty close to Journey down Anduin.
My thoughts on Escape from Dul Guldur are not settled yet - I like the challenge on one hand but I am cursing the ridiculous difficulty on the other. I will try to make my mind about it latter as I decided to see if further player cards will make this beatable.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Wojtek Wojcik(Wojo)Poland
Kraków(Cracow)
Malopolska
I very much like designing games but I think I prefer to play them.
Metallum ... game I most proud of.
-
Here is a compilation of my comments on the scenario, note that they were made some time ago and I have not edited them much so they tell a story of how my view point changed (but my current opinion may differ). They are presented chronologically in each section.
[Session Reports]
- I started to play using pre-constructed decks first. I was basically massacred by the scenario each time (although was able to get far few times with leadership).
- This is were I started to deck build and quickly settled on Spirit/Leadership deck fairly early on (although had some luck with spirit/tactics as well).
- At first I was considering the Hill Troll as a main obstacle but soon enough discovered that the second part is even harder once you figured out how to deal with troll.
- Went with tournament illegal decks of 30 cards and started to have a decent go against it.
- Returned to it several times after that (with extended card pool). Still found it engaging, challenging, thematic and fun.
[General Thoughts]
- While playing only with cards from the Core Set one is extremely limited in deck construction part of the game if using two sphere tournament deck of 50 cards. Almost all available cards need to be used which means that quite a few of not so good cards will end up in your hand throughout the quest. Since in this game most of the time the encounter deck will pound on you very hard every card needs to work to its highest potential and those not so good cards will be your undoing.
- Threat is an excellent mechanic in this game introducing very hard and interesting choices. Do you go for better heroes that will be able to do a lot of cool things latter ... the trade off is that enemies will start pounding at you from the turn one and will most of the time overwhelm you by killing your allies and wounding heroes. Then you are so weakened that treacheries will slowly kill you off unless you are very lucky. On the other hand ... if you choose only weak heroes you will have time to prepare but will lack the strength to take care of the stronger enemies. Of course it all depends on the scenario but as a general observation it seems to be correct.
- When choosing heroes/spheres for playing you really need to choose ones that will help you reasonably well with several aspects of the game. The test above showed me that tactics is probably the weakest sphere in solo playing - it is solely oriented on fighting (if you disregard Legolas and Balde of Gondolin) and this is usually not enough to succeed (on regular basis) in more difficult quests. I am not ready to say that it useless in solo play but for now I am marking as the weakest or too specialized.
- Cards "on paper" might look weaker/stronger then they actually are in a particular deck. Need to try several cards that I consider bad/not worthed and see if they are actually that bad or am I not seeing their full potential.
- So far Journey down the Anduin is by far the best quest for solo players. Passage through Mirkwood is a bit on the easy side and it is fairly repetitive as far as quest stages go. Escape for Dul Guldur is just too hard solo (although I will try to play it again soon). I like the Hunt for Gollum but once you know how it plays it's ending seems a bit anti-climactic. JdtA starts with an earthquake (troll), it tension rises (as more and more things flood the staging area), to reach excellent finale (when you try to time going to last stage with as few enemies as possible in the staging area)
- [+] Dice rolls
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Wojtek Wojcik(Wojo)Poland
Kraków(Cracow)
Malopolska
I very much like designing games but I think I prefer to play them.
Metallum ... game I most proud of.
-
I do not have any extensive comments about the scenario as I played it a lot before starting to comment my plays. Here is a summary from memory:
[Session report] Played it with all pre-constructed decks. Managed to win with all of them except tactics at least once. It was a very good experience as I was still learning the basics of the mechanics and I was able to get to know all the player cards from the Core Set. This helped a lot with my deck building later on.
[General Thoughts]As for the scenario it self I like it quite a bit as an introduction. It is not too deadly most of the time and should give you time to build up a little bit. If you are new to the game I really recommend playing it few times with pre-constructed deck (even if you can beat it easily) as you will get the taste for everything without feeling pressured much (at least most of the time). This a good introduction for the game although still some things do tend to confuse new players (searching for Ungolianth's Spawn in stage 3).
From a more experienced player perspective it is not that exciting and it does not age well (in a sense that new cards make it too easy). I am not planing to revisit it anytime soon (unless I decide to go through all scenarios again). Still if introducing new people to LOTR:LCG it will be my first choice although see bellow on my thoughts about teaching the game to my wife and playing this scenario:
In general teaching rules to LOTR LCG is quite easy (as the rules are fairly straightforward) but of course the devil is in the details as there are plenty of rules on the cards and it can be quite hard to manage/understand them all at the same time. Now after teaching my wife the game I also understand why so many people were not impressed with this game as much as I am. Two points:
1. Without deck building you loose very fun strategic part of the game and you are left with a tactical game (that you might or might not enjoy enough to like the game as a whole)
2. If you play the game only to win each scenario once (instead of trying to build the deck that will beat it consistently) its replayability will be very limited
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