Greater Tioga County Area Gaming Group

[Eilandor]

I'm fine with either time.

[Vardaen]

I say we shoot for weds then.

[Vardaen]

Last night we played some Lotr LCG. Myself, Eilandor and Brennor (the man the myth the admin).

So in honor of the Hobbit movie coming out on DVD and me getting the 2nd part of the Hobbit Saga expansion for the game we played the Hobbit Saga stuff. I had taken apart all my decks and put together Hobbit themed decks, meaning lots of dwarves and time period stuff as much as possible.
So to start with we picked 3 of the 4 decks I had made.

Eilandor took the leadership/spirit deck: Thorin Oakenshield (Leadership), King Dain (Leadership) and Nori (Spirit). The deck offered up some card canceling, resource gathering, threat management, etc. Dain was a clear MVP of this deck for the game as he gave EVERY dwarf bonuses, and we had lots of dwarves in play.

I then used the tactics/spirit deck: Gimli (Tactics), Thalin (Tactics) Oin (Spirit). The combat aspect of this was great, I managed to kill a troll in one round, and Thalin kept the crows at bay. The spirit however was unbalanced and I never drew any spirit cards in the first game.

Brennor used the Lore/Spirit deck: Bombour (lore), Ori (lore) and Dawlin (spirit). It had healing and some quest things, fiddle with locations, and things of that nature. He ended up trading this deck out for the second game and said he liked the new deck better.

Brennor (2nd game) used the Leadership: Balin (leadership), Gloin (leadership), and I forgot the third guy. This deck had minor healing, deck twiddle, which was going to prove to be a good thing.

So game one: We Must Away, Ere Break of Day

The point of this adventure is to mimic the Hobbit story. The game sets up with two seperate piles beyond the normal encounter deck. A piles of the trolls and their cave (Tom, Bert, William) and a pile of Sacks. The sacks will eventually get thrown on our dwarves and neuter them from attacking, defending, questing or triggering effect. Its sucks. But on our side we have Bilbo that is passed from player to player and can unsack our guys and do some other things along the way. Yeah for Bilbo!
Stage One: An Unexpected Party Setup: Remove and shuffle the 7 Sack cards into a Sack deck and set it aside face down. Remove the 3 Troll enemies and the Troll Cave from the encounter deck and set them aside out of play. Then, shuffle the encounter deck. Each player reveals 1 card from the top of the encounter deck and adds it to the staging area.


So we travel through the Shire and Bree. The opening set up puts out a crow, and some locations, nothing amazing. We actually bash the stage 1 quest in the first turn traveling from the Shire to the Trollshaws without even trying.

Stage Two: Roast Mutton When Revealed: Add the set-aside Troll enemies and the Troll Cave to the staging area. Shuffle the encounter discard pile back into the encounter deck.
Forced: If there are no Troll enemies left in play, or if there are no cards left in the encounter deck, advance it to the next stage.
Any time players would place progress tokens on this quest, discard an equal number of cards from the encounter deck instead. (Progress is placed on the active location before triggering this effect.)

So the trolls show up. They are big and strong, and when they attack you they sack you as well. They have various effects that limit our fighting against them. But I draw Tom, who limits the number of your characters that can gang up against the trolls. I actually take him in two round thanks yo Khazad! Khazad! giving Gimili +6 Attack. The other guys are questing and dealing with the locations, and one of the other Trolls that comes after Brennor's guys.

The interesting thing of this game is when you quest, you eat up the Encounter Deck and if you can eat it all up dawn arrives and turns the trolls to stone. Or you have to kill the trolls outright. Harder than it sounds because the cards in the Encounter deck shuffle themselves back in, put card back into the deck, or for you to raise your threat or play more cards. It was a serious cycle of doom for us. No Campfire was a really bad card that was hurting us alot, along with Hungry Troll that would EATING our dwarves with sacks on them.

We managed to kill Tom and Bert both, and at one point had the Encounter deck down to one card, we drew it, but it dumped 6 more cards back, so we JUST missed dawn. William was engaged with Eilandor's dwarves and was wounded, we knew it was going to die and all we had to do was make it the combat phase. And the way the game works, if we kill all the trolls the Stage Two ends, and Stage Three is auto complete.

BUT

The quest phase pulled out several points of Threat... dam Doom trait on cards. It pushed Eilandor up to 51 Threat. At 50 a player is eliminated from the game. That doesn't mean we loose, only that Eilandor is dead. So the troll would go back into the middle, and I'd draw it and fight it possibly. However, Eilandor was player 1, and Bilbo was in his party, and when you are eliminated, all your heroes die. If you loose Bilbo, game over! WE LOST. Half a turn from victory! By the end of the turn Bren and I would have both pushed to 50 threat as well and been dead. It was SOOOO close, very disappointing.

---

We fired up a second try at this, but by turn 4 or 5, we had lost Dain, Oin, and two others were close behind thanks to extra hungry trolls that game. It was very clear the game was over at that point and we conceded right before defeat after just playing it out a bit more to test it.

One of the neat things too was if you can manage to explore the Troll Cave before defeating stage 2, meaning you have 2 objective cards and travel there. When stage three triggers you get to add Sting, Glamdring and Orcist to your decks from there on out as Treasure Cards. I suspect we'll try this again. After it was all said and done I tweaked my deck and removed the Spirit from it all together and made it all Tactics adding in Bard the Bowman (from Lake-town) to my starting Heroes. Bren did a few card switches using my spirit cards I removed to remove things he didn't like. Next time you smell trolls, next time!

[Vardaen]

Let's try again huh?

Next week maybe?

I could do Wed night again (10th), Friday (12th) and the Weekend 13th,14th If we did the weekend I would be okay with a house full of little ones as well. If we play early enough and the weather is nice we can make them go outside!

[Vardaen]

I could also swing going to someone else's house, on the weekend, in the morning: Say around 9-10 and stay until 2ish. I'd have to bring Lil'Vman, but could leave the baby at home.

[Vardaen]

Family paradigm shift. Likely have to bail on this next week till I sort things out.

[Vardaen]

So last week, on Wednesday we busted out another game of Lord of the Rings . This time it was me Brennor and Amaris! We used the same decks as last time attempting to do the fist of the Hobbit Quests where you face the Trolls.

This game was way better than the rest. We actually had to stall our victory so that we would be able to have enough time to collect the treasure cards, which we did. My tweaks I made going all Tactics paid off, as I was able to actually use 2 of the new cards Thicket of Spears to stop the trolls from attacking for 2 rounds, and again with a Feint. That meant no damage to our heroes for 3 combat rounds! Big.

Amaris' deck was pumping out allies, and she had 4 or 5 of them out at just about all times, and Gandalf was rocking it questing and fighting which she paid the threat to keep in play. With some cards to reduce threat it worked well. Plus she had alot of resources out with Steward of Gondor and Thorin (with 5 dwarves).

Bren's deck was doing good in card control, healing came in handy one time, and generally his deck did what we expected it to do. The best move was putting Navri's Belt out on Balin, who was then able to produce "Pipe/Bilbo" resources, that allowed us to sneak into the Troll Cave and collect Glamdring and Friends.

My Bard the Bowman actually used The Black Arrow, and did a 1 round kill of a Troll, THAT was awesome. Toward the end game we purposefully stalled out, leaving the last Troll with 1 health so as not to end Stage 2 until we had an extra round for treasure hunting. We also were questing soflty as not to run the Encounter Deck out and use it up and get to dawn, which would have also ended the Stage. We Nearly screwed ourselves however as we had some Doomed cards pop that pushed our Honor, and had I not released Tom back into the staging area, I would have gone to 50 Honor and lost on the turn that I had Bilbo in my control -- that would be an end game.

BUT, we did it, and can now move on to the High Pass/Goblin Town game, with the three treasure cards in hand.

[Trogdor]

Sounds like fun.

[Vardaen]

The win has gone to Amaris' head. Claims the only reason we won was because of her

[MadVlat]

NICE!!!