Assault on Osgiliath: Quest

Throughout I will refer to the Tactics/Spirit and Leadership/Spirit ‘players’.

Assault on Osgiliath: Planning

Card pool at the time of writing (complete). This is the last time I’ll mention this, alongside an expression of relief that I started early enough to avoid the horror show that is trying to pick up missing packs to complete my collection.

Continuing the theme of invoking community-made content, a recent episode of Tardy Takes, a Patreon-only secondary feed for Cardboard of the Rings, saw one of the hosts, Shellin, question the playtesting that led to the creation of Explore Secret Ways. How such a niche card was allowed get through playtesting when it should be one of the first ones you reach for when building with side quests in mind – it’s one of only two Lore player side quests – is an open question. Playtesting – it’s an art, not a science.

I feel much the same, from the encounter card viewpoint, about Power of Mordor.

The Great Armament

Just because something is corny doesn’t mean it isn’t fitting, and this is something that applies to the sense that The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is blessed with an online community. Just look at the forum for the game on BGG. The most recent posts will be peppered with rules questions that will have been answered countless times before, as would have been discovered with even a small amount of searching, yet you will never see people getting stroppy over this as the question asked in good faith gets answered in the same spirit. The same is true of the Reddit forum. As for Discord? I’ll have to take a mulligan on that one.

I mention this because it was the kindness of said community that has contributed, directly and indirectly, to the revival of this blog.

Encounter at Amon Dîn: Refresh

There was a discussion recently on The Dice Tower’s Top 100 Games of All Time series of videos on what constituted a lifestyle game, whether it was one that was so deep and complicated that it required a constant investment of time and effort in order to internalise the rules, or whether it was one could consume a person’s life to the extent that the game plays you. The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game definitely ticks both boxes, to the extent that a person could write thousands of words about it and barely scratch the surface. The game also has a habit of giving form to real world concepts, and one of those that I have long thought about with respect to this game is one that has become a hot topic in recent times: inflation.

Inflation as people are enduring as of early 2023, i.e. rising prices, is obviously a bad thing.

Encounter at Amon Dîn: Quest

Throughout I will refer to the Leadership/Tactics and Lore/Spirit/Tactics ‘players’.

Encounter at Amon Dîn: Planning

Card pool at the time of writing (complete)

In any blog post, you don’t want to spoil things but you don’t want to bury the lede either. In that spirit, I present a cryptic screen cap before the jump:

The Drúadan Forest: Refresh

That was annoying, annoying on the double. I mentioned my use of Octgn to record the playthrough and I was grateful for that when I made a mistake right at the end. The bit in the quest phase of round eight where Drúadan Drummer gives Each Wose enemy in the staging area…+2 threat? I hadn’t noticed that until I came to write about it. Thankfully it was a relatively easy task with Octgn to reconstruct the state of play, and there was a curious satisfaction to be had in questing like a boss with Drû–buri-Drû, so no harm done.

Far more annoying was realising that there is a mis-step in the decks.

The Drúadan Forest: Quest

Throughout I will refer to the Leadership/Tactics and Lore/Spirit/Tactics ‘players’.

The Drúadan Forest: Planning

Card pool at the time of writing (complete)

As noted previously ad nauseum I’ve endeavoured throughout this blog to make my own mistakes, so usually only investigate blogs like Vision of the Palantír for a particular scenario after building a deck with which I was satisfied. That doesn’t mean completely ignoring everything that goes on there or elsewhere and, bearing in mind that I am not likely to write about it for a couple of decades at my current output, it was without concern for spoilers that I clicked on a recent article for Under the Ash Mountains, only to be greeted with the following opening line:

I know I said after my Drúadan Forest review some years ago that I would never cover a quest in such a negative tone again. But boy, did I find another quest that I find unfair, and you are all here to read me whining about it.

Not an auspicious start for this quest – although not as bad a start as poor ol’ Under the Ash Mountains, which must be quaking in its boots at what I might think of it when I get around to it in about, ooh, 2047.

The Steward’s Fear: Refresh

Cardboard of the Rings recently discussed burnout and asked: is it a bad thing? If you were in a group and other members of that group were dependant on you always being there to get their particular gaming fix, such as needing seven bodies for Diplomacy or six for Dune, then I can see how it might be a problem. In a solo game though, just go away and do something else. Since the last post I immersed myself in the Peloponnesian War where I had the pleasure of getting feedback from the designer, Mark Herman. More exciting than a much-ballyhooed event on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the game that turned out to be 18 minutes of Nate French, MJ Newman and Caleb Grace doing a spot of freeform jazz based on their memories of the game? Yes, touching the hem of Mark Herman’s cloak was far more exciting.

I’m being bitchy, especially when you consider why I was suffering from ‘burnout’ after playing The Steward’s Fear: I spent many hours with what is an absolutely brilliant quest.