The Fellowship: What Can Men Do Against Such Reckless Hate?

In my last post, I detailed how I orchestrated my first victory over the spiders of Mirkwood. My spirits were flying pretty high. I beat the first scenario a few more times in order to get a feel for the game a bit more before upping the ante and beginning my Journey Down the Anduin.

Nothing will dampen your spirits like trolls.

The Fellowship: Caught in a Web

My fearless band

In my last post, I described my first five attempts at the Passage through Mirkwood scenario in the Lord of the Rings LCG. I'll provide the tl;dr summary of that last post: FAILURE.

After my first five failures, I tried deck-building using tactics as the backbone of a tactics/lore deck. I will briefly describe the result: MORE FAILURE.

But I was not cowed.

The Fellowship: One Does Not Simply Walk into...Mirkwood?

So here we are. Three posts in, and I'm finally going to embark on my first quest.

The rulebook suggests beginning with the scenario "Passage through Mirkwood," which it states is a difficulty 1 (of 10) scenario. I looked briefly through the encounter deck to get a sense of what I might be up against, saw lots of spiders, and the sphere that screamed out to me was "tactics."

Tactics, for those of you not in the know, is the sphere that focuses on physical strength. It's also the sphere wherein I recognize all three heroes included in the base game (Gimli, Legolas, and Thalin). I looked at their stats, was impressed with their attack values, and rushed to fight Ungoliant's spawn. What can go wrong? I thought.

Everything. That's what can go wrong.

The Fellowship: The Lay of the Land

It's only fitting that the last vestige of my Star Wars CCG
addiction now holds what could become
my Lord of the Rings LCG collection/addiction

Before we begin our journey in Middle-Earth, I thought I should provide you with a brief overview of what comes in the box, what the gameplay is like, and what to expect in my adventures.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the Lord of the Rings LCG is how story-driven it is. It is a cooperative game, and it has players playing against scenarios with various difficulties (ranging from 1 to 10). But what's great about these scenarios is that they are tangential to the Lord of the Rings books. That is, they easily fit within Middle-Earth, and in some cases are even mentioned in the books but without being discussed in depth (for example, the search for Gollum). While I'm sure this is a mercenary decision on Fantasy Flight's part--if you only publish scenarios in the quest to destroy the ring, well, you'll eventually run out of material--it's an exciting opportunity for players to forge their own path through Tolkien's world.

The Fellowship: An Unexpected Journey

I wrote a long post about CCGs (customizable card games) for my personal blog, which you're welcome to read if so inclined. The basic gist of it: My name's Lenny, and I'm addicted to CCGs.

Hi, Lenny.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I used to be addicted. When 100% of my money was discretionary income, 100% of it was spent on trading card games. Overpower, Redemption, and then the Star Wars CCG were the biggest monetary sinkholes, but I also dabbled in just about every other CCG that was released, even the lesser-known ones. When Magic: The Gathering was in its heyday, there were many, many copycats.

Because of my former addiction, I've tried hard over the years to steer clear of overly mercenary collectible card games. When I discovered Dominion, I found what I imagined was the Platonic ideal for all those CCG shadows on the cave wall: no random collecting, no trading, simple enough rules that anyone can jump in and play.