after a slightly longer pause than intended (I blame starting a new job), it’s time for the next installment in the Locations review.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should let you all know that The Ringmaker cycle is probably my least favourite so far – I never really liked the time mechanic, the Dunlendings felt thematically off, and it failed to deliver on early promise of finally fleshing out the Rohan trait.
For this article though, I’ll do my best to put as many of those personal gripes as I can aside (I can’t promise 100% success), and focus on the locations of the cycle: how they worked, when they were hideously convoluted, and the positive aspects.
Taking the Hobbits to Isengard (gard, gard, gard…)
The Deluxe itself- Voice of Isengard – laid the foundation for 3 fairly distinct settings in the campaign: the plains around Isengard itself, the wild hills of Dunland, and dark and ominous forests. Interestingly, comparatively few of the locations from this box actually found their way into the later adventures, with the enemies and treacheries being the cards more commonly carried over.
One of the few encounter sets which did show up repeatedly, was Broken Lands. First appearing in the Second Scenario, To Catch an Orc, it had 3 copies of 1 hideous location, the eponymous Broken Lands themselves. Whilst they only had 2 threat, they were a chunky 6 progress to explore, and has a passive effect which prevented progress being placed on locations in the staging area whilst they were in the staging area. The rest of the locations in that scenario were, actually, not that huge (average threat/progress of 3), but there was one – Methedras – which boosted the threat of all the others, and things could swiftly get out of control. Essentially, once you drew Broken Lands, you had to travel and clear it, before you drew another copy – in high-player counts, an early one of these basically meant instant location-lock.
The Woodland setting for into Fangorn kept threat on locations moderate, but required high numbers of progress to get anywhere.
The Ringmaker
Moving on into the cycle proper, the non-unique locations were generally not the central focus of the quests – although some, like The Three Trials, still hit you hard with the 3 non-unique, but only copy each Barrow locations, with an average threat of 3, and 8 progress required. Others like the Dunland Trap or The Antlered Crown spun on a quest-card mechanic that somewhat dwarfed the impact of individual cards in the staging area.
Trouble in Tharbad
Easily my favourite scenario of this cycle was Trouble in Tharbad – it got a bit of stick when it came out (especially from some of the power-gamers) for being too easy, but in my book, that was a significant part of its charm: this was a scenario that allowed enough scope for players to try different things out, rather than just charging full-tilt with an aggro deck at everything. (it’s worth remembering that this is around the time that the One-Boromir-to-rule-them-all deck first came to prominence).
Tharbad also had some brilliantly simple and thematic locations. The Decrepit Rooftops sent all the enemies back to the staging area (you are hiding on the roof), whilst the Streets of Tharbad gave all the enemies -20 engagement cost (what do you expect walking down the road in broad daylight?)
Bogged Down
The trouble with Tharbad is that it was followed up immediately with the absolute slog that is Nin-in-Eilph. The positive about this quest, is that it captured very well the feeling of trudging around in a swamp whilst hopelessly lost. The problem is that trudging around in a swamp whilst hopelessly lost is a fairly miserable experience – it isn’t really one which you want to recapture accurately! Finger of Glanduin acted like a reverse Northern Tracker, eating away the progress on locations, whilst Sinking Bog gave characters -1 to all their stats for each Item they had.
By the end of the cycle, the complexity was really starting to stack up. Celebrimbor’s Secret saw locations destroyed, which got them out of the staging area, but powered up some really nasty quest effects. The Antlered Crown was a fairly early experiment with separating the locations and (some of) the enemies into separate decks, it was a constant nightmare for attempting to keep track of all the different passive effects and triggers. Amongst all that, you had a pile of locations with time counters on, whose power to hurt you far outweighed their modest stats. As always, credit to the designers for their innovation, but by-and-large, these quests felt like a bit of a miss to me.
Number-crunching the Ringmaker cycle is slightly difficult. For one thing, the classic strategy of just about keeping your head above water until you can get a couple of Northern Trackers out and watch the locations go away was rarely viable in a quest that featured time, or in one which featured the Broken Lands. This was a cycle where you had to power quest every turn, take the big attacks on the chin, and be ready to hit back twice as hard. As such, the actual difficulty posed by the locations was probably greater than in a quest pre-time-mechanics where the average threat and progress values were the same. For that reason, the numbers generally look fairly reasonable: average threats around 3, with progress requirements probably nudging a bit closer to 4, it doesn’t look like a major step up from Against the Shadow, but it certainly had the potential to feel that way.
Giving hope to Men
At least the Ringmaker cycle did give some scope to allow the players to tech against all these nasty locations. A new hero, Idraen was probably the first to interact directly with locations, and her ability to ready after a location was explored allowed long-neglected cards like Strength of Will to make a come-back: if you can travel to a location which only needs 2 more progress, this card essentially allows her to explore it for free.
Along with Idraen, the first of the scouts, we got some early support for the scout trait, in the form of the Warden of Arnor attachement. Once attached to a questing scout Hero, this placed a progress token on the first location revealed every round.
This card always felt a bit lacklustre to me: it draws my mind back to a “Strider” custom hero I made several years ago, a Spirit version of Aragorn who acted as a Thalin for locations, placing 1 progress on each location revealed whilst he was questing. Given the size of modern locations, I really don’t think that the card would have been overpowered if it had done this, and my lack of enthusiasm is unlikely to change, but it is at least cheap enough that if you’ve got a scout who’s going to be questing every round, there’s little reason not to slap it on her.
Aside from these two, there wasn’t really a lot more on offer for dealing with locations: Ringmaker saw the rise of the Silvans, talented multi-taskers, and sneaky little blighters, but with little in the way of direction location control. It did lead to a bit of a revival for the Lorien Guide, who was good at whittling away active locations, but did little for the staging area.
Final Thoughts
Ringmaker is still the cycle I look back on with the least fondness, and was the point at which I first let slip my ongoing aim of beating all new quests at least once with 1, 2, 3 and 4 players. The locations are more irritating than intriguing, and apart from Tharbad, they didn’t particularly interest me.
However, the Scout trait got its start there, and this was probably the first time we really got focused location-control decks (3 Spirit Heroes + 3 Northern Trackers doesn’t count), and those can still be used 2 or 3 cycles later, with the hills of Dunland far behind us, so it wasn’t a dead loss.
That’s about all for today, but I’ll be back in a week or 2 to take a look at the locations in the Saga boxes which represented The Two Towers.
There are quite a lot of locations in the first quest, and this becomes particularly problematic when you reach the final stage and are attempting to travel to the Buckleberry Ferry – this unique location is immune to player card effects, and can only be travelled to if there are no other locations in play. In our experience, this can lead to round after round where you smash the questing, but can’t clear enough locations in 1 go to be allowed to travel (there is some help available from the quest card, but in 4-player it’s often not enough).
Moving on to Bree, there are more unique locations, starting with The Prancing Pony and proceeding on through Midgewater, to finally end up at Weathertop itself. The unique locations give shape to the overall narrative of the quest, and have fairly powerful effects, both good and bad. This pattern is continued in the Flight to the Ford, where the Last Bridge and Ford of the Bruinen draw directly from the books for their abilities.
That said, the decision-making in this box often felt very constricted: many of the unique locations are put into play by quest effects, or need to be explored before the stage can be completed. As such, whilst we see these iconic locations as we go along, there’s actually fairly limited interaction with them – you travel when you have to, and explore them once you’ve mustered enough progress. That’s about it.
Box 2 (for book 2, none of this nonsense about Lord of the Rings being a Trilogy) felt to me like they’d managed to strike more of a balance with the locations – the fact that we had already spent so much time in Moria meant that the designers had already had plenty of chance to play around with mechanics that might represent the Doors of Durin or the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, and these certainly felt like the refined version. The first quest out of Rivendell could well prove to be the death of the hobbits, as damage is scattered across locations, triggering in turn cascades of nasty effects.
The final quest returns to the stacked sequence of unique locations, and gives you very little choice over what to do in the early rounds, along with providing heavy punishment for certain deck-types. Whilst the initial stages can get annoying though, I’m generally prepared to give them a pass, because I’m such a fan of the way the latter part of the quest is done: I really like the multiple staging areas, and the way cards move between them, it felt like a clever way of representing a party scattered across a fast-flowing river, and made for an enjoyable experience. In campaign mode, the Seat of Seeing adds another fun element of decision-making, as you have to weigh whether to stall the quest a little longer in an attempt to get rid of those burdens.
Overall, I think the first 2 Saga Boxes for Lord of the Rings did a really good job of capturing the flavour of the books, and the latter box in particular managed to convert them into enjoyable quests to play. Although these two boxes relied quite heavily on having cards that were unique to each quest, I actually thought that some of the most interesting locations came in the sets that were shared across multiple quests, The Old Road and Pathless Country. Both of these offered fairly low-to-middling stat-lines, but combined them with effects that forced players to make choices – The Old Road can be gone in a heartbeat, if you take on the peril of another Burden. The Pathless County can be left and tracked over the course of several rounds, but it will take a long time, due to those conditional extra progress tokens – this type of mechanic, where players are given meaningful choices definitely scores them points in my book.
One thing that the Fellowship of the Rings boxes didn’t really offer a lot of, was new cards for players to deal with locations – in fact, there was nothing within the standard card-pool that would allow us to manipulate threat, progress, or effects on locations. The “Lorien Rope” Boon provided a powerful effect, reducing the threat of every location in the staging area by 2 for a round, but to trigger it, you had to remove the card from the campaign pool, so it wasn’t something you could really rely on, even in campaign mode (and wasn’t available at all outside of it).
I bought the Lord of the Rings LCG the day it came out, and loved it. We made some stupid mistakes to begin with (counting the threat of engaged enemies was a big one), but gradually we figured out what we were doing. I played it solo, with my wife, and with groups of friends in 3 and 4-player. For years I bought every product that they made for this game, although after the first few cycles, I gave up on the Nightmare decks.
There is some mitigation to this: Beregond, Cirdan and Eowyn have all brought success for my wife and other players in our games, and Elfhelm has attempted several quests, even if he’s not actually managed to secure victory.
Arkham Horror the card game is also a cooperative LCG from Fantasy Flight, and it shares a designer along with several recognisable features with LotR. That said, there is also a lot about it that’s different.
It’s quite easy to see the mark of LotR in Arkham – the way locations are done in this game definitely feels like it got a test-run in the Dreamchaser cycle, and the end result is a more polished, cleaner implementation – hopefully in the future, we’ll be able to see the favour returned: concepts piloted in Arkham, and then put to use in LotR. Game of Thrones LCG recently hosted their 
Ostensibly the biggest change in this cycle came with the new mechanics: Battle and Siege, which turned the game on its head as characters were required to quest using their Attack or Defence respectively, rather than their traditional Willpower. It was also, perhaps a last hurrah for the idea that this game was primarily based around Spheres of Influence, rather than the “Tribal” themes which drew together decks of mostly Dwarves, Elves, Rohirrim, or Gondor, as the player-card pool received a series of cards which supported players running Mono-sphere decks.
Starting Active Locations with unpleasant effects were also a big thing in this cycle. Whereas earlier in the game’s life we had tended to see these locations start in the staging area, now it became more common for their effect to be in play from the word go – whether that be the 
The Against the Shadow cycle itself saw a wide variety of locations, any many of them reflected that quest’s unique: Underworld in the Steward’s Fear, Villagers in Encounter at Amon Din, Hidden Cards in The Blood of Gondor. Even when the keyword itself was not directly carried across, there was a stronger sense of thematic tie-in in this cycle: for example all of the resource denial in Druadan Forest to complement the Prowl Mechanic, or the wat that locations in The Morgul Vale tried to add progress to To The Tower, or else simply flung things back to the staging area in order to slow the players down.
The overall effect of this was to make locations something that was much more of an issue than in earlier cycles – you certainly could just track away most of the places you went in the Steward’s Fear, but if you did so, there was a very real danger of getting suddenly ambushed by a large number of enemies from the Underworld deck. If you didn’t come with ways of dealing with the Druadan Forest, the Woses and their accompanying treacheries suddenly took on a rather fearsome aspect, with Threats of X and high archery totals. Encounter at Amon Din was largely an exercise in exploring as many locations as possible as fast as possible: Mostly low-threat, high progress, they look like ideal targets for the Northern Tracker, were it not for the Villagers burning alive round-by-round.
Probably the most notable Quest of the Cycle from a location perspective though, was Assault on Osgiliath. This was ostensibly a street-fight, a back-and-forth tussle to take the city, street by street, location by location. When a location was explored, the players took control of it, potentially bringing a benefit, but more commonly just another condition they needed to watch out for which could see that control lost if they left an attack undefended or a character was destroyed.
The overall objective for Assault on Osgiliath was to control all the Osgiliath locations at the end of the round and, as originally printed, it was rather broken – you could 
The Heirs deluxe box probably contained the most direct attempt at location control, A Watchful Peace – this was a spirit event which allowed players to return innocuous locations to the top of the encounter deck after they left play – interesting, but hardly powerful.
As we’ve played this cycle mostly 2-player with a little bit of solo, it’s generally been about choosing a single escort for the Dreamchaser, and the choice has almost always been Narelenya. The once-per-round cost reduction of an ally is a really powerful effect in almost any deck, and it’s particularly true of my wife’s current Gondor deck, and of course, my tried-and-tested solo deck: Play as many Dwarves as you can.
On the flip side, threat reduction is nice, as offered by Silver Wing, but is the +1 attack per hero worth it? Potentially with the difficulty of Corsair bashing this is one we should investigated in more detail but I can’t recall ever using this solo or 2-player. Perhaps a Lorgaron deck might be able to get better mileage out of, but for us it never felt worthwhile. It would actually be quite nice if you could leave out the Dreamchaser, and have Dawn Star and Silver Wing balance each other out in solo, but sadly this is never an option.
Most Ship enemies had a few things in common – big stats, the “Boarding” Keyword, and limited interaction with other player-card types.
Beyond that though, it just made the burden of combat feel too uneven. We’ve played quite a few quests this cycle combining a fight-y Gondor deck and a Spirit Questing deck – once the Spirit deck has properly got set up, it has some decent combat potential (Idraen and Lanwyn are amongst heroes, and it also runs ally Glorfindel, Northern Trackers and Rhovanion Outriders) – against a normal enemy or two, it can handle a fight. What it can’t deal with is a massive boat AND a few random pirate enemies thrown in on top, especially when many of those pirates have resource-stealing mechanics which make them more and more powerful if you can’t kill them in a single round. Even for the Gondor deck, defending a ship with their ship, defending a handful of Corsairs and being expected to strike back again, is a major problem – if you don’t have Boromir the Steward of Gondorian Fire set up, along with a bucketload of threat-reduction, it’s just not feasible, and that’s coming from a deck that’s designed to be able to handle combat.
There were various different ways that they represented this – my personal favourite was the Cave Torch, which allowed you to place progress on a location, at the cost of possibly adding another enemy to the staging area. This is perfect thematically – if you shine a light, it’s easier for you to see the cave, but also a lot easier for a nearby goblin to see you – and also felt like it really added to the decisions you needed to make. There were plenty of other locations in the Kazad-Dum boxed set that offer similar high-cost options you could take to alleviate a problem, like the 
Location-wise, there were still a few gems: the 
Much like quest 2 of the cycle, The Long Dark is a quest I’ve largely shunned, as it had what was essentially a “cancel this or lose” card – Foul air
By and Large, the locations of the Hobbit boxes were not that numerically different from the others around in the game. Admittedly, there were a couple of really gentle locations before you left the shire, but overall, the numbers were not that much lower than the Dwarrowdelf cycle, and probably still a bit higher than Mirkwood numbers..
Asfaloth, as most players of the game will know is a Lore Attachment. Too early in the game’s life to follow the conventions later established for Mounts, he is not Restricted, although he can only be attached to a Silvan or Noldor. Most of the time though, you’ll want to attach him to Glorfindel as, once you’ve done so, he can be exhausted to place 2 progress tokens on any location.
Massing was the first Gen-Con scenario, a place that has typically seen the most punishing and brutal quests hurled at players. The game starts with 3 enemies in play per player, and concludes with a boss fight against the Witch King whose 666 stats were considered truly frightful at that point in the game’s life.
Of course, Asfaloth wasn’t the only location control card released during this period, he was just much, much better than the others. It is still worth spending a few moments thinking about some of the others though, even if their impact was less than the mighty Asfaloth.
It’s worth giving specific mention at this point to The Hills of Emyn Muil, one of the most heavily criticised quests of the early days of the game. Hills required players to amass a certain number of victory points, and have no Emyn Muil locations in the staging area.
It wasn’t necessarily an easy quest – the 2 locations which started the game in play were both big, and had nasty effects that could really put the hurt on you. That said, if you were still alive by turn 3 or 4, and had a Northern Tracker out, it was probably going to be plain sailing from hereon in…
It’s also worth mentioning Core Set Legolas. Whilst 2 progress may not seem like a huge amount, it’s surprising just how many locations in those early days could be taken out with only 1 or 2 progress tokens. That meant that if you were confident of having Legolas kill something during the combat phase (and as a 3-attack ranged character, the odds were always good), then locations which ramped your threat during the refresh phase, or stopped you from drawing cards during the resource phase wouldn’t actually stick around long enough to be a problem.
It also struggled with questing, and threat –as I had Lore in there, there was the suggestion to just take a load of Ents, but I was trying to keep things thematic, so I opted instead for a string of cheap allies (Errand Riders, Squires of the Citadel, Envoys of Pelagir) and upping the quantity of Visionary Leadership in the deck.
I still think that this deck needs to be paired with something relatively heavy on Threat reduction (ideally a Galadriel deck that can use Elrond’s counsel to keep its own threat in line, and play Galadhrim’s Greetings / just use Galdriel’s power on the Gondorians.)
This is pretty impressive: with 2 attack and 2 willpower, his enemy threat-reduction is just as powerful as his questing (provided you have an enemy in the staging area to target), and with low-threat enemies, he and Thalin together mean that you’re dealing 2 damage to an enemy the round it’s revealed. Given how many enemies there are these days with stupidly high defence values, being able to bypass that and go straight to hit-points is a big deal.
To build a direct-damage deck, I started with Thalin and Argalad. A lot of the cards which followed were fairly self-selecting: 
As a note on the 3rd hero, this deck tends to go two ways, depending on the number of players and the quest. I started with Beregond, who can take a Spear of the Citadel for Free, and if you manage to give him a Gondorian Shield as well, can comfortably tank attacks from most enemies. Sadly, Beregond is a bit of a 1-trick pony, and in a quest without those big hitters, a more rounded option like Mablung is probably better: he still blocks for 4 with a shield on him, and provides some resource acceleration (making him a good target for a song of wisdom), and a questing option once your allies are set-up (the Mablung iteration also includes Wingfoot to try and find some action advantage.
We managed to beat Thing in the Depths using this deck (Beregond version) alongside the Denethor and Sons deck – the second half of Thing in the Depths feels a lot like an updated version of Watcher in the Water, and Argalad and co performed admirably. I’m still a little way behind on the Dreamchaser cycle more generally, so I may carry on with these two as we try to catch-up.
Beyond that though, it’s a lot more complex. Boromir may have fallen into evil for a while, but he clearly rallied at the last moment, sentinel defended a number of attacks, and then discarded himself to deal 2 damage to each enemy in play.
Saruman the White, head of the order of the Istarii, and a mighty Maiar sent to Middle Earth for the aid of the free peoples. Of course, we all know that he went bad in the end, but for a long time, he at least seemed to be working on the side of good (although from watching the White Council scenes in the Hobbit films, you would have to wonder how everyone else missed what he was up to…)
Grima Wormtongue is another figure who fans of the books or the films will struggle to see as anything much besides a villain. However, he has appeared in 3 very different guises in the card-game: As a hero, an enemy, and an objective ally.
The concept of this card that might be working for you, and might be working against you was taken to another level with the rise of the double-sided card. The most obvious character from Tolkien’s lore to be given this treatment is Gollum/Smeagol.
It was only when Gollum re-appeared for Land of Shadow, the second of the two Saga boxes to cover The Two Towers, that this was really taken to the next level. Land of Shadow Gollum starts out as a remarkably resilient enemy (the quest card gives him randomised defence boosts which really get in the way of trying to take him down) who can – ultimately – be defeated, and flipped over to the objective-ally Smeagol. Smeagol is now an objective ally, someone who will help the players, guiding them through the Dead Marshes. Even then though, you need to be careful, as an unfortunately-timed treachery, or a poor quest phase, can flip him back to Gollum again at a moment’s notice.
[This is where the Spoilers start] Of course, whilst much of what we see in Lord of the Rings LCG is drawn from Tolkien’s Lore, the designers have also, particularly in recent cycles, put a lot of effort into creating their own characters, to develop new stories. This, of course, gives them more space to explore the idea of characters whose motives may be more complex than they appear.
For some people, there was always something about Alcaron that felt a bit off- his uncanny knack of turning up just as things were falling apart – it all seemed rather suspicious. Personally I had missed the hints we were given, but once we entered The Morgul Vale, all doubt was removed, as he was revealed- a Black Numenorian who had been plotting against us all along, and who was behind the kidnap of Faramir.
Fast forward a couple of years to the present and, early in 2016, we got two new enemies – Captain Sahir and Na’asiyah. As prominent Corsairs, these FFG-created characters seemed like logical inclusions for ship-to-ship fighting, but they had the interesting additional feature of being double-sided, capable of becoming allies at a later point in time. We didn’t know what this meant for the future, but we had to assume the cards had been printed like that for a reason.
Intrigued but uninformed, we continued into the Dreamchaser cycle, still hunting pirates, all the way up until Thing in the Depths, at which point the sudden assault from a giant sea monster made us all re-think our priorities, and Sahir and Na’asiyah became our allies as we fought for mutual survival.
Na-asiyah’s Hero ability mirrors the text on both her Enemy and Objective Ally cards, with resources being turned into attack and defence. It is clear that she is still not trusted by everyone, as her resources cannot be used to pay for allies, but for now at least, she is fighting alongside us.
We already know from the various spoiler articles we have seen, that the next cycle will see our heroes finding themselves in Far Harad, and that there will be at least one Haradrim ally. It looks like the designers will continue to explore the question of who t is truly “evil” and who can be redeemed. I look forward to seeing where it takes us.
Prince Imrahil is one of the most important book characters not to make it into Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation, but he has long had an important place in the card-game. His simple, yet effective ability to ready when a character leaves play means that he pairs brilliantly with his son-in-law (Eomer), but can also offer you great action advantage in conjunction with Silvans, chump-blockers, or anyone using sneak-attack Gandalf a lot.
Although I’ve not seen it used in action yet, Prince of Dol Amroth already feels like a great choice – alongside 
So far, we’ve only had objective Mumaks spoiled, and it’s unclear whether we’ll get a proper player-card Mount attachment that’s a Mumak, but we can hope.
Dor Cuarthol 