Hey all, first post - yay!

                   Ok, recently the wife and myself picked up a copy of Middle Earth quest for ourselves. We both read through the rulebook for both sides so we had a good understanding of how the game works. The problem came about when we actually played the game, we found the colour system to be really hard going at times, especially for me as i'm colour blind! Trying to determine the differences between some of the locations was pretty difficult, and I found myself constantly asking my wife what was what!

                   So my question is this, does anyone know of any player aids which could potentially help with the colour system? I have thought of making my own, but i'm just asking on the off chance. Really enjoyed the game though, the colour thing just makes it a little bit harder at times!!

                   Thanks for reading.

Step one on the road to bliss is to improve one's Middle-Earth knowledge  . For most of the locations, if you know what region it is located in in "actual" M-E, you can just look at the names on the Encounter decks and know which one you're drawing from (Dol Guldur not being part of Mirkwood is really the only one that might mess me up). To ease the monster placement issues, could place the monster stacks next to the corresponding Encounter stack (even if this means a bit of a stretch for Sauron).

Did a quick-look at the files on BGG, but didn't spot anything, although a location reference did catch my eye:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/48691/location-reference

Full list:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31563/middle-earth-quest#files

Dam speaks the truth. I recently purchased MEQ myself and the color scheme is fairly irrelevant to me because I know Middle-earth geography fairly well. I would suggest getting to know where places are by reading through the books or background. If you're not that hardcore, try studying the board when you have some spare time.

Also as Dam suggested, I find it best to place the monster tokens next to the matching encouter card stacks on the board during setup.

Good luck!

Thanks for the replies, putting the monster tokens next to the encounter decks is actuall a pretty good idea - don't know why I didn't think about it! My Tolkien knowledge is actually quite good, but strangly my middle earth map knowledge isn't! But yeah, more map studying will help!