I just started playing this game and I'm really liking it especially with the solo play capability. So far I've only played with 2 of the 4 preconfigured decks from the Core set playing Passage through Mirkwood (DL=1) and I'm just barely surviving most of the games, and that's playing without Shadows! I know I'm still learning the game and I'm sure my player deck will improve with expansions, but I can't imagine what the harder Quests would be like.

I'd be thrilled to continue playing this game for a while and I'm excited to get into the exansions and adventure paths. For example, the Hobbit saga expansions sound really interesting, but everyone says it's really hard and only experience players should get it. I understand making more difficulty scenarios to appeal to the hard-core advanced players who want a challenge, but I would hope the designers keep in mind to make games and expansions as accessible as possile to a wider audience.

Can it really be that hard to scale Quests for different levels?

I like the idea of an increasing level of difficulty as an adventure cycle progresses.

Other options could be they could have adapted easily for scalability is indicating optional Encounter sets for a Quest. If you want a harder game, include this optional set; if you want an easier game, don't include it.

Or they could have a small icon on the face of the Encounter cards to indicate an "Easy","Normal", or "Hard" difficulty. So for example, if you want a medium game, just include the Easy or Normal cards. Maybe a color icon would be less intrusive: Green, Yellow, Red
It would take a little more setup time for you to sort through the cards to include or exclude cards, but it least then more people can play all Quests at whatever difficulty level they want, and it also gives you the ability to replay the Quests at increasing difficulty when you improve your game.

I definitely lean towards preferring a higher difficulty, and agree that we as players have some measure of control over this.  For instance: Hunt for Gollum, Hills of Emyn Muil are easy with Spirit decks, especially with Northern Tracker.  To make them harder limit your deck by playing without the Northern Tracker, or even not using Spirit.  Then, try using just Tactics (a sphere which, though it's come a long way since Core, is not well suited to these scenarios) if you feel it's still too easy.

Yep, it is better to make scenarios difficult enough. Some customization would be nice. Those comeing nighmare add on cards will help a situation a bit, but casual players are more keen on making the game more easier. I find most scenarios too easy after some try, but not all players are so keen on deck tuning or willing to buy all nesessary cards.

Fortunately it is much more easier to make the game more easy than to make it harder. Here are some suggestion that I put in Boardgamegeek.

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I may suggest some modifications that you may use. (Use one or more of them depending an how difficult the scenario is.

1. Hard duty: (aka Night shift) Untap a character by giving a wound to the untapping character (owerworking)
2. Backpak: (select one, two, or three… cards in advantage from your playing deck and when you draw a card, you can take it/them from your draw deck or backpak.
3. Gifts of Caladriel: (or other suitable character) A variation of backpak, but you get a fixed amount of preselected cards directly to your hand in suitable part of the game (beginning, start of second phase etc.)
4. Prepared defenses: (a variation of Gifts of Caladriel) You start the game with some preselected cards. They replase or are additional to your normal starting hand.
5. Favor of Valar: (Plessed by Eru etc…) You get additional resource token(s) in the resource phase
6. Prepared for battle: (Family heirlooms) Every character starts the game with one item (or attachement)
7. Fellowship: (Start the game with one or more allies)
8. Long journey: Start the game with 7, 8, 9 or 10 cards (instead the normal 6).
9. Campfire: (aka Resting plase) You get one or more healing after you complete one stage.
10. Sanctuary: (as Campfire, but you reduce you threath level after you complete one stage)
11. an Elven cloak: You start the game with reduced treath level (because of an Elven cloak it is harder for enemies to catch you)

So here we have some options that makes the game easier. Thematically it is easy to fith these to the scanarios. The more dangerous mission is, the more you get support from free peoples of Middle Earth.
Just don't over use them or you make the game too easy! It is guite easy to make up more of them, just make sure that there is somekind of "reason" for the modification.

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I am a very casual player. I play maybe once every month if I'm lucky. I bought this game to play solo. However, playing solo means one of two things, if you want to be a DL 7, you need two hands or just quit, because it cannot be done. I have many Kazad Dum and 1.5 Cycles of adventures…I REALLy wish there was scaleability, because I can barely beat the DL-1 in the core set. BARELY!!! This game is HARD. i have logged 8+ plays of the game so far and have beaten DL-1 from the Core like, twice. I play this game for it's story and the great art. I wish I could play casually without having to cheat…too much  ;-)

GalaxyUC said:

i think the reason here is that you havnt played enough. i bought the game for solo as well as for the first year and a bit played just that. i beat all of the quests apart from dol guldur.

so while i agree on the difficulty of solo play i would say give it more of a chance….

rich

The sad truth is that, if you play solo, the choices are limited: without Spirit, this game is really tough.

Serazu said:

Depends on your card pool.  Currently I use a deck of drawfs without spirit cards and it performs quite well, though my card pool for this deck is all Adventure Packs and up to the Hobbit expansion.  Granted, without a Test of Will, it is vulerable to deadly Tracheries.

I never played a deckbuilding game prior to this.  I'm not sure I ever will again. 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this, to some extent, but the things that make the deck-building community happy is not what makes me happy.

For example, due to the difficulty of the quests, there are only a very few limited options for succeeding that quest.  For some, this is fun, for me, this is BORING!!!

I just purchased over 1000 cards, and I can only use 50 to beat this quest.  The other 950 just sit there, worthless.  

Now, some will chime in and say, "hey, the sky is the limit, you can build whatever theme or deck you want!".  Not if you want to have a reasonable chance at success, you can't. 

Many have already said…spirit cards or bust.  I do agree, the dwarves have serious advantages to them.  And I often solo play with two hands…spirit on one and dwarf on the other.

But deckbuilding players never understand my point or if they do, they brush it off and say that is what deckbuilding games are all about.

If I buy a game with a wizard, cleric, rogue and fighter and the game is only winnable with the wizard and cleric and the rogue/fighter are not capable of winning, then it is an unbalanced game.

LOTR/LCG is an unbalanced game in a similar way.  I'm not trying to say it isn't fun.  I own every expansion and campaign there is to date, so it would be pure supidity for me to say to you that it isn't fun and still keep purchasing and supporting the game.  I'm just simply saying, it feels broken and the difficulty levels exascerbate its brokenness.  Rhosgobel is the one quest that made sense to me, because you finally use cards you would otherwise not use.  As it stands, I have a whole pile of cards which are never used  (Rohan deck anybody?  Eagle deck anybody?).  I keep trying to use them, but they just don't work with a high degree of success.  The only thing which works is very limited.

So I have, in essence, a game with over 1000 pieces, but we only play with 100 of them.  THat is how I see it, but deckbuilding players don't see it this way, they think this is wonderful.  I guess my boardgaming roots are just too strong…I would be ashamed to play a boardgame which was that limited in its use.

Yeas. LCG games are deck building games. You have to like it in some degree, to like these games a lot. But I still play guite succesfully eagle deck :-) It just have so much card drawing that it is hard to not make it work, so it somewhat cements what you say. Certain type of decks are just better than another kinds are.

And that is the thing that game designers try to brake from time to time. You need very different deck to the Heirs od Numenor cycle than with two previous, but it just makes some type of decks better compared to other. It is the very nature of all deckbuilding and development games. In WW II games if you managet to develop some uber technology it may be impossible to stop you etc. It is possible to find out uber combos in miniature games, and it is possible that only certain army types can counter that combination. It is the bless and curse in the same time. Some people finds out completely uber, even proken combinations/play styles and other are desperately trying to offer harder counter effects. In Co op games it is the game company.

For example in board game Archam Horrow, each "upgrade" kit makes the game harder and harder, just to counter better and better gameplay of some players in the world, so It is definitely only problem in card games. Yoy have to somehow masochistly like the sutuation ;-) or make some house rules to remedy the situation id you are not "sitting in the top of power curve".

So far there has been several ways of beating many of those scearios with different heroes and some varitions of speres, but the harder the scenario gets the less there is marging for alternatives. IMHO. That is one reason why I like those custome scenarios. There are guite many to chose from so that I can get challenge hard enough, so that I can try to beat and get beaten down with many deck variations.

schmoo34 said:

See I found this pretty funny because we'd been struggling for a while with Foundations of Stone with 2 players. Our two Dwarf decks couldn't make it through after repeated plays. Just to be different we tried it with a Rohan and an Eagle deck (built on a "Eagles are rubbish" dare) and made it through first time! Then those two decks sailed past Shadow and Flame as well.

I think it's easy to get stuck in a mindset of what's good and not, and this restricts you trying out new things.

But even if you are sure some cards are rubbish there's no reason you can't at least try them. See it as a challenge… take a bad strategy and try and make it as best you can. Play the early, easier scenarios. This way you're getting repeated use out of both 'bad' cards and early scenarios that are just too easy for your good decks to bother with.

Morph said:

This.

Deck building for me is the essence of the game.  Developing single and multi sphere decks of different varities and strengths is, for me, the most enjoyable aspect of the game. 

My friend and I play 2 player.  I have never played the game 1 player before.  We have come across adventures that have been so difficult we couldnt imagine how we were going to defeat them.  But each time we sat down and either tweaked the decks we were using or came up with a different combo altogether, and eventually overcame. 

I have seen no personal evidence that one sphere is essential to winning, or is necessary to defeat most adventures.  Although we usually play two spheres each.  Finding card combos either within your personal deck, or in concert with another deck, is what really makes this game fun.

Given the incredibly high number of variables, FFG has done a steallar job with balance.  And Keep the difficulities high.  Nothing dissappoints me more than beating an adventure on the first try.

That, as a huge fan of co-op and that's how it works. The LotR baord game, Arkham, and this. Maybe there sould be a "tutorial" encounter, but after that it should be hard to win. A co-op game that isn't exactly almost too hard is a boring game, and as anyone who plays co-op games knows, the game gets easier so you need expansions to ramp up the difficulty. A good expansion for this game should seem almost impossible on the 1st play through. then you build your decks paly a few more times, it's still hard. Then, well you know how to win and you go what's next. Look at the Arkham page there is no shortage of "too hard" posts but there are 10x as many let's make house rules to make it harder posts

In response to schmoo34's comments only about 5-10% of cards being usable.

You make some good points.  Some cards are simply almost always better than others, and some cards are chaff.  For instance, I've never played Beorn's Hospitality, so this would qualify for me as wasted money/space, as you mention.  However, I feel that compared to other games LotR: LCG has far fewer of these sorts of cards than other card games (such as Magic's many of versions of Grizzly Bears), because in some scenarios they can find a home and even be great.  If I read you correctly, it bothers you that for a scenario only certain cards are good.  To me this is a strength of the game because it encourages you to:

-Use cards that may not be good in a general sense, but are in a specific scenario (I feel that Elanor fits the bill here, to some degree).

-See if you can beat a scenario with tools not built specifically for it.  It's a lot of fun to try location-heavy quest like Emyn Muil w/out Northern Tracker.  Give it a try.

You mention using only 50 or 100 cards out of a collection of 1000, and this is boring to you.  May I suggest not using only the best of the best?  Lorien Guide instead of Northern Tracker.  One can beat the scearios without ONLY using the top cards/spheres.  Your win % may not be quite as high, but being a good player will do much to balance this out.  I'm no master at this game and have won difficulty level 7 scearios with many of these sub-optimal cards, playing single-hand solo, with a win ratio in the neighborhood of 50%.  If you're looking for that deck to get you in the 90%+ win ratio then perhaps your card pool would be more limited, as you mention. 

Yes, perhaps Spirit is the strongest sphere (it could well be for a majority of the scenarios), but the nature of the game doesn't require balance between the spheres, although they should be roughly comparable.  I feel the spheres are becoming closer in power the more cards are released.

Power-creep is pretty inevitable in card games, and it's impossible to have hundreds of cards that will be balanced for more than 20 unique scenarios.  Deck-building ccg's (lcg's, tcg's, whatever) are not to everyone's taste.

Allso I would like to say that Hobbit scenarios seems to be very possible to solve with core and both Hobbit expansion cards. With core and only one of those Hobt scenarios it is going to be too difficult. Allso it is better to have 3 treachery changelin cards in each plaing deck.

I've been playing the game since it came out, have every single expansion and POD and I'm very close to quitting the game because of the difficulty level. 

It feels like at one point the quests were more on the easy side and now the pendulum has swung to being way too hard. I don't mind tweaking my decks, but I honestly do not have the time to take them apart and make brand new ones for every single quest. I also like playing games with four decks and feel like the quests are terrible at scaling up and down in terms of difficulty.

My husband and I play together and we've already tried modifying the rules and we still find it too difficult. There needs to be a bigger variety of quests for different kinds of players. The quests should be on the easier/average difficulty side with variants to make them more challenging for those who want higher difficulty. As someone mentioned, I think the hobbit expansion was the sweet spot for the game, not too easy, not too hard. 

Also, the development of the spheres and the keywords have been really uneven. Rohan has pretty much been forgotten for example and it is nearly impossible to have a spirit only deck. If they have POD quests, why can't they also make POD cards for the spheres? I would gladly buy them. I am more than willing to throw my money at Fantasy Flights if they do this, because frankly, I have more cash than time.

Honestly, the game has become less fun and less thematic as time has gone on. I play to have fun, and while I don't mind working for my wins, playing the latests quests feel like I am beating my head against the wall.