by IanHancock
Greetings Geekers
,This is just a bit of a general musings post, which is why it is general. Be warned, this could be text wall
So, a bit of background. My wife (bless her) is one of those gaming chicks, not only that, we have 1 or 2 other "couples" friends that are in the same predicament. So obviously LOTR LCG was for us- I mean, it could have been "My Little Pony LCG" with a co-op design and we would have gobbled it up since the co-op thing makes it less prone to me sleeping on the couch.
We have a regular games night that a whole bunch of people get together and I sent out to those guys saying that every week for the next 9 sessions four of us would be playing Lord of the Rings and going through the Core Scenarios and the Mirkwood cycle (we are currently up to "Confict at the Carrot"). This is not a sessions report post so I wont bore you with the details, but rather just muse over the things I have seen.
For starters,I hate Elanor. Not because of her ability or her stat line but because when you are playing with four people you have to take her. You are boned without her. And even then, the card being replaced from the encounter deck means that in 4p your not necessarilly any better off. That would be fine if she was decent in combat, but she isn't. If you don't use her to cancel a Treachery, she tends to be like Dain- just sitting there with arms folded but without giving the +1 bonus of awesomeness to those around her.
So we houserule her. Nothing special, but in a 4 player game we don't replace the treachery card that she cancels. This all being said, it doesn't replace the core problem of there being very few ways to cancel treachery (none in fact, other than that spirit event) and that even with 4 players, two of which are playing spirit with 3 of each cancel effect, they just come out too often to be able to deal with any number of "game ending" treachery cards. I would love to see an ally that has the same sort of ability as the Dunedain Watcher for Treachery cards. Break in case of emergency sort of thing.
Another thing that annoys me a little bit is the fact that you can only travel once per turn. This makes location heavy encounters like Hunt for Gollum particularly tricky. I know in these situations there is the one card win that is Northern Tracker, but as you have probably noticed, I'm not a big fan of the build a deck to beat a scenario thing, mostly because I am often the guy who has to build the decks... This is not something that we have houseruled at all, since it seems to play out okay most of the time, it just seems to make those quests go for a lot shorter since we just quest our ass off before the Staging Area fills up. The other thing that happens is we die horrible deaths to the threat counter and our group doesn't like this much- we much rather go down swinging, losing 3rd turn to Massing at Osgiliath is a bit of a hobby for us.
That's all I can think of at the moment, mind you I'm in the middle of my morning coffee so something else will come to me later no doubt. In closing, and I've said this before, LOTR LCG is a great game that is balanced really well for 2 players. My wife and I do it all the time (Edit: play that is...) and it's fantastic; some of the quests tend to get a bit skewed when you play with 4 players...
Bring on Nightmare Mode!