Middle-Earth Arcade: Rampage 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Time for another installment of Middle-Earth Arcade. George, Lizzie, and Ralph have arrived to smash the town down!

Rampage consists of selecting a giant monster, climbing buildings and bashing them down, and eating up the locals. What fun. In this version of the game, you get control of all three monsters at once, and boy can they smash.

Rampage is all about smashing both buildings AND small primates with puny guns. The smashing primates part is clear enough, and the encounter deck will churn out plenty of Orcs for you to eat up. To smash locations, I mean buildings, equip yourself with some mounts, because, uh well, you have to 'mount' the buildings in Rampage. Yes, that's it. Then smash!

Don't hit 50 threat though, as all of your monsters will shrink back down to naked primate size and sidle off the side of your screen.

Some piloting instructions: You start at a whopping 37 threat, so some quests will shut you right down. Keen as Lances and Favor of the Valar are your friends.

Look to get some healing out soon in order to continually use the Ents' abilities. You have options. In pure solo, the Wellinghall Preservers are very important cards to look for, for the willpower. The deck lacks resource acceleration, which you will feel, but it does have some smoothing.

Put Arod on Quickbeam and put Asfaloth on Treebeard so that he can smash, too. The one and only purpose of Elf-friend in this deck is to enable Asfaloth. I went crazy and had a Galadhrim Healer with The Elvenking also, so you have a hapless elf to repeatedly "eat" and get healing by doing so (kind of : you still had to play her again later to actually get the healing), but there was way too much sacrifice for theme here, and the deck did not function! Too many dead cards. So bye-bye Elvenking and Galadhrim Healer, if only.

The result is a surprisingly functional but high-risk deck. The heroes themselves are so powerful that they just stomp any early game combat challenges. Sustaining can be a challenge as the damage piles up, despite all the healing! Although I played some easy quests and won in pure solo, as is the case in about 90% of my decks, it will function better in a specialist role in a multiplayer environment. The threat reduction cards become much more important in multiplayer, as more cards revealed per round means more threat-raising Treacheries and Doomed effects.

And a bit of testing results. In pure solo:

Passage through Mirkwood: 2/2, despite getting Hummerhorns as a shadow effect both times. This deck has some hit points. Once I quested through stage 3, and once I had to defeat Ungoliant's Spawn (which I did on the first turn it was revealed).

Journey Down the Anduin: 1/2. This deck removes pesky Hill-trolls on turn 1 and keeps going. Beorn died once in the winning game. I had some threat raises and used two Favors and two Keen as Lances, all for threat. A second Hill-troll would have killed Beorn and simultaneously raised my threat by doing so, but Honor Guard's valour response prevented that.

In 2-handed play: Treachery of Rhudaur: 1/1. I got to play Arod but not Asfaloth. Lost Beorn during the last round. Ended at around 45 threat with a Favor of the Valar still on the table (felt comfortable).