Solo Thematic Campaign: Journey in the Dark 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

The Campaign

I’ve been part of 2, 3, and 4 player campaigns but I’ve never sat down and run my own solo campaign. I won’t be recording or blogging this campaign as others have recently done that (I’m in the middle of a YouTube thematic campaign with Mr Underhill right now) and I want to play rather quickly through the entire set of quests but I will play in “strict” campaign mode and trying to build as thematically as I can.

I can’t promise the decks I publish in this series will be totally optimized or super teched against each quest for a 90% win ratio, but I hope they will be decent thematic decks that could provide a good experience for people looking to play the campaign in a thematic manner.

The Deck

This is actually the exact same deck I used for The Ring Goes South! It works! It isn't built to kill the Balrog so I'll be relying on moving quickly through the quest so I don't have to face it at the end. I probably should have upped Fellowship of the Ring to 3x because you can play it on turn 1 and it's massively helpful.

The Experience

I had to play this several times to make it through without facing the Balrog. Several things had to line up to succeed. I needed a willpower boost on turn 1 or 2 so I could get to stage 2 by the second turn. This means I needed to see either Fellowship of the Ring or Frodo's Intuition on the first turn and Sword that was Broken ASAP. I also needed to see at least 1 enemy revealed on turn 1 or 2. If you don't seen an early enemy, you can get bogged down at the Chamber of Mazarbul and then you're chance of getting through in 10 or less turns is gone. The last thing that really needed to happen was avoiding the Fool of a Took treachery.

I lost plenty of attempts and aborted a few games as I struggled to find another enemy to kill at stage 2 but eventually I beat it on turn 9 with zero damage left on the objective, then I played it one more time just to make sure I didn't mess anything up. Everything came together and I was able to win on the 8th turn with all 9 characters in play.

You can see final board states to my successful games on my Twitter account.

Campaign Decks so Far

1. Shadow of the Past
2. The Old Forest
3. Fog on the Barrow Downs
4. Knife in the Dark
5. Flight to the Ford
6. The Ring Goes South
7. Journey in the Dark
8. Breaking of the Fellowship
9. The Uruk-Hai
10. Helm's Deep
11. The Road to Isengard
12. The Passage of the Marshes
13. Journey to the Crossroads
14. Shelob's Lair
15. Passing of the Grey Company
16. The Siege of Gondor
17. The Battle of the Pelannor Fields
18. The Tower of Cirith Ungol
19. The Black Gate Opens
20. Mount Doom