Solo Thematic Campaign: The Siege of Gondor

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The BGamerJoe 5119

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 basically the same deck I used for The Passing of the Grey Company with all the threat reduction cards swapped out for Legacy of Númenor and The Hidden Way.

This quest has no threat-increasing effects and you want to finish this quest as fast as possible so Legacy of Númenor is excellent here. My hair-brained idea was to pull a Legacy of Numenor and The Hidden Way in my opening hand so I could clear a Ship location (without getting the accompanying pirate) on turn which would me it would be possible to finish the game with only 4 resources on The Corsair Fleet. I included the Dunedain Pathfinder to pull ship locations as well.

The deck still relies on attachments on Aragorn to buff questing numbers on a relatively few number of characters. Gimli is still the DD (designated defender) but the Army of the Dead has to fill in as secondary defender when you get engaged with 2+ enemies which can happen. Beravor should still be dedicated to drawing cards in nearly every planning phase to increase consistency.

The Experience

I played this several times and won several games but I kept replaying until I could get a good result on the resource count on The Corsair Fleet. Sometimes you're just at the mercy of the encounter deck for giving you Ship locations. If I had no ship in play, I'd take the "reveal and extra encounter card" option on the Corsair Fleet objective but still, sometimes I'd have no options for travelling to a ship. My Pathfinders and Hidden ways would often miss a location as well! There's so many treacheries in this quest!

I found I struggled if I couldn't get a Legacy of Númenor on the first turn. I didn't draw one on my final play but I managed to finally get one by using Old Bogie-Stories and Beravor's draw. I got lucky on the first turn and revealed a ship location which produced a smaller enemy I was able to kill right away. I found a ship location with the Pathfinder on turn 2 and revealed another location on turn 3 so everything worked out so I could explore a ship every turn. I started to get overwhelmed with enemies going into the last turn so I lost a couple characters including the Army of the Dead on the 4th turn. I really like the decisions this quest forces you to make. Should I accept the delay and kill this enemy or travel and reveal another enemy and hope I can survive? That decision can be hard. Kept some chumps up on that last turn just in case!

I was able to win on the 5th turn but I had max damage on every single character!

Moving Forward

The Army of the Dead is removed from the Campaign Pool, but I'm happy I'll only have to wait 4 turns before Aragorn arrives at the Battle of Pelannor Fields. I'm still not entirely sure what kind of deck I'll build for that quest as I've had trouble beating it solo before. I know Éowyn's going in there!

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
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