Flight to the Ford - Progression - Katherine's Deck 1.0

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• 1.0

A few things to note up front. We played campaign style for the three scenarios inside this box but do not intend on carrying these heroes through a broader campaign of all 18 scenarios. Once we've played through all 18 we will revisit with a fellowship intended to take on all 18. Therefore, in some aspects this scenario was easier as we were not as worried about collecting burdens for future scenarios. We will bear those concerns in mind when tackling all 18 in the future though. I do still believe this was a fair playthrough for a couple reasons. When you shuffle in burdens, it still adversely affects this scenario if you draw them (which we did draw a few); they also all surge which is bad and the shadows are bad. So we were still feeling ill effects by shuffling them in. Also, we carried all our same heroes into this campaign rather than tailoring our hero composition specifically for this scenario. For example I think Beregond would be great but we did not take him. Moreover, we also carried forward the burden from the first scenario that we earned. Furthermore, when we start The Road Darkens, we will not include any earned boons which will hurt us starting those quests. Lastly, there is a location which has an action to shuffle in a burden to place 4 progress (and get rid of it), we did not use that ability thus requiring us to deal with that threat value and progress tokens.

With my explanation of our campaign, future plans and rationale for still playing campaign style out of the way, here are some of my thoughts.

This scenario is undoubtedly a race. We just have to go as fast as possible before Frodo succumbs to his wound. I built these decks with the express purpose that we would not try to kill anything but rather, like the novels, evade the Nazgul. I included high willpower and a lot of + defense. We put multiple + defense attachments on Fatty Bolger and multiple Fast Hitch. We tried our best to engage enemies on Fatty Bolger's side of the board and made liberal use of Feint and the campaign effect to shuffle burdens to stop attacks combined with all of Fatty Bolger's + defense and extra actions. This let use reliably defend the Nazgul as we pressed on with questing.

We almost always sent nearly every character on the quest. By the way Eowyn had the boon for + willpower and Fatty Bolger had the boon for + defense. Gildor Inglorien was in the encounter deck but was never drawn.

We were able to make significant progress each round in doing this and manage to defend all the Nazgul each turn. To be fair, we once again got quite lucky with drawing several Fast Hitch (although unlucky that we never got Light of Valinor). We took maybe 5 rounds to beat it and Frodo ended with 8 life (he lost a couple to encounter cards/enemies).

Ford of Bruinen was extra-ordinarily helpful as we washed away 5 Nazgul (including the Witch King). It would have been ok if all were on Fatty Bolger's side, however, 2 were on the other side of the board. We thought after washing them out, surely we would draw no more Nazgul or maybe just 1...but the next cards off the encounter deck went Nazgul, Nazgul, ugh.

At the end we had 16/30 progress and 2 Nazgul. We used Merry + Sam + and ally or two to dispatch of one of the Nazgul. The other we Sneak Attacked Gandalf in the refresh phase then in the next rounds planning phase played Gandalf naturally to deal a total of 8 direct damage killing the last Nazgul and making us have 16/15 progress to win.

As with every other Saga quest I love how the designers really incorporated the flavor of the novels into the gameplay mechanics. It was a blast and I look forward to playing it as a part of all 18 scenarios where we will truly have to make harder decision about whether to shuffle in extra burdens !