Journey Down the Anduin - Nightmare - Progression

Wow, extraordinarily long hiatus, at least the length of the pandemic up to now but probably close to 1 year. Work + Kids + no help from grandparents due to the virus = no free time for games, especially ones needing a lot of thought in both deckbuilding and gameplay. Anyway, it was a blast to get back and we hope to get back to playing probably once a week, hopefully!

So, I do not have a fully refreshed mind as to the deckbuilding as I built these decks a year ago and never played the scenario. We picked them up today and just gave it a shot. It took us a couple quick scoops and then just one solid long game to beat the scenario.

Of course in the nightmare version, no attachments on trolls so no Forest Snare or the like.

We quickly got Spear of the Citadel. Citadel Plate and Unexpected Courage on Beregond and he basically carried most of the game.

As always, Light of Valinor on Glorfindel at the beginning of the game was key.

Second Unexpected Courage went on Elrond.

Elrond + Warden of Healing made it easy to mitigate the 10 threat location and then heal away the damage. We actually got two Warden of Healing out and it made damage melt away.

Gimli also took a troll hit and some damage from the 10 threat location to get really buff, he also eventually got a Citadel Plate.

Thalin makes the crows silly still.

We ended up fighting, and killing, FIVE Hill Trolls because of that horrible no cancel treachery that brings the highest health back (in fact was killed 3 before beating the first quest phase and the other two were revived in the four cards revealed when moving to last quest phase) !

We got fairly lucky multiple times this game where we ran out of cards in the encounter deck such that we did not need to deal shadow cards a few key times (do not shuffle encounter deck solely for shadow cards, only for staging).

Lastly, I don't know if the nightmare deck had printing errors, two rats say cannot be damaged discard in 3rd phase if only rats remain, simple enough but the third merely said cannot be damaged this round and did not even have a '-' in the health globe or any number to indicate a health value. Also, it had the line with skull to indicate a shadow effect below but not text either. We basically jest treated it like the other two (making it harder) and at the end of the game we had more than enough attacks that we could have attacked and killed it in case we weren't supposed to just discard it.

Great fun to get back into it, especially with a more challenging scenario. Now we get to deckbuild afresh next go round !