Journey in the Dark - Thematic

My goal was to win the Journey in the Dark scenario three times in a row with a thematic fellowship in campaign mode. This fellowship has managed that.

This was a hard scenario to win three-in-a-row with one thematic hand tied behind my back. I probably played about 50 times over several weeks, with different iterations. The final breakthrough came when I switched Gandalf from ally to hero in deck 2. (Amarthiul had that slot for most of my attempts). The decks are meant only to be played as a fellowship, and are probably almost unplayable as single decks.

I'm doing a complete Saga playthrough with homebrew thematic constraints for the campaign. The idea is to make characters, attachments and events available when thematically appropriate. For Journey in the Dark (pt 5), the unique characters in the fellowship (both heroes and allies) had to be present at the Council of Elrond and be in the player decks for pt 4, passing through the Doors of Durin. No other unique characters were allowed. I only allowed a maximum of two non-unique allies per deck (sets of three), as the maximum that could have made it past the Watcher in the Water in pt 4.

In this version of the story, the Fellowship was not limited to 9 characters. Every OG member except Gimli is present. Gimli is replaced by Bofur. In addition, Beregond, Glorfindel, Arwen and Bilbo joined. Scouting ahead of the Fellowship are Elladan and Elrohir with Dunedain allies.

The game plan is to defend and attack the Balrog in round 8, and then quest across the bridge to destroy it in round 9. Beregond with Raiment of War and Self Preservation can defend, as can Boromir with Raiment of War and Arwen's boost. Glorfindel does the heavy attacking: with Celebrian's Stone and Strider he has 7 WP for Fair and Perilous. Gandalf is the sacrifice.

To survive to round 8 and make enough progress, the fellowship has solid WP, defending, attacking and action advantage. I lost a couple of games to shadows and to threat on deck 2, so there's cover for that. The treacheries are horrible, so there's a full suite of 6 Test of Will as well as Dwarven Tomb to make it functionally 8. Priority to avoid losing counters on Doom Doom Doom. The Mountain of Fire version of Frodo was by far the most successful in my games, and most importantly makes it possible to play the Fellowship sphere cards on round 1. The one copy of Hour of Wrath was often a life-saver, to reset a board full of orcs.