19 - Dungeons Deep and Caverns Dim (Progression Series)

This is another fellowship continuing on in my goal to play through all of the quests in release order to learn how all (or most) of the cards interact with one another. The first fellowship for the quests in the core set can be found here, and it contains a slightly more detailed overview of what I'm going for with building these decks. As always, any feedback is appreciated so that I can continue to learn more!

Another fairly straight forward set of dwarf decks to take care of this scenario. I slotted in a few copies of Will of the West in case the Riddles go really poorly (especially useful in the Dain/Thorin/Ori deck which can burn through its cards incredibly quickly even without the help of having to discard for Riddles). The questing and killing of Orcs/Wargs shouldn't be too much of a problem for either deck unless things really go sideways early on. So the difficulty comes from being able to correctly guess what you're going to discard on the riddles section.

I suppose I could have gone monosphere or something to have made it a little bit easier to correctly guess, but getting some resources on Bilbo by raising threat with the Magic Ring, and then lowering the threat using Gandalf (and Dwalin) was usually enough to eventually get the job done. The Tactics/Dwalin deck definitely placed the bulk of the progress on Stage 2B, and it is where I spent the majority of my Baggins resources to try to burn through it.

I would say this was probably my least favorite quest in the box, mostly due to the random nature of the discards. It wasn't a super fun mechanic to try to build around, and I suppose I'm also getting a little tired of just filling up the board with nothing but dwarves. Heirs of Nuemenor is up next, which should be interesting because I haven't actually played any quests in the deluxe or cycle yet since everyone says they're incredibly punishing.