Flies and Spiders - Progression

To start with, much the same as with the first Hobbit Saga Expansion, we are playing Dwarves. We knew we would want to try out a lot of new Dwarves with each Hobbit box so we purposefully try to avoid them other than during the Hobbit boxes. Therefore, not only do we use Dwarves, we go all in on Dwarves (even when mixing other heroes would be objectively stronger than pure Dwarves). Further, we like to try out new heroes so we stuck Oin and Bombur in these decks and left out the heroes Bifur, Dwalin and Gloin in favor of trying out their ally counterparts. Disclaimer, we intend to take this same band of Dwarves to each of the 3 scenarios and tailor the cards of the deck to each scenario. We did not read the subsequent 2 scenarios so hopefully we didn't choose too poorly. We are not bringing the treasures from the first Hobbit box because we wanted to try new Dwarves. We will try to collect any treasure available and put it to use in future scenarios.

Oin: I'm sure that he can really shine in the right spirit/tactics deck but in this first outing he was kinda meh. Granted, this is largely due to not even taking a single purely tactics hero. I'm excited to try him out again in the future but he was less than stellar here.

Bombur: I was unsure about him counting as 2 Dwarves being a strong enough ability to warrant his inclusion. After one playthrough, I'm happy I tried him and will use him again in the future. He ramped us into the 5 Dwarf threshold on turn one (he made it 4 to start and we played 1 Dwarf ally) and he is a fair defender out of the box. We quickly managed to slap both A Burning Brand and a Dunedain Warning on him and he was an asset the remainder of the scenario. Color me happily surprised.

As alluded to above, Brad's deck focuses on the 5 Dwarf threshold while Katherine's is the Jack Of All Trades Master Of None kind of deck. Dain's global boost is a powerhouse in any Dwarf deck, managing threat with Nori is great for triggering Bilbo's Magic Ring and Oin's access to tactics allows for opportune Feinting.

A few strategies:

 - Turn 1 spend Bilbo's resource to search for Bilbo's Magic Ring then you can, if you choose, immediately trigger it to replace that resource (at the cost of 1 threat).

 - Take it slow to build good boards before getting split. No need to rush quest phase 1.

 - Get Steward of Gondor and Narvi's Belt on Thorin and he will be able to fund basically anything.

 - Miner of the Iron Hills is awesome for removing poison (and bats). You can prioritize keeping characters from coming close to unconscious or removing poison from characters with only 1 so they are no longer a "poisoned character". Both are strong. Also, the spirit deck has Stand and Fight to play Miners out of the discard of the other player.

 - Before you split up, spend Bilbo's resources because he will lose them (and spend from the other heroes the will lose too). Use him to pay for Gandalf or traveling to the 3 threat, 1 progress location.

 - Use Snowbourn Scout to nuke the aforementioned location.

 - Hardy leadership is awesome to help Dwarves survive more attacks but remember that it wont keep them from going unconscious because posion only cares about the printed health value.

 - Watch out for defenses with 1 health allies/characters that are 1 posion away from going unconscious (or even 2 away sometimes) because if they pick up a poison or 2 and match their printed health, they will be unconscious and the attack turns into an undefended attack that will often kill one of your heroes, yikes !

 - Time passing the first quest phase with the Dain deck being 1st player, Dain's boost will really help when you have very few characters conscious as you wait for more (I...errr...made an off-by-one math error and we passed the first Quest Phase when we were on the wrong first player, whoops. It probably made us take 3-4 extra rounds to win, but we did.).

 - Don't pass the first Quest Phase with the first player having any enemies engaged, it'll make Bilbo's solo plight all the worse (we accidentally did this and almost lost, see my math error above).

 - Use Bilbo's Magic Ring every turn once split so that you can revive 1 character every single turn (Bilbo will gain 1 resource per turn and then the Ring will give another).

Overall I think I enjoyed this scenario but the mechanic with Bilbo alone (although thematic) saving all the Dwarves from the spiders felt a little annoying/frustrating. It felt like it could be very easy to build up for a while and feel good about winning but then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by having solo Bilbo fail to rescue his fellow companions and all that build up would have seemed a waste of time.

Hope it's a little smoother sailing for you !