After more than seven years, I have finally embarked once more on the Saga play-through for Lord of the Rings LCG!
The last time I played A Shadow of the Past was Spring 2015, and I seem to recall that I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience. The scenario involves the heroes, along with Frodo Baggins, trying to evade the Black Riders as they make for Bucklebury Ferry. There are five Nazgûl in the encounter deck, and a slew of locations. The objective is to explore the Ferry location, but you cannot travel there if there are any locations in play, so it makes sense to have a whole host of locations in the deck.
I very nearly reached location-lock early on, but managed to remember that Legolas can add progress to the quest, and as I also had him riding Arod, he was able to make some effort to also clear those locations in the staging area. It became an exercise in keeping my threat low, though, as I tried everything I could to engage the Nazgûl on my own terms.
Thanks to the decks that I am using, there’s a lot of Ranged and Sentinel, which meant a lot of the time, combat was a pretty straightforward affair. The deck headed by Aragorn could basically support the deck headed by Eowyn, meaning it felt very much like I was playing one huge deck! In fact, the heroes duplicate spheres across both, so it kinda is one big deck! I think this is the first time that I have really experienced that, and it really did feel like one big Fellowship!
I’m sincerely hoping that things continue in this vein, anyway! I wouldn’t say that it was easy, but it was certainly easier this time around. I did start the game with 2 resources per hero, but otherwise played without any of the house rules I mentioned the other day. Whether I end up resorting to house ruling certain things as we go along will remain to be seen, though!!
So. I explored two locations worth 1VP each, but I don’t really want to go in to the whole scoring thing, as scoring in Lord of the Rings is very convoluted, involving adding up your end threat, remembering how many turns you played, and totting up the starting threat for any dead heroes. So I’m going to leave it as a final score of 2VP for now.
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