I have been thoroughly enthralled by the Hobbit this last week . Quests 1 and 2 are hard but manageable solo, winning some, losing some but jeez is that 3rd quest a bitch!!! Havent got near to beating it yet as a mix of bad riddle guesses getting Bilbo killed and swamped by that extra encounter card each round is finishing me off. Im playing with a dwarf themed deck which is maybe limiting my card choice so sadly i will have to look beyond the Hobbit storyline for the cards i need to swap into my new deck. Any thoughts on beating quest 3 consistently? Anyway im loving the 3 quests so much. Cheers

Quest 2 is boring as hell. Nothing happens, and the boss enemy is a joke. Played the third quest once and I'm not too happy about that riddle zone stuff. Too complicated, too luck dependent. Feels more like a lottery. Also, there are not enough card with riddle effects. I only got one each second round and managed to solve tow of the three riddlies with one point each. That way I need at least 18 rounds to get through the riddle phase! It also feels rather absurd that I have to use half of my deck to solve these riddles.

All in all I think this expansion wasn't worth the money. Hopefully the Gondor expansion will be better.

leptokurt said:

i agree to an extent here, though i have really enjoyed the overall feel of the pack, and the player cards were very nice

the obvious star is the first quest- lots of great ideas and art, the others could have been more entralling that is for sure. i like the riddle idea on paper, however in that quest its been rather annoying (probably because i cant win)

i think the smaug duel may be something like it

i think you shall be happy with numenor though- im pretty sure it will be the opposite of the hobbit, mainly centered around fighting and sieges (schmoo shall be happy.)

rich

First quest is really nothing interesting.

Yesterday we have chance to play by 3 players second quest. Really cool! we play 3 times and we lost every time. The encounter deck is really powerful and even with very strong player decks we cannot win! Really cool game session take about 6 hours.

last quest is quite difficult solo but by 3 players is really easy and boring.

I love Hobbit cose is bring you new kind of challenge but of course sure HON will be much better. I dont really like Hobbit book story………

More classic quotes. The Hobbit first quest is "not really interesting" and you dont like The Hobbit story.  Jeez, what a guy. Your negativity is never ending.

In a highly surprising turn up for the books, I played my tactics deck solo against scenarios 2 and 3, and won both times!

I'm glad to see tactics got a real boost in this set, the key difference is card draw (via foe-hammer) and early options for blocking and counter attack with Beorn.

The deck starts really slowly on the questing, as Dam pointed out, the heroes can only muster 2 willpower between the 3 of them, but there are enough 2 WP allies to mean it soon picks up. I added 3 songs, 2 SoG and 2 sneak attack to the basic deck. Give it a go, it is a blast, there is quite a rush trying to complete the quest before your threat tops out. I'd quite forgotten that side of the game as I've been playing decks with plenty of threat reduction for a long time now. This is more on the edge and therefore more exciting.

Memetix said:

Yep, they did a good job with the tactics sphere in this expansion. I haven't tried Beron yet, but he sounds interesting.

How did you manage to get the 9 points for the riddle without  "Will of the West"?

I had a few riddles that were just "name a sphere" so they gave about 5 progress (spending baggins resources), similarly name a sphere and cost were not too tricky. I only failed one riddle in the game, winning 5 to get to the 9 progress required. Thankfully I didn't lose any to those annoying treacheries.

I had reached the 14 needed on stage 1B already so I completed the quest stages after answering a riddle (on a treachery), putting Golum into play and removing the lake before I completed the quest phase. I then placed my progress on stage 3 - nice but not planned for.

leptokurt said:

He is quite cool. I make a deck with Beorn/Glorifindel/Frodo. Beorn is a tank. He defend, fight (together with Glorifindel he strike 8) and when he die you just get him back with Fortune or Fate. Is not a tier one deck but quite funny and powerful.But in coop game Beorn is not good in my opinion. We play and is real shame sometimes players cannot do nothning with him so later for coop i change him for Hama.

We play mainly two player. First quest was tough but pretty fun.

Second quest, seemed pretty easy to us. The Goblin King seemed like a real easy pushover with just not much else happening.

But the third quest seems just absolutely BRUTAL to me. We've played it 7 or 8 times without a win. The riddle mechanics just seem very hard to have much skill with, unless you build your entire deck out of one sphere and only one or two different costs. We don't build different decks for each quest, instead choosing to build a deck that can try to make it through the whole cycle. I built a two sphere deck, Spirit/Lore (about half of each), where I had about 20 cost 2's, and about 15 cost 0's. That seems like it should've been at least decent at guessing for the riddles, but I still kept failing a TON of them because it's a crapshoot. Some you have to guess sphere, cost AND type, and many you have to guess two of the three. It's just highly random. I don't think my deck seems THAT unreasonable of something that should be able to play against this quest, but I don't think we made it to the third stage even once. Basically you fail 3 riddles and Bilbo dies, and many times you'll hit 2 or 3 riddles each turn, sometimes more because of certain treachery cards.

Just crazy.

Glaurung said:

I think he's pretty fun even in co-op. A friend was running Landroval, so I'd have Beorn sentinel block his smaller enemies as well as my own and then we just let him die/resurrect with Landroval to be near full health at the end. It let my friend have extra free attackers throughout the game and Beorn's 5 attack certainly helped me crush some stuff as well. ^_^

Mattr0polis said:

Yes with different amount of players quests difficult is change. Second one is easy with 2 very difficult with 3 and third one is more easy with more numbers of players. So formula is easy some quest more difficult growing up with number of players and some quest more difficult with less number of players.

But what is good : all quest quite challenge and interesting to play solo. Much better then before. I really like the way of game now.