How To Play The Lord Of The Rings LCG - Part 2: Multiplayer, Card Text, Deckbuilding, Optional Rules

now that you understand how to play this game Solo in this video I'm going to teach you the rest of the fundamentals in four sections first is the rules for multiplayer I'm going to summarize the differences between solo and multiplayer and then I'll actually play one full sample round so you can see all those rules in action but I am also going to show you some other really cool things in that play through so you don't want to miss that next I'll cover the rules for building a deck and then we'll finally get to talk about the cards themselves this is where most of the complexity comes from and how all the cards interact with each other so definitely don't miss that one and then lastly we'll cover several optional rules that change how you play the game like easy mode how to keep score and then my personal favorite way to play the game campaign mode so let's begin there are six differences when playing this game multiplayer instead of solo the first is staging you always draw one encounter card per player during the staging step so that's one card in a Solo game but in four player game that's four cards you're drawing cooperation now many card abilities can be played to help yourself or your teammates so a card like unexpected courage just says attached to a hero that could be any Hero at the table you can also play faint to cancel an enemy attack made on any player or use barivore's ability to choose any player to draw two cards so this game was really designed with cooperation in mind which makes it really fun to build multiple Decks that synergize and complement each other and can cover each other's weaknesses but one rule to keep in mind is that whenever cards get discarded they always go back to the original owner's discard pile so like if I play one of my attachments on my friend's hero if that attachment ever gets discarded it goes back to my discard pile the ranged and Sentinel keywords let you assist your teammates in the combat phase letting you attack or defend enemies engage with other players I'll show you exactly how this works in the sample round right after this the first player token now the biggest difference with playing multiplayer is that most phases in the round are done in turn order starting with the first player and then going clock clockwise around the table from there so during setup the players choose who starts with this first player token and that player is going to be the first person to play cards in the planning phase commit characters in The questing Phase engage enemies in the engagement phase and defend and attack their engaged enemies in the combat phase and then finally at the end of the round during the refresh phase they pass that first player token onto the next player in clockwise order so I'll show you all of this on a sample round right after this but there's one more thing I do need to mention here and that is that the first player also gets the final say on a few things they decide which location to travel to in the travel phase the order in which simultaneous effects resolve and the encounter deck lets you choose a target for an effect that first player gets the final say on who the target should be so this is a Cooperative game okay there's always going to be lots of discussion around the table about what to do in these situations but the fact that the first player gets the final say will keep the game moving along at a good pace and keep your group from hopefully not getting locked in analysis paralysis action Windows now we already talked a bit about actions in the last video but for multiplayer games there are a few additional rules to help resolve any potential timing conflicts that could come up between players basically the way it works is that when an action window opens up any player can play any number of actions they want in any order as long as all the players agree okay but if there's a disagreement like one player wants to play an action before someone else then you can follow these rules here on the screen about who gets to play their actions first I've honestly never had to use these rules because my friends and I have always just agreed but again it's here to just resolve any potential timing conflicts player elimination so in a multiplayer game there is player elimination meaning if one player gets eliminated by having all their Heroes destroyed or their threat reaching 50 then all the other players keep playing to try to win for the group so if the remaining players win everyone wins even those that got eliminated but if all players get eliminated that's when everyone loses so if you get eliminated there are a few steps to follow here first you discard all the cards in your hand and all the cards you control second enemies that were engaged with you return to the staging area keeping any damage and attachments those enemies have and then third other players keep playing but they reveal one fewer card during the staging step although if you do get eliminated during the staging step then you still finish out the rest of that staging step as normal and then the following round is when you would reveal one less card during staging and lastly if the first player is the one who got eliminated then you immediately pass that first player token to the next player now to teach you the rest of these rules it's better if I just show you rather than try to talk about it so we're going to jump into a sample round now but if you're a solo player keep watching because I'm still gonna show you some fun action window Shenanigans you can use in your games as well as some other really fun things you can pull with arranged and Sentinel keywords so here we go it's Passage through merkwood again and I've got two multi-sphere decks here uh this deck currently has the first player token this is me and there are three enemies in the staging area and we've already done the resource phase so now moving into the planing phase this is taken in turn order where the first player is going to play all of the allies and attachment cards they want to play and then they pass to the next player in clockwise order who then plays all the cards that they want to play and so on and so forth after you pass playing cards in the planning phase you can't jump back in and play cards again you'd have to wait until the next round to play cards again so in my hand I have Steward of Gondor which just says attached to a hero so that could be anyone's hero so I'm gonna pay two leadership resources to play this on one of my friends Heroes so they can get some extra resources I'm also going to play gleia wine uh it costs two lore resources and he has an ability that lets me choose any player to draw one card I don't need to draw any cards right now so I'm done playing cards so I pass the turn player two is now going to use the action ability on stew of Gondor to gain some resources and um by the way just as a tip I like to use uh colored cubes to Mark cards that I've exhausted and maybe some special things so instead of turning the card I'm just going to put a black Cube on there to gain the resources for Aragorn and now player 2 really wants to draw a card if they can so they ask me if I can use glarewine's action on them so they can draw a card I agree so I exhaust glarewine and they draw the Silver Load Archer now remember that this planing phase has a special action window that behaves different than the rest the other 17 action Windows happen in between steps in the round but this action window is open during the entire planning phase so any player can freely use actions in any order before or after anyone plays cards so even though I've cast on playing cards I can still use any actions I want so player 2 drew the Silver Load Archer and they're gonna play that right now using these leadership resources and that's all they're going to do for now so now they pass and now that all players have passed we move into the quest phase but before we do let me just rewind a little bit and run a hypothetical scenario here to show you why turn order matters okay so let's say that player 2 was the first player this round glamine and Steward have not been played yet so player 2 would not be able to draw their Silver Load Archer and so they wouldn't be able to play anything this round so let's say they pass now as the second player let's say that I play Stuart angle iron just like I did before I would still be able to trigger their actions like before to let this player draw a card and let them gain resources but they now would not be able to play this Silver Load Archer because they've already passed on playing cards so they would have to wait until the following round to play the Silver Load Archer so this is why turn order can really matter in some situations okay so now let's move on to the quest phase the first step where we commit characters to the quest is also taken in turn order I'm gonna commit all of my characters first simultaneously then I will pass in player 2 will commit all of their characters simultaneously this turn order matters when you have responses like theodrid at the table that can trigger when you commit characters to the quest if you remember Theodore's ability lets him give a bonus resource to any hero that has committed to the quest so let's say that I commit both him and eowin to the quest since player 2 hasn't had their turn yet to commit characters I could only give the bonus resources to one of my heroes but if player 2 had that first player token and they came into their characters first and I'm the last player theodre could give the bonus resource to anybody at the table so as the first player and since therad is caught in a web right now I'm just gonna commit AO and player 2 is going to commit Aragorn and use his ability to ready after he commits to the quest I'm just going to mark that with a green Cube instead to show he is committed to the quest but he's not exhausted so now that both players have passed we move on to the staging step revealing two cards in a two-player game we've got Chieftain oofthoc and a forest spider that's 10 total threat strength against my eight total willpower so that would mean that all players at the table would need to raise their Threat Level by two for questing unsuccessfully I definitely don't want to do that so we're going to use that most valuable action window the golden action window to play actions to adjust my willpower remember this happens after the staging so I get to see everything that gets out there but I haven't resolved the quest yet so I can still adjust willpower here this is the best time to use aowin's ability which lets me discard cards to boost her willpower so we're each gonna discard one card she gets plus two willpower that means we are now matched 10 willpower to 10 threat strength so nothing happens we get to skip the travel phase now because there's no locations out there so let's jump right into the engagement phase and in my opinion this is the hardest thing to learn going from solo to multiplayer so here's how this is going to work in a Solo game you basically just engage all the enemies with an engagement cost less than or equal to your Threat Level so like here player 2 has 32 threat strength so he would just engage all four of those enemies but in a multiplayer game you actually have to take turns making engagement checks back and forth one enemy at a time and you start with the enemies with the highest engagement costs that meet your threat threshold so to make this whole process easier let's first arrange the enemies in order of Engagement cost let me actually stick Steward under Aragorn here to give us a little more room here that's better so now let me show you a couple examples of how this engagement phase could play out let's say that neither one of us chooses to optionally engage anything so we just let the engagement checks happen naturally here's how that would look as the first player I check my Threat Level which is 25 so these two enemies will definitely not engage me because they're higher than 25 but all of these other enemies have the potential to engage me and out of these potential options it's the enemy with the highest of those engagement costs that engages me first so this Forest fighter is going to come to me here now the next player makes one engagement check he's got a 32 threat so out of these three available options Mongolian spawn is the highest of those so Mongolian spawn engages this player back to me again and out of these two enemies the Black Forest bats engages me next actually let me put this guy up here that's better and then going back to the other player dolgeldor Orcs is the next highest so that engages player two and chief to new Fox just stays up here no one engages him so the problem I see with this distribution of enemies is that player 2 doesn't really have any great Defenders right now because Aragorn is damaged denethor is the strongest Defender right now because he is the protector of lorian so he can boost his defense pretty high so I really want to be the one to engage angolian spawn so player 2 should take the weaker enemies in this case so now let's just rewind mind and run a different scenario here to see if we can manipulate this a little bit to get the enemies we want engage with us so instead this time I am going to optionally engage on golient spawn here and then player 2 is going to take the orc and now we do regular engagement checks so as first player I take the spider who is the highest engagement cost of the available options and then the Black Forest bats is going to engage player two and again no one engages Chief to new that looks a lot better so now we're going to start the combat phase but before we do uh there are two new rules about Shadow cards that I haven't told you yet first there is a specific order to dealing Shadow cards and the order does matter so starting with the first player's enemies you deal Shadow cards in descending order starting with the highest engagement cost enemy and working your way down to the lowest engagement cost enemy so in goliant spawn would get it first he's got 32 engagement costs and then the four spider gets a shadow card then you go to the next player in turn order and do the same thing so the Black Forest bats gets the first card because he's higher than the double door Orcs the next rule is that if you run out of cards in the encounter deck as you're dealing Shadow cards then you stop dealing Shadow cards lucky for you there may actually be some enemies left over without Shadow cards so you never reshuffle the encounter discard pile to make a new encounter deck while you're dealing Shadow cards you only reshuffle the encounter deck if it's ever empty during the quest phase and now to the combat phase so in a multiplayer game here's how the combat phase goes the first player defends against all enemies engage with them then the next player defends against all the enemies engage with them after resolving all the enemy attacks then we do all the player attacks starting with the first player again they get to declare one attack against each enemy engage with them and after they've attacked as many enemies as they want in past then the next player does the same with their enemies and so on and so forth so as the first player I'm going to choose to resolve this guy's attack first I'll defend with denethor and reveal the Shadow Card and it's plus one attack for a total of six so this would normally kill denothor but right now there is another key action window where I can use actions after I reveal Shadow cards but before I resolve the damage before the attack actually goes through I've heard this referred to as the Silver action window because it's really the second most important action window that all new players need to know about it's in this window that I'm going to use protector of lorian to discard three cards to get plus three defense and now dinosaur takes no damage and now we'll do the four spiders attack over here and I don't really have any great Defenders left over so player two is going to kindly offer to use Aragorn who has the Sentinel keyword to defend for me this is great so Aragorn's gonna exhaust let's reveal the Shadow Card okay now it says the defending player must choose and discard an attachment they control all right this is a little bit confusing here because Aragorn's defending but I'm engaged with the Enemy so who is the defending player here the rule is that when a Shadow Card refers to the defending player or just you Sentinel Defenders do not change who the effect is referring to these kinds of shadow effects are always referring to the original player who's actually engaged with the Enemy so that means that I need to discard a Detachment so I'm going to discard protector of Lorien remember I can't discard caught in a web because I don't control that attachment so this car goes away and we've defended all the enemies engage with me so now we're gonna move to player two's defenses let's defend the Orcs with glowing so I'm going to exhaust him let's flip the Shadow Card and it's a plus one attack so that actually would normally kill glowing here but I'm gonna once again utilize the silver action window to exhaust daughter of the nimrodell to heal gloines to damage so now he can actually take the two damage coming from York so let's get him a couple resources too and now these black forest bats they've got a one attack and these are always tempting to take undefended because taking a damage on a hero is not going to be a big deal but I really don't want to exhaust Lego loss here and I don't want silverlord Archer to die so let's risk taking this undefended ah shoot okay it's a plus three attack so this actually would kill a hero I can't afford to take four direct damage so we're gonna do um something a little tricky here in the silver action window again I'm actually gonna play sneak attack Gandalf to put four direct damage on the Black Forest bats during the action window so his attack has not resolved yet but I'm still going to be able to deal the damage and kill the bats before the attack resolves so it's a bit tricky here it's really cool though in that if I kill an enemy before the attack resolves it will stop the attack completely so I don't have to worry about that for damage going to my heroes anymore oh and that sneak attack cost a resource from glowing so now that all the defenses are resolved it's time for attacks and as the first player I can declare one attack against each enemy engaged with me and then I'm gonna pass to the player two and they'll do the same thing with their engaged enemies that's straightforward enough but it actually gets a lot more complicated when you introduce characters with the ranged keyword so I've got Lego loss and the Silver Load Archer that both have the range keyword and there are three major rules for ranged characters that I'm going to show you right now I'm going to declare an attack against angolian spawn with my two remaining characters here and after I declare the attack all other players can join in on this attack with any number of ranged characters they want so I'm going to exhaust my two archers here that's a total of eight attack minus two defense is six damage and now player two is going to use unexpected courage on Lego loss to ready legal loss I'm out of ready character so I pass to the next player and now player two can declare one attack against each enemy engage with them that's in this case only the Orcs however if a player only declares ranged attackers then they can also declare one attack against each enemy engage with other players at the table so all exhaust Legolas to declare another attack against angolian spawn placing another damage on it this is a bit tricky so let me reiterate in a multiplayer game it is possible to attack the same enemy multiple times using the same range character as long as you have readying abilities and that's because joining in on an attack is not the same as declaring an attack each player can only declare one attack against each enemy but you can join in on any number of attacks you want and as a side note it's not possible to declare an attack without an attacker because declaring an attack and assigning an attacker are intertwined so if you really want a range character to join in on an attack the engaged player must declare at least one attacker as well so let's recap all the major rules that we've learned in this section one so far first we covered the differences when playing multiplayer where you reveal one card per player during the staging step many cards can be played to help your teammates a lot of cooperation in this game the range and Sentinel keywords can be used to assist your teammates in combat you take turns in many phases starting with the first player who also get the final say on a few things and then you need to take turns playing actions if you can't agree on what order to use and there is player elimination so the group only loses if everyone gets eliminated and then in the sample round we learned a few other things Shadow cards are dealt in turn order and in descending order of Engagement cost it's very important and if the encounter deck runs out while you're dealing Shadow cards that's great you stop dealing Shadow cards you don't reshuffle the encounter deck while you're dealing Shadow cards and killing an enemy in any action window before the attack resolves will stop the attack completely so some functionatings you can pull there defending with a sentinel character does not change who the defending player is so if a Shadow Card targets the defending player or just you that's always referring to the player actually engaged with the Enemy so it doesn't matter if your friend defends with a sentinel character and lastly joining in on an attack using ranged characters does not count as declaring an attack against that enemy so thus it's possible to attack the same enemy multiple times by using ranged characters and readying abilities foreign let's talk about the rules for building your own custom deck which is really what this game is all about rule number one is you can choose up to three heroes from any of the four spheres of influence it's leadership Spirit lore or tactics each sphere has different strengths and weaknesses and kind of specializes in different aspects of the game so you could build a monosphere deck with three heroes from one sphere which is what we did in the last video but this is usually only recommended when playing multiplayer because your teammates can then cover those other weaknesses that you're missing so in Solo games your deck really needs to be well-rounded in all of the aspects of the game in order to win consistently so most decks are going to be dual sphere or tri-sphere to try to provide more balance and give you more options when you're deck building now funny enough you are allowed to choose less than three heroes in your deck but I would definitely not recommend that unless you have a very large card pool because there are some specific cards that you need to make a two hero deck or even a one hero deck function rule number two is that your deck must be a minimum of 50 cards now most players recommend that you ignore this rule if you're only playing with a core set because you just don't have enough cards in your card pool to build really interesting 50 card decks but once you start buying expansions getting up to the 50 card limit is great but there is actually no upper limit so you could theoretically have as many cards in your deck as you want and it might be tempting to go over 50 cards just because you have so many cards you want to use in your deck but it is strongly recommended that you consider 50 cards the maximum as well and that's because the more cards you include in your deck the more watered down it can be and the harder it becomes to find the really key cards the really important cards that you need to make your deck function so it's hard to do but try to stick within that 50 card limit and really you should only be going over that limit if you're playing something that can cycle through your entire deck consistently each game like a dwarf mining deck or a nold or aerostore deck those are the exceptions so generally speaking you should try to keep your deck to about 50 cards rule number three is that you can only include three copies of any card by title okay so for instance there are multiple versions of Gandalf in the game so you can only have up to three total gandalfs in your deck now each player could have three gandalfs in each of their decks but that is the limit now this last one isn't necessarily a rule it's just something that most new players Miss and that is that you can include any cards from any spheres you want in your deck they don't strictly have to match the Spheres of your Heroes now let me explain here so playing cards normally requires a resource match where the you know if you want to play a spirit card you have to have a spirit hero to pay those resources right we talked about that a little bit in the last video so in a dual sphere deck let's say I have leadership and lore I could fill my deck with leadership lore and neutral cards and then I would be able to play all of them normally but I would also be allowed to include Spirit cards if I wanted I couldn't play them normally without a spirit hero and I couldn't even play Zero cost Spirit cards okay even zero cost cards requires fear match but there are several clever ways to get around this okay one way is to add additional spheres to Your Heroes there's cards like calabrian Stone which can add the spirit sphere when played on Aragorn so Aragorn could become both a leadership and a spirit hero allowing him to pay for those Spirit cards but another way could be to use a card Effect that lets me put a card into play this is different than playing a card normally okay when I put a card into play I ignore all costs and all sphere restrictions so for instance I could use sneak attack or stand and fight to put Bjorn into play even if I don't have a tactics hero and for more tips on how to build a good deck I've got a link up here in the corner of the screen to a top 35 tips for new players you should definitely check that out let's talk about all the most common things you'll find on cards this would be keywords abilities symbols and text I'll primarily focus on the core set stuff but there are a few things I want to mention from the revised expansions to this game so before we get into the weeds though we do need to establish a sort of foundation for how to interpret cards in this game and there's really two official rules that lay the foundation for how to interpret cards first is the Golden Rule rule which says if the ability text of a card directly contradicts the rule books the card takes precedent so to put it simply the whole point of a card game like this is that the cards break the rules in some way so even if the card disagrees with the rule book you always do what the card says in fact knowing that cards Break The Rules can sort of help you learn the rules funny enough so like there's a card called Stand Together which lets you declare multiple Defenders so if you know that card exists then you should know that normally you can't do that normally you can only declare one Defender so if a card lets you do something that probably means you can't do that thing normally the last rule for interpreting cards in this game is called the Grim Rule and you gotta love the designers for this one it says if you can't find the answer to a rules question or a timing conflict in the rule books then you resolve the conflict in a way that you perceive to be the worst possible resolution with regards to actually winning the scenario this is supposed to be a hard game so keep it challenging okay now that we have a lens for interpreting cards in this game let's look at the top 18 things you'll find on cards restricted is a keyword that you'll find on some attachments usually the most powerful ones the rule is that each character can only have up to two restricted attachments at a time so blade of gondolin is restricted so you could have up to two of those attached to a single hero but not three you could also have a horn of Gondor and a blade on a hero but if you want to play a third restricted attachment on a character then you'd first have to discard one of these unique okay some cards like Stuart of Gondor are unique shown by this little circle symbol next to the title of the card it means only one of these things exists in Middle Earth so there can only be one Steward of Gondor in play on the table you can put up to three copies in your deck but only one of them can be in play at a time and if one Leaves play or gets destroyed or discarded then you can play another one from your hand to replace it and if in the very rare circumstance that a unique version of a character enters play from the encounter deck like gildor and glorion for example from The Fellowship of the Ring Saga and there's already a copy of that character under a player's control then that player must discard the version that they control because again you can't have two Guild Wars going around traits now all characters and most attachments have traits that are shown right below the name of the card glorifendel here has three traits Noble noldor and Warrior and traits matter because some cards refer to traits in different ways traits don't have rules on their own but like here in this example for Gondor refers to traits it's an event that gives a universal attack boost to all characters but also a defense boost to characters that have the Gondor trait now some cards also give traits to characters like Steward of Gondor gives the Gondor trait and lastly some cards have play restrictions based on traits so sort of numenor says it can only be played on a Dunedin or Gondor hero so let's play an example really quick I attached Steward of Gondor to glorfindel giving him the Gondor trait that means I'm now allowed to play sort of numenor on glorfindel because he's now considered a Gondor hero then during the combat phase I could play for Gondor to boost his attack and defense because he's now a Gondor character now let's say I defend against an enemy and reveal a shadow card that says I have to discard an attachment I control and I choose to discard Steward of Gondor so question now that he's lost the Gondor trait what happens to my sword of numenor and what happens to my defense Boost from for Gondor well it's actually good news for once I get to keep both of these things play restrictions on attachment cards like this one only are checked at the time the attachment enters play so as long as he was a Gondor hero when I played the card initially I don't check for that restriction again and lasting effects created by player cards like this one are only calculated once at the time the ability is triggered and if the game State changes the effect is not recalculated now that's a lasting effect on a player card but lasting effects on encounter cards work a little different but I'll get back to that later responses are optional abilities that can only trigger immediately after the event specified on the card these are pretty easy to understand because you really just read the card and it tells you exactly when you can play it but for Heroes allies and attachments that is everything except event cards so Heroes allies attachments if there's a responsibility on those cards you can only trigger them if those cards are in play not in your hand not in your discard pile so for example Sylvan tracker has a response that can heal Sylvan characters but this only works if Sylvan tracker is in play not in your hand not on the discard pile now there are some exceptions to this though where the card specifically says it will get triggered while the card is not in play Brock Iron Fist is one example of this he triggers while he's in your hand okay but the card tells you that and uh Aaron Lewin Miner for instance his response triggers when he's being discarded from your deck that's those are exceptions the response will tell you so just read the card and do what it says actions are also optional abilities but you can only trigger them during during an action window so whereas responses could potentially happen at any time during the round and can even interrupt certain things from happening actions can't interrupt okay you have to wait until an action window opens up to use them now there are 18 different action windows and around and generally speaking they open up in between most steps in the round but even after years of playing this game I still open up the rules reference to page 20 in my games to verify exactly when I can use certain actions it's not intuitive it's hard to learn so it's just going to take time and repetition to eventually learn where those are now I'm not going to talk about each action window because this is not a strategy guide video okay I'm just explaining the rules here but I've already covered the three most important ones that you need to know about okay that's the special action window during the planning phase the golden action window after staging and the silver action window after revealing and resolving a shadow card so if you understand those three you're off to a really good start and I will add a link in the description below to the best strategy guide for Action Windows if you want to learn more about those there's two last rules that you need to know about actions though so while most action abilities begin with the word action some cards will say things like Combat Action or Quest action this tells you that it's restricted to one specific phase so faint is a Combat Action that can only be played during the combat phase and secret paths is a quest action so you guessed it can only be played during the quest phase and lastly this might be obvious but you always need to resolve each action completely before resolving the next action okay finish one before you start another forced effects as the name implies are not optional these are mandatory effects that you must resolve each time the condition is met so these could trigger multiple times so these are not one and done if there's a force effect in play you have to be aware of it at all times and so this is where sometimes the mental load of the game can get a little bit heavy if some quests they just have a bunch of forced effects on the table so you have to keep track of all these at the same time constant abilities like these ones are always active okay just like forced effects these can be pretty tricky to keep track of in some quests there's a bunch of them that come out all at once so just try to keep on top of those when you see them come out direct damage okay so when a card tells you to deal damage that's called direct damage and it cuts through all defense and goes straight to hit points some cards may also say to assign damage among characters for those effects you can't assign damage Beyond a character's remaining hit points so for this biting wind example let's say you had five questing characters and so you have to assign five damage among your questing characters you wouldn't be able to put all five damage on your wimpy one hit point guy you can only put one damage counter on a one hit point character explored there are lots of card effects that let you place progress tokens on locations while they're still in the staging area so you don't always have to travel to a location to explore it if you have these location control effects to place enough progress tokens to meet the quest points then that location is considered explored even if it's in the staging area so this can let you avoid some nasty travel effects or maybe even benefit from some effects that will trigger when the location gets explored all of that can happen while it's still in the staging area unless the card tells you otherwise sphere granting now some attachments can give Heroes a second resource icon which we mentioned previously some of these are character specific like calibrian Stone only works on Aragorn but it gives him both spheres so it's sort of like Aragorn's resources become multi-colored and so you can spend them to pay for both spirit and and Leadership cards objective cards now several quests have objective cards like allies who assist you or important artifacts Quest cards or campaign cards will often tell you what to do with these like to set them aside or put them into play but sometimes objective cards are shuffled into the encounter deck as well so if you ever reveal an objective card from the encounter deck you simply add it to the staging area like you would normally with an encounter card but you just follow all of the instructions on the objective card when you see it objectives will remain in play unless the game tells you to remove them keywords on encounter cards there are four major keywords you'll find on encounter cards these are doomed surge guarded and victory let's go through each of these real quick the doomed keyword is simple it just forces every player in the game to increase their Threat Level by the number shown the surge keyword forces you to draw an additional encounter card immediately after resolving the staging of this encounter card the guarded keyword is a bit more complicated and it's not very common you're not going to see it in many quests but it is heavily featured in Escape From dogaldur from the corset and it has these three objective cards that have the guarded keyword whenever an objective card with the guarded keyword is revealed even during setup then you reveal the next card from the encounter deck and attach it to that objective card and place them both in the staging area so this encounter card is guarding this objective so you have to deal with this encounter card first before you can claim the objective so how do you do that well if it's an enemy or location that's guarding the objective it's pretty straightforward you just defeat the enemy or explore the location as you would normally and that will free up that objective but you can pull some Shenanigans here and if you're able to force the enemy or location to leave play through a card Effect then that also will free up the objective now if it's a treachery that is guarding the objective then it's even simpler you just resolve the treachery's effects and you discard it as normal but you could also cancel the treachery with a card like test of will to free up that objective card now if in the very rare circumstance that the card you would attach to the guarded objective also has the guarded keyword then you use the next card of the encounter deck to fulfill the original guarded keyword and then you resolve the guarded keyword on that second card so after the attached encounter card gets dealt with then the objective becomes unguarded and remains in the staging area until it is claimed by the players and the objective card itself will always tell you how you can claim it one final note is that the guarding enemies and locations still do contribute their threat strength while they're in the staging area just like normal in the last major keyword you'll find on some encounter cards is the victory keyword it looks pretty plane in the game's first four Cycles but starting with the angmar awaken cycle they kind of made it look a bit fancier with a border around it so after the location is explored or the enemy is defeated with a victory keyword instead of going to the discard pile like normal it's added to an area of play called the victory display which is just an area that's off to the side it's out of play the main thing this does is that it gets it out of the encounter deck so you won't have to deal with that card again during this playthrough but it's also worth this number of victory points if you happen to be keeping score which I'll talk about later okay now we're going to get into some of the more nuanced language that you're going to find on some of these cards revealing an encounter card is not the same as adding it to the staging area or putting it into play or even looking at the card okay these are all different things revealing an encounter card is always worse because you resolve everything on the card when you reveal it that's the when revealed effects the keywords like doomed Surge and guarded all of those happen when the card gets revealed so let's compare some of these effects here the first QUEST card from Journey along the anduin instructs you to reveal encounter cards during setup that's the bad thing that triggers everything on the card but the first QUEST card on Intruders in Chetwood instructs you to add locations to the staging area which means you get to ignore all of the keywords and the when revealed effects during that setup step now similarly there are some cards that say put an enemy into play engaged with you since it doesn't explicitly say to reveal the card it would not trigger any keywords or when reveal effects on that enemy you just put into play also looking at is not the same as revealing a card so henamarth River Song lets you look at the top card of the encounter deck you don't resolve anything on the card you're just taking a peek at it playing a card is the norm horrible thing you do in the planning phase where you pay the resource cost which also requires a sphere match from a hero you control but putting a card into play ignores the resource cost and the sphere match and restrictions or prohibitions regarding the potential of playing that card okay I already mentioned the two corset card that can let you do this sneak attack and stand and fight both amazing cards so you could use this to put an off sphere Ally into play but it also works on cards like Knight of the White Tower this guy has a play restriction that says his resource cost must be paid from a single Hero's resource pool that gets ignored if you put him into play somehow this distinction is also really important to make for quests like escape from dogledor okay because Quest Card 1B says that you can't play more than one Ally per round but you could still put into play as many allies as you want you will see lots of cards in this game that have abilities that trigger when they enter play or play from your hand okay minor the Iron Hills response triggers after he enters play it doesn't matter how he entered play so you could use sneak attack to bring him in and his ability would still trigger but in contrast galadriel's response only triggers when you play her from your hand that's much more specific so sneak attack would not work to trigger galadriel's ability if an ability instructs a player to select among multiple effects an effect that has the potential to change the game state must be selected okay so for example the angmar orc says that you either discard one Ally from play or reveal an encounter card so if you have no allies in play then you must reveal the additional encounter card because you can't choose an effect that can't change the game State some cards have effects that trigger when an enemy engages you like we saw with the forest spider in the last video so what you need to know is that engaging an enemy or being engaged by an enemy is the same thing so it doesn't matter how this Force spider engages you it's going to trigger its effect no matter what so it could engage you during engagement checks or you could choose to engage it during optional engagements or you could even use a card Effect Like Son of arnor to engage the enemy you can't get around that forced effect okay it's always going to trigger as soon as it engages you there are many cards in this game that describe a sort of cost that you need to pay in order to resolve some sort of effect okay and it's always going to be written in a format like this pay X cost to resolve y effect okay that word two is the key that that is what you need to look out for on card effects because that word two always separates the cost from the effect so let's take bereivor as a very simple example her ability says action exhaust bear Vore to choose a player that player draws two cards so the cost is to exhaust barivore the effect is to choose the player to draw two cards there's three rules that you need to know about costs if the cost can't be paid the effect can't happen okay if barevoir is already exhausted then you can't pay the the cost so you wouldn't be able to use her ability you can't pay a cost to exhaust a character while exhausting that character for something else so if you're exhausting barevor to commit her to the quest you can't simultaneously trigger her action using that same exhaust that's like double dipping okay trying to pay one cost to trick or two abilities each ability has to be treated separately with cost paid separately and lastly the cost can't be paid if the resolution of the effect does not have the potential to change the game state okay this is a little funky but let me illustrate this with a little more complex of an example Darren Dingle Warrior and Honor Guard okay Darren Dingle Warrior has an ability that says action deal one damage to Darren Dingle Warrior Two give it plus three defense for this attack there's a cost in the effect you can see honor guard's ability says response exhaust Honor Guard two cancel one point of damage just dealt to a character so you can imagine what many players try to do here as a combo right you trigger Darren diggle Warriors ability to damage him then cancel that damage With Honor Guard and still get the plus three defense boost right sadly no this does not work because you have not truly paid the cost for Daniel Warriors ability since you didn't actually damage him canceling that damage With Honor Guard means that the game state did not actually change so paying the cost of an ability must actually change the game State that's the rule okay that was a lot of information but now you should have a pretty good grasp on the 18 most common things that you'll find on cards in this game and there are so many different kinds of effects that you'll find there are thousands of cards in this game so I'm not going to have time to cover everything out there but I am going to cover a bunch more in the next video in part three and now we're going to end this video by talking about the different ways that you can change how you play the game including my personal favorite way campaign mode [Applause] this is a very difficult game it becomes easier the more cards you have and the more skilled you become at building decks so if you don't have a large card pool yet or if the challenge of the game kind of changes from being fun to frustrating I would strongly encourage you to try out easy mode this is not a baby mode and there's absolutely no shame in playing it it just simply makes the game more fun if you have that limited card pool or maybe you're playing with fun Decks that aren't necessarily optimal to play easy mode you simply take out all of the encounter cards that have a gold border around it and then you add one extra resource to each Hero's resource pool during setup some folks even like doing something in between where you just do one of those two things either taking the resources or taking out the really hard encounter cards there's also a very popular fan made variant called Grace of the Valar I'll post a link to that in the description below but basically it helps ensure that you don't get stuck on one Quest losing again and again and again so it kind of ramps up your benefits each time you lose or how quickly you lose it's really neat very clever I would recommend it and it even offers an alternative way to keep score which actually let's talk about that right now keeping score in the game is completely optional if there if you want to compete with yourself or with your friends or if you just want to see which decks perform better you'll find these score sheets in the back of the learn to play rule book and you could just photocopy these for your own use the way it works is when you win a scenario you first add up the three undesirable elements that's the final Threat Level of each player the threat cost of all defeated Heroes and the number of damage tokens on all surviving Heroes then you subtract any victory points that have been collected usually from cards that are in the victory display and then lastly you add 10 points for each completed round in the game note that when a player is eliminated their Threat Level automatically raises to 50 and all of that player's heroes are defeated so elimination wrecks your score pretty badly and of course with this system low scores are better campaign mode allows you to play a series of quests as one connected campaign it was previously only available in The Saga expansions which followed the stories of the novel but now it's been added to the new revised core set for a three-quest campaign and the dark of merkwood expansion has a two Quest campaign sort of a mini campaign but you can combine these into a five Quest Campaign which is really neat plus each of the cycles that are getting repackaged in the new to box format they're also getting a brand new campaign mode and I think it's a fantastic addition not only does it make the quest more exciting by adding these rewards and consequences to your decisions it smoothes out the difficulty curve of the game it kind of uh gives you some pressure on the easier quest to make them harder but it also tones down the difficulty of the most difficult quests that were just frustrating before now it's really an enjoyable challenge in my opinion especially escape from dolgeldor in the core set that was previously a nearly impossible challenge solo but now they've rebalanced it in campaign mode to actually be an enjoyable challenge in Solo play so there are three brand new elements introduced with campaign mode the first is a campaign log to keep track of everything that happens and help you set up future scenarios in that campaign you can photocopy this from the rulebook or you can just download a copy from the Publisher's website there are campaign cards also that give you additional setup instructions for each Quest and resolution instructions for when you beat the quest and the best part are the new Boon and burden cards that can be earned throughout the campaign these cards provide some weight to what happens and the Strategic decisions that you make so for instance since you might be rewarded with a boon if you overcome a particularly difficult challenge but if you take shortcuts or play it too safe you might earn a burden instead and you keep track of all these Boons and burdens you've earned in the campaign log in a list called The Campaign pool when you set up each Quest you add all the boons and burdens in your campaign pool into the appropriate decks so they might go in the encounter deck or they might go in your player deck there are six new rules for campaign mode Let's go through these real quick you only advance to the next scenario after winning the previous one so there's no penalty for losing you just need to replay the quest again and generally speaking the goal is to play with the same heroes from start to finish and if a hero gets destroyed but you still win the quest and decide not to replay it then you add that hero to the list of fallen heroes in the campaign log after that everyone would receive a plus one starting threat penalty for the rest of the campaign and then you would choose a new hero to replace the Fallen one for the next Quest so there's definitely an incentive to not lose any Heroes during your campaign but if you really want to you could choose to swap out a hero in between quests by voluntarily taking that plus one threat penalty however let's say you're using leadership Aragorn you could choose to swap him with tactics Aragorn without taking the threat penalty so you can freely swap out Heroes with the same name now some Boons and burdens also have the permanent keyword this is kind of like it sounds it's going to be permanently attached to a single character and it can never be removed and it can never transfer to another character so when you earn a permanent card you also record the name of the hero who earned it and during the setup of future scenarios that card must be attached to that hero and permanent cards can never be removed by any player card or encounter card effects for any reason and if that hero gets added to the list of fallen heroes then you also lose those attached permanent cards from the campaign pool now all of the other Boon cards that get added to the player decks are always optional extras okay they don't count against your Dex 50 card minimum so you still need to play with your standard 50 card deck the boons would just be extras on top of that and so you can choose to add them in or not now if you're looking for a harder challenge there is an expert campaign mode where you make damage on Heroes persistent so any damage tokens on Heroes will carry over to every future quest in the campaign but if you want to heal all the damage from one of your Heroes after a quest is over so in between quests you can choose to take a permanent plus one threat penalty to heal all damage from a single hero in the last rule for campaign mode is that each campaign is self-contained so when you finish a campaign things do not normally carry over into your future campaigns unless a card specifically tells you to do that so as of the making of this video there are two campaign cards in the revised core set and in the dark of merkwood expansion that will allow you to carry over certain Boons into your next campaign so I'm not going to spoil what those are but if you do play this combined five Quest mirkwood paths campaign then you can earn the ability to bring up to three specific Boons into your next campaign and that could be the angmar awakened campaign it could be the Saga campaign or any other campaign that comes out now I am convinced that the designers put this feature in to help new players specifically with the angmar awaken campaign because it is notoriously difficult and these Boons really help with that cycle in particular so my advice is if you're going to attempt the angmar awakened campaign with a smaller card pool or maybe you just want to enjoy the story more and you're not as interested in a ruthless challenge then you should definitely definitely start by playing the corset campaign first to earn those Boons to take with you into that campaign I think it's really going to make a better experience for you click here to watch part three when you're ready to learn the more complicated and lesser-known rules for the game you've been watching the game Locker Godspeed foreign

Channel: TheGameLocker

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Length: 55min 42sec (3342 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023