I'm going to teach you how to play The Lord
of the Rings LCG, one of the best solo and cooperative games ever made, but I'm gonna do it
in a way you've probably never seen before. I'm going to strip away all of the complexity by
covering up the details you don't need to see right away and then gradually reveal things to
you one at a time as they become relevant. This is a very complex game but my goal is to make
this the easiest and simplest way to learn the game possible, and by the end of this series you
will have learned everything in both rulebooks. You're watching TheGameLocker, let's begin! We are heroes from Middle Earth working together
to complete quests. Our quest today is to journey through Mirkwood Forest to deliver a message.
Now if you don't know, Mirkwood Forest is teeming with spiders and Orcs from the stronghold of Dol
Guldur, where Sauron himself is secretly gaining his power as the Necromancer. If you and your
friends can complete all of the objectives on these Quest cards while resisting the relentless
onslaught from these encounter cards you win the game. This game is challenging, it's puzzly,
and it really rewards cooperation between the players. This game is also very thematic. Every
quest tells a unique story that you experience not only through the amazing artwork on the
cards and the story text in the campaign book, but through the actual mechanics of the game;
and the variety among all the quests in the game is staggering. Now the most important thing
you need to know about this game is that it is a customizable card game, sort of in the same family
of games as Magic: The Gathering, where before the game even begins you build your own custom deck
to play with, filling it with allies to recruit, attachments to boost your character's abilities,
and one-time events that can turn the tide at just the right moment. Some people love building decks
and some people just don't like how long it takes and would rather just pick up a deck and start
playing right away. And while you can use the suggested decks in the rule book or purchase one
of these Starter Decks that come pre-built, that's really only designed to get you started with with
the game so you can see what a good deck looks like. To get the most out of this game you really
need to learn how to build your own custom decks. Now to me, the deck building process
feels like a puzzle to solve where I need to think through what kinds of cards
and heroes would work well together, and what challenges am I facing in the next
quest that I need to prepare for, oh and what what decks are my teammates bringing so that I can
compliment and synergize with what they're doing? There is a great deal of freedom here that
gives this game so much depth and replayability. This is a game that can be played for decades. But
with that amount of depth comes complexity this is not an easy game to learn or teach. Each round in
the game has seven phases you need to learn and some of those phases have several steps and sub
steps. And on top of all that you have to learn what all the card abilities do. So there's a lot.
But I'm going to simplify this for you by covering up all of the card abilities at first so you can
just focus on learning that round structure first. In this video my plan is to cover about 70 percent
of the rules which is enough to get you started playing your first few solo games. But in the
next video my plan is to cover everything else, including the rules for multiplayer but also all
the card abilities that you're gonna find in the game. So that's the road map! Now I want us to
get started playing a game as soon as possible so I'm only going to explain a few basic concepts
and then I'll teach you the rest as we play. Let's begin! This is the quest deck for Passage
Through Mirkwood which tells you the story of the quest and gives you the objectives you need to
complete. Most of these quest cards are completed by placing progress tokens. Now this particular
quest card has eight Quest Points which means I need to place eight of these progress tokens
to move on to the next quest card. But some of the quest cards will give you something else to
do, like killing a specific enemy for example. Now this quest is also interesting because it
has two of these stage three cards, sort of like a branching path, so each time you play you might
go down a different path. And like I said before, as soon as you finish all of these quest
cards, in this order, you win the game. This is the encounter deck which is full of nasty
enemies, locations, and treacheries that stand in your way, and they fight against you as you try
to complete the quest. These are my heroes. Now these are the main characters that I control and I
can use them to do several things: I can use their willpower to make progress on the quest, their
attack strength to kill enemies, or their defense strength to block against enemy attacks. These are
their hit points which is how much of a beating they can take so Aragorn here can take four
damage and still survive, but if he ever has to take five or more damage then he is destroyed, and
if all of my heroes are destroyed I lose the game. This is my deck, the player deck. During the
game I'll be drawing cards from this deck which contains allies, attachments, and events, and I'll
need to spend resource tokens which my heroes gain each round to play these cards from my hand.
So this ally costs one resource token to play, this attachment costs two, and this event
costs nothing, it's free. All of my cards on the table can be in one of two states: ready,
like this, or exhausted. A ready card is available to be used for something, and when I use it, I
exhaust it so I can't use it again that round. At the end of the round though I do
get to ready all of my cards again. So what this means is that by default I only get
to do one thing with each of my characters each round. So for example I could use Aragorn's
willpower to commit him to the quest but that will exhaust him so I can't use him later to attack or
defend and I could use gloyne's defense strength to block an enemy attack but that will exhaust
him too so I can't use him to attack so choosing how to use each of your characters each round
is one of the main decisions you need to make this is my threat dial this shows my Threat Level
which sort of represents how much danger I'm in or how much Sauron and the forces of evil notice me
if my Threat Level is low like below 30 is pretty good I can sneak past certain enemies without
engaging them but if my Threat Level is high then even the strongest enemies will notice me and
engage me which can be really bad if that happens too early and if my Threat Level ever reaches 50
that's game over I lose the game so let's recap you win if you complete all of the objectives
on the quest cards you lose if your heroes are destroyed or if your Threat Level reaches 50.
so let's set up a game so we can start playing setting up a game is really simple I just need
to build these three decks set by starting Threat Level draw my starting hand of six cards and
then I follow whatever instructions there are on this first QUEST card that's it so let's just
run through each of these real quick first I grab the quest deck that I want to play this one is
for Passage through merkwood and you'll notice that these cards are double-sided with a b side
and an a side so always start with the a side on top with one a at the top going down to 3A at the
bottom and there's two three a cards the order of these doesn't matter there's your quest deck then
I build the encounter deck by shuffling some of these encounter sets together the corset comes
with a bunch of different encounter sets but you don't use all of them in each Quest so you need
to look on the quest card for these symbols here and you find the encounter sets with the matching
symbols so that would be these three here so I'm going to take all these Shuffle these together and
that is my encounter deck for this Quest the rest of these unused encounter sets just go back in
the box now I put my three Heroes on the table and I shuffle my deck I'm just using the basic
leadership starter deck found on page five of the rule book it's one of the best ones for playing
solo and we'll talk more about how to build your own custom deck in the next video now I add up the
threat costs on all of my heroes that's 12 plus 9 plus 8 that's 29 that's going to be my starting
Threat Level that I put on my threat dial and now the fun part I get to draw my starting hand
of six cards now if I don't like this starting hand I am allowed to take one Mulligan which means
I shuffle this hand back into my deck and I draw a new starting hand of six cards but I can only take
one Mulligan so I have to keep this second hand if I do that then the last thing I do is read the
instructions on this Quest Card which tells me to search the encounter deck and add these two cards
to the staging area and I'll explain what that is later then there's some flavor text on the card
that tells the story of the quest and sets the scene I'll let you read that on your own all you
really need to know is that we're trying to get through merkwood Forest after doing everything on
the quest card then you flip it over to the B side and in almost every Quest there's some important
game text you'll need to read here but this is the simplest quest in the game so there's nothing
else here to read except for some more flavor text that's it for the setup now as you're starting out
I also highly recommend you keep a round summary nearby if you're doing the rules reference it's
on page 20 that you'll find this really helpful chart it's the most detailed round summary
because it also shows you where all of the action windows are and I'll talk about that later
if you're using the learn to play book on the very back there's just a very high level summary
which is nice if you just need a quick reminder and then if you buy the dark of merkwood
expansion it comes with two of these little round reference summaries which I find really
handy because I can stick those in a deck box and lastly there are some rules references
you can find on boardgamegeek.com I'll show my favorite one down in the description below
that you can print out okay let's start playing all right the first phase in the round is
the resource phase where I draw one card from the top of my deck and add one
resource token to each of my heroes now each Hero has their own separate resource
pool so don't mix these together in one big pile you'll see why this is important later next
up is the planning phase this is where I get to spend these resource tokens to play cards from my
hand I'm going to play this calabrian Stone which costs two and it's in the purple leadership sphere
which means I can only spend resource tokens from purple leadership Heroes to pay for this card
and conveniently in this deck all three of my heroes are leadership so I can spend any of these
resources in any combination to pay for this card but let's say for example I was playing aeon
from the blue Spirit sphere as one of my heroes I could only use her resources to pay for other
Spirit cards so let's play calabrian Stone I'll spend a resource from glowing and theodrid and
let's read what coloring Stone says attached to a hero attached hero gains to willpower great
okay now the rest of this text won't apply in this game so I'll explain what those abilities do
in the next video so I'm going to attach this to Aragorn and that will boost his will power by two
making him better at questing I can play as many cards from my hand as I want as long as I can pay
for them so I have one more resource on Aragorn but I actually want to save that for later
so for now that's the only card I'm going to play these resources will accumulate each round
so I can save up to buy something bigger later Now we move on to the quest phase where I attempt
to make progress on this Quest Card which as you remember is how I win the game there's three steps
to this phase step one is to commit characters to the quest I choose to exhaust characters to
use their willpower to try to make progress on the quest and also remember we said that when
I exhaust a character like this they are used or spent so I can't use them later for combat and I'm
pretty sure this spider is going to engage me as I'm going to have to hold back some of my heroes
to deal with this spider so I'm not going to commit everyone to the quest I'm just for now I'm
going to commit Aragorn by himself the next step in this phase is called staging where I reveal
cards from the encounter deck and add them to the staging area all right let's pause here to talk
about the staging area real quick we've already got two cards in this area from the quest setup
and every round we're going to be adding more cards in this area represent distant threats
that are far away from me but they're still close enough to be an obstacle and a threat
think of it like this location and this spider are standing between me and my goal so to Quest
successfully I need to get around them so questing is more difficult when these cards are here in the
staging area to represent this in game terms each card in the staging area has a threat strength
which shows me how much of a hindrance or threat these cards are to me think of threat strength
like the opposite of my willpower so in just a bit I'm going to be comparing the willpower
of the characters I committed to the quest to the threat strength on all of these cards in the
staging area and if my willpower is greater than I Quest successfully and I get to make progress
but if the threat strength is greater than my willpower I Quest unsuccessfully and I raise my
Threat Level we'll see how all this works in just a moment but your main takeaway here is that if I
let too many cards build up in this staging area it eventually the combined threat strength will
be so high that it becomes impossible for me to Quest successfully so to win this game I need to
regularly remove these cards from the staging area so like I was saying this is the staging step
where I reveal one encounter card per player so in a Solo game it's just one encounter card and it's
another forest spider yikes so I got two spiders now I'm gonna have to deal with and that's also
going to add two threat strength to the staging area the last step in this phase is to resolve
questing where I compare my total willpower to the total threat strength in the staging area so
first I'm going to add up the willpower on all of my committed characters to the quest which is in
this case just Aragorn he's got two willpower on his own but then another two willpower from his
calabrian Stone attachment for a total of four willpower then I add up all this threat strength
in the staging area that's two plus one plus two that's five so unfortunately my willpower is
less which means I quested unsuccessfully that means I don't get to make any progress on the
quest this time a and instead I need to raise my Threat Level by the difference between those
two numbers so 5 minus four is one that means I raise my Threat by one now that could have been a
lot worse I'm really glad I played that attachment at least that definitely helped that's it for
the quest phase so next up is the travel phase where I get to travel to a location in the staging
area and make it the active location now this will do a few things for me it takes the location out
of the staging area which will reduce that total threat strength up there making it easier for
me to Quest in future rounds it also gives me the opportunity to explore it and discard it for
good locations have Quest points just like Quest cards so if I placed three progress tokens on this
location then I get to explore it and discard it traveling can also be good sometimes because some
locations have beneficial effects that trigger when you travel here take this Old Forest Road
for instance it has an ability that says response after you travel to Old Forest Road the first
player may choose and ready one character they control nice so since I just traveled here I'm
going to ready Aragorn so he's going to be able to help me deal with those spiders the next phase
is called the encounter phase where I may or may not have to engage these enemies in the staging
area I will say that this is a lot more complex in multiplayer games than it is in Solo games so
we'll cover all of those complexities in the next video but there are two steps to this phase first
is optional engagements this is where I'm allowed to choose to engage one enemy in the staging area
I'm going to skip this for now and show that to you in future rounds the second step is engagement
checks so first thing I want to do is look at the engagement costs on these two enemies they have an
engagement cost of 25. I compare that to my Threat Level which is 30. the lower my Threat Level the
better because the more enemies I can avoid but since my Threat Level is greater than or equal
to their engagement costs then I am noticed by these enemies both of them notice me and they
engage me but let's say for example that this dolgeldor Beastmaster we're also in the staging
area he's got an engagement cost of 35 which is greater than my Threat Level so this enemy would
have remained in the staging area during this step he would not have engaged age me a couple more
things to point out here these spiders are not engaged with a particular hero they are just
engaged with me as a player and these spiders are no longer in the staging area right they've
engaged me so that means their threat strength no longer counts against me anymore so questing
in future rounds is going to be a lot easier now unfortunately these Forest spiders have a very
nasty ability that triggers right now it says forced after Force spider engages a player it
gets plus one attack until the end of the round ouch so for this round only they are each going
to have three attack strength instead of two and now we reach the combat phase where I fight
all of the enemies that are engaged with me this is by far the most complicated phase in the game
it has a bunch of steps and sub steps but after doing this enough times it is going to become
second nature it really does get a lot smoother first ideal a shadow card to each enemy I just
take the top card of the encounter deck and deal one to each enemy these shadow cards may add some
additional nasty effect to this enemy's attack but it might also do nothing next I need to defend
each enemy attack now this is important because it's actually different than a lot of other card
games enemies always attack you first in this game it doesn't matter how you engage the enemy
you always defend against all the enemy attacks first and then you get an opportunity to declare
one attack against each enemy that's engaged with you so let's start these defenses step one is to
choose an enemy to resolve their attack I choose this spider to go first the second step is to
declare a Defender I'm going to declare glowing as my Defender which means he is now exhausted it is
possible to declare no defender in which case it's called an undefended attack but I'll explain that
later third step is to resolve the shadow effect so I flip the Shadow Card on this enemy to see
if there's a shadow effect and yes there is check this out shadow effects always sit below this
black divider and have the word Shadow here this one says Shadow defending player must choose an
exhaust one character they control two characters instead if this attack is undefended that is
not good so I guess I'm gonna exhaust theodrid yeah Aragorn is better in this case so the last
step is to determine damage where I calculate how much damage glowing is gonna take this spider
is coming at me with two attack but remember the ability also boosted it by one so it has a total
of three attack glowing only has one defense so I take the spider's attack strength subtract gloin's
defense and that's how much damage tokens get placed on gloine two damage tokens that get placed
on glowing but thankfully there's a little silver lining here glowing has a really cool ability that
triggers right now it says response after glowing suffers damage add one resource to his resource
pool for each point of damage he just suffered so as a little consolation I get to add a couple
resources to his card that's the first offense now let's do the same four steps again to resolve
the next spider's attack choose an enemy this spider declare Defender I'll declare Aragorn
as Defender this time so I'm going to exhaust him resolve the shadow effect let's flip this
over and see if there's anything and there's not there's no black divider and no Shadow word
so everything else on this card is ignored completely then I determine damage so same as the
other guy it's two plus the one on his ability that's three attack minus Aragorn's two defense
equals one damage token on Aragorn now that we've defended against all the enemies the next step
is to attack but there's a big problem here I don't have any more ready characters everyone's
exhausted so no one is able to attack back this is pretty bad because it means that these enemies
are going to stick around and stay engaged with me and they're gonna attack me again next round
so I think what I really need right now are some more allies to help take the heat off of my heroes
so I can attack back and kill these spiders next time that ends the combat phase so now I discard
all remaining Shadow cards on the table the last phase in the round is the refresh phase where I
get to ready all of my characters and I increase my Threat Level by one and that's the end of
round one now I know that was a lot of steps we just went through okay but I promise you the
more you play this game the smoother and easier all of these steps become I'm going to pick up
the pace a little bit here as we play round two foreign we start a new round with the resource phase
where I add one resource to each of my heroes resource pools and I draw one card from the top
of my deck and by the way there is no hand size limit in this game so I'm just going to keep
drawing one card every round no matter what next in the planning phase I'm going to play some
allies on the table to help me kill these spiders the first Ally is Silver Load Archer this is a
three cost one willpower two attack zero defense one hit point Ally this guy's really squishy I'm
probably not going to use him to defend but he's got decent attack and he also has this keyword
called ranged this is something that's only used in multiplayer games so I'm going to explain
what this does in the next video the next Ally is guard the Citadel this is a two cost a little
bit cheaper one willpower one attack strength zero defense two hit point Ally you can absorb a
little more damage but he's flexible I can use him for questing or attacking and he has no special
ability on his card so he's just a nice basic Ally so first I'll play the Silver Load Archer for
three resources let's spin those from glowing's resource pool and then I'll play the guard of the
Citadel for two resources let's spend that from theodrid and one from Aragorn and one good thing
to know is that there's no limit to the number of allies I can have on the table if I can pay for
them I can play as many as I want now allies in this game work very much like Heroes they can do
all the same things that Heroes can they can Quest attack or defend the main difference here is that
they don't gain resources every round like a hero does and some card effects like this calabrian
Stone said attached to a hero so I would not have been able to attach calibrian Stone to an ally but
apart from that you can think of them as sort of like mini Heroes next is the quest phase and as
always I start by choosing which characters to commit to the quest and this is a pretty different
situation the last time though because last time the staging area had a bunch of cars in it and
now it's empty but I got two spiders that are engaged with me trying to kill me so I kind of
want to just focus all my attention on combat if I can and I don't really care so much about making
progress on the quest yet but it's at this point that many new players make a big mistake so don't
miss this you can never skip the quest phase even if I would just rather focus on combat for a round
I always reveal encounter cards during the staging step and I always compare the threat strength to
my willpower so if I don't commit any characters to the quest my willpower would be zero compared
to that threat strength of what's coming up I will probably be forced to raise my Threat Level again
which is super bad so it's usually a good idea to commit at least one character to the quest to keep
my Threat Level down Aragorn still has the best willpower right now so let's quest with him again
but this time I'm going to trigger his ability which is perfect in a situation like this first
of all Aragorn has a keyword called Sentinel just ignore this for now this is a multiplayer only
thing so I'll explain what that does in the next video but his main ability says response after
Aragorn commits to a quest spend one resource from his resource pool to ready him this is a great
ability so he's going to be committed to the quest but I get to ready him for combat just by spending
one of his resources responsibilities like this one are always optional I could choose not to use
it and I didn't use it last round so that I could save that resource to pay for more allies but this
round I think I definitely need him to be ready so Aragorn is committed to the quest he's ready and
I know some of you are going to ask this and the answer is no I can't commit Aragorn a second time
to the quest to add his willpower again you can only commit characters to the quest one time now
let's do the staging step and see which card we get and it is a location this is the great Forest
web it has two threat strengths so that'll be added to the staging area and the last step is to
resolve the quest just like last time by comparing my willpower to the threat strength and remember
because this is super important only the threat strength in the staging area counts I ignore the
threat strength on the active location and on all the enemies that are engaged with me so this
time I have four willpower compared to two threat strength in the staging area which means I quested
successfully that means I get to place progress tokens on the quest equal to the difference
between these two numbers so four willpower minus two threats rank equals two progress tokens now if
there were no active location here these progress tokens would go directly on the quest card but
if there's an active location progress always goes through the active location to get to the
quest so these progress have to be placed on the ACT of location and this location has three Quest
points and I made two progress just one short of the quest point total so I need to make one more
progress hopefully next round in order to explore this location and discard it now the worst part
about not clearing the active location is that now I can't travel to this other location there
can only ever be one active location at a time so I need to explore this active location first
before I can travel here I'm not allowed to just swap these locations so because we can't travel
anywhere I skip the travel phase and since there's no enemies in the staging area I get to skip
the encounter phase as well and now since I have enemies engaged with me we do the combat phase
these spiders are going to keep attacking me over and over until I get rid of them so the first step
is to deal a shadow card to each enemy and then we resolve enemy attacks I choose which spider I
want to go first let's deal with this one one first I'm going to declare glowing as my Defender
for this attack this is kind of risky here because gloyne already has two damage and he only has one
defense so if this Shadow Card boosts the attack on this spider then glowing is dead so I'm hoping
for no Shadow effect let's resolve it and see if there's a shadow effect and thankfully there's not
okay no Shadow effect so we just have two attack strength on this spider remember this ability down
here only triggered or it only lasted during the first round it engaged me so this ability doesn't
count anymore it just has two attack strength minus glowing one defense equals one damage token
on gloin and now his ability triggers again which means I get to add one resource to his resource
pool because I took one damage and that's it for the first spider attack now let's resolve the next
spider's attack um I'm gonna choose Aragorn as my Defender for this one let's reveal the shadow card
and see if there's an effect and yeah yes there is it says attacking enemy gets plus one attack plus
three attack instead if this attack is undefended that's a bummer so it gets plus one attack that
means it's a total of three attack minus two defense on Aragorn equals one damage token being
placed on everyone that's it for resolving enemy attacks now I get to declare one attack against
each enemy engage with me and thankfully unlike last round I have some ready characters that
I can use to attack so the first step in an attack is to declare the target of the attack and
declare attackers so I'm going to choose to fight this spider doesn't really matter they're both
the same enemy and now I get to declare as many attackers as I want against that enemy that's
different than how defending Works remember I'm only allowed to declare one Defender but when
I attack I can gang up on an enemy and declare multiple attackers so I'm going to exhaust all
three of these characters and declare them all as a hackers against this spider the next step is
to determine attack strength that's just adding up all the attack strength here that's two plus two
plus one equals five the last step is to determine damage now this spider has one defense so five
attack minus one defense equals four damage and that's enough to kill the first spider so
I put the spider in the discard pile along with its shadow card and I can choose the order in
which I discard these cards I mentioned this because in certain quests like some of them in the
angmar awaken cycle the order of the discard pile matters so it's important to learn these kinds of
details now but for most quests it really doesn't matter that's it for that attack now I am allowed
to declare one attack against this spider but I'm all out of characters everyone's exhausted so
that's the end of the combat phase now I discard all remaining Shadow cards from enemies the last
phase is the refresh phase where I ready all of my cards again and then I raise my Threat Level by
one up to 32. now don't leave yet because there's still lots of rules I need to cover including one
of the most important things for new players to learn and that is action windows but now that
we've finished two rounds hopefully things are starting to click for you so I'm going to start
playing through these spaces a little faster now thank you I add one resource to each Hero's
resource pool and I draw one card from the top of my deck I've got four resources and I'm gonna
spend two of them to play Steward of Gondor this is a two cost attachment that says attached to a
hero action exhaust Steward of Gondor to add two resources to the attached Heroes resource pool
now just ignore the other text for now as it won't matter in this game so this is something
new though that we haven't seen yet this is an action ability which is an optional ability
that can be played during any action window and the concept of action Windows is one of the
most difficult topics to learn in the game so I'm going to be spending a whole section in the
next video to explain this in detail but for now all you need to know is that during this planning
phase right now there is a special action window that allows me to use any action abilities like
this that I want before or after I play cards so I'm going to attach this to Aragorn and I'm
going to use this ability right now by exhausting the card which will let me add two resources to
Aragorn's resource pool and of course let's pay for the card uh let's use glowing's two resources
to do that and then I'm going to spend one resource to play snowboard Scout who has a really
Nifty responsibility that says after snowborne scout enters play choose a location Place one
progress token on that location great so I'm gonna play snowboard Scout over here I'm gonna spend one
resource from Theo Jersey resource pool and then I can place a progress token on this location in the
staging area or the active location since the one up here needs two progress tokens to explore it
I'm gonna place it on the Old Forest Road which will actually explore it now because I have three
progress tokens and it only needed three from the quest points so I'm gonna get to place that in
the discard pile that's a relief so now I should be able to travel to this other location this
round I'm done playing cards now so let's Quest but first here's an important rule you need to
know when you commit characters to the quest you commit them all simultaneously you don't commit
them one at a time and that's important for what I'm about to show you I'm going to commit Aragorn
and theodrid this time and if you remember Aragorn has an ability that triggers right now but so does
theodrit so let's take a look at these together Aragorn's ability says response after Aragorn
commits to a quest and theodrids also says response after theodroid commits to a quest since
we always commit characters simultaneously their abilities also trigger simultaneously and when two
abilities trigger at the same time I get to decide the order in which they resolve so we already
know Aragorn's ability lets me spend a resource to ready him but theodre's ability says choose a
hero committed to that Quest add one resource to that Hero's resource pool so this actually
creates a really neat combo I can use Theo drizzability first to give Aragorn a resource then
use Aragorn's ability to spend that same resource to ready him in the end both Heroes get committed
to the quest but Aragorn readies essentially for free but just remember like we said before
responsibilities are always optional so I could have just used theodrid's ability without
using aragorns if I wanted to actually gain a resource to use later so I have committed them
both to the quest I've used theodroid's ability to add a resource to Aragorn's pool and then I'm
going to spend that resource to ready Aragorn but he's still committed to the quest now let's do the
staging step and see what card we get in yuck it's a double door Beastmaster he's got two threat
strength so he's gonna be added to the staging area up here I've got a total of five willpower
from my two committed characters there's four threat strength in the staging area which means
I quested successfully and I get to make progress based on the difference between these two numbers
so I make one progress on the quest and this time there's no active location in the way so I get
to place this progress directly on the quest card yay only seven more to go it it's actually fine
I'm I'm not in a rush to finish this Quest stage my main goal right now is just to build up my
board state with allies and attachments so as long as I'm not questing unsuccessfully I'm happy
once I've got more cards on the table I'll focus more on the questing now in the travel phase
I can travel to this location but before we do let's take a look at this ability text on the
location this is a travel cost it's something that triggers as soon as I travel there and it's
a nasty one it says each player must exhaust one hero they control to travel here this cost must
be paid if I want to travel there if I can't pay the cost I can't travel there now thankfully
I do have a couple of ready Heroes right here so I'm gonna exhaust gloin and travel to the
great Forest web making it the active location now it's the engagement phase and remember in the
first step I could choose to optionally engage one enemy if I want but right now I'd prefer not to
so I can just focus on killing this spider first for engagement checks let's check my Threat Level
it's at 32 right now and that is lower than all of the enemies in the staging area double door
Beastmaster has a 35 engagement cost so since I'm lower I sneak past him without being noticed
so he does not engage me next is the combat phase where I deal a shadow card to each enemy engage
with me and I'm going to defend this guy with my snowborne Scout okay this guy is super super wimpy
I know he's going to die that's actually the point when you defend with a really weak Ally like this
it's called chump blocking and it's an extremely useful strategy for saving your more powerful
characters for other things so now I resolve the shadow effect let's flip it over and see okay yes
there is a shadow effect it says attacking enemy gets plus one attack plus three attack instead
if this attack is undefended alright so he gets a plus one attack I don't really care about that
at all because I already expected him to die so it's a two attack plus one from the shadow effect
that's three attack strength minus one defense on my snowborne Scout equals two damage tokens
and that is enough to kill him because that's more than his hit points so I get to discard my
snowborne Scout which again it's fine in fact it's even a good thing right now because now I get to
play a card for my hand called Valiant sacrifice this is a one cost event it's a response after
an ally card Leaves play which it just did that card's controller draws two cards very nice so
this costs one so I'm going to spend it from Aragorn's resource pool so now I'm going to draw
these from the top of my deck now let's attack the spider with Aragorn and the Silver Load Archer
that's a total of five attack with one defense that's four damage which is enough to kill this
spider so I get to discard the shadow card and the enemy and I choose the order I discard those
in and last is the refresh phase where I refresh all of my cards and I raise my Threat Level
by one up to 32. next I'm going to show you one of the most powerful card combos in the entire
game and let's pick up the pace a little bit more I add one resource to each of my heroes resource
pools and draw one card and I'll trigger Steward of Gondor to add two more resources to Aragorn's
resource pool I'll play another snowborne Scout from my hand and I'll spend that from Aragorn's
resource pool and for the snowborne Scout's response ability I'm going to place the progress
here on the active location I'm going to commit Aragorn and theodrid to the quest just like last
time I'm going to trigger theodrude's ability first to add the resource to Aragorn's pool and
then I'll trigger Aragorn's responsibility to spend that resource to ready him just like last
time I love that combo let's do the staging step and reveal an encounter card oh and this is a
really nasty one this is caught in a web it says when revealed the player with the highest Threat
Level attaches this card to one of their Heroes counts as a condition attachment with the text
attached hero does not ready during the refresh phase unless you pay two resources from that
Hero's pool so this is a doozy but basically my hero gets caught in a web so they can't ready
as much unless I spend resources to do it so this is a really ugly treachery I'm gonna end up
attaching this to glowing here because my other Heroes I really need them to be able to ready
more I've got five total willpower against two threat strength in the staging area which means I
Quest successfully and I place three progress now I've got three progress to place it goes through
the active location as always so I'm going to put one progress here which explores the great Forest
web and then I'm going to place the remaining two progress tokens directly on the quest card so
that's really important to remember any excess progress tokens always overflow to the quest card
there's no locations in the staging area to travel to so we skip this travel phase I'm going to
choose to engage this doggledore Beastmaster now during the optional engagement step because
I think I'm ready to deal with it now so we enter the combat phase I'm going to deal a shadow card
to him and now let me show you this guy's ability it says forced when dogledor Beastmaster attacks
deal it one additional Shadow card that is pretty nasty so I'm not sure I want to risk defending
with my heroes here and I'd like to save my snowborne Scout later in case there's a nastier
enemy so instead I'm gonna bring in a different Ally this isn't the planing phase so I can't just
play another Ally normally but there is an action window right now so I can play sneak attack this
card is amazing it says action put one Ally card into play from your hand at the end of the phase
if that Ally is still in play return it to your hand this is a staple card in the leadership
sphere it cost me one resource so I'm going to spend one resource from Aragorn's resource
pool and really here I want to bring in the most powerful Ally I can because the more powerful
the Ally the better this effect gets and there's no Ally more powerful than Gandalf he costs five
resources to play normally he is neutral which is interesting he's not associated with a particular
sphere so you can spend any Hero's resources to pay for him normally he has amazing stats an
incredible ability that lets me choose one of three effects whenever he enters play it says
response after Gandalf enters play choose one draw three cards deal four damage to one enemy in play
uh by the way that's direct damage that bypasses the enemy's defense that just goes straight to
the enemy's hit points or reduce your Threat by five and lastly if he's still in play at the end
of the round I discard Gandalf from play so he comes in he does some amazing stuff and then he
leaves that sounds about right for catnulf now playing him with sneak attack just feels like
cheating though because you get to put him into play for only one resource instead of five during
any action when know you want and he doesn't get discarded because the effect on sneak attack
that puts him back into your hand at the end of the phase that triggers first so I'll still have
Gandalf in my hand to play him normally in a later round this combo with sneak attack and Gandalf
is still one of the strongest card combos in the entire game okay so now that I've put Gandalf into
play I get to choose one of his cool three enters play abilities I'm going to choose the one that
lets me reduce my Threat by five so I'm gonna go all the way down to 28 threat just like that okay
so I'm going to choose to defend this enemy attack with Gandalf and now we resolve the shadow cards
let's see the first one it says defending player must choose and discard one attachment they
control okay I know what you're thinking right just discard the spiderweb on glowing right that's
an attachment well sadly I can't do that because I don't control attachments that come from the
encounter deck it's controlled by the encounter deck so I have to discard one of these attachments
on Aragorn so I think right now I could use the resources more so bye bye calabrian Stone and
the other Shadow effect is plus one attack all right so it's a four attack minus four defense on
Gandalf means Gandalf takes zero damage and now I get to attack back so I'm gonna exhaust Aragorn
My Silver Load Archer and my guard of the Citadel that's a total of six attack minus one defense on
the double door Beastmaster equals five damage and that is Enough To Kill The Beastmaster so let's
put all those in the discard pile and now Gandalf is going to return to my hand now that we're at
the end of the combat phase that was the effect on sneak attack and now in the refresh phase I
ready all of my cards and I raise my Threat Level by one up to 29. in the next round I'm going
to show you one of the most powerful allies in the game and the number one most important action
window that every new player needs to know about I add one resource to each Hero's resource pool
and draw one card from my deck and I'll trigger Steward of Gondor as normal to add two more
resources to Aragorn I'm gonna play an amazing Ally pharamir he's got an action ability that
says action exhaust pharamir to choose a player each character controlled by that player gets plus
one willpower until the end of the phase this can give me an incredible boost to my willpower and
it's an action meaning I can play this during any action window but there's one particular action
window that's the best time to use this I'll show you that in a bit so he caused four resources to
play I'm gonna spend two of them from glowing uh just as a general tip you should usually spend
resources from the heroes you think are most likely to die first since glowing already has
three damage I'm gonna spend his first and then I'll spend the other two from Aragorn and now that
I've got a better board State here with plenty of allies I'm gonna Quest a little bit harder
this time to try to clear out this Quest stage so let's commit both Aragorn and Theodor just like
last time and I'm going to use their abilities to add the resource to Aragorn spend that resource
to ready him and I'll also commit both the guard and the archer in the staging step we get the
double door Orcs all right they have an ability that says when revealed the first player chooses
one character currently committed to the quest and deal two damage to that character dang so I
think I'm gonna put the damage on the guard of the Citadel which is gonna kill him but I'd rather
keep my other characters healthy and he's sort of the least useful character that's committed to the
quest right now that does mean though that I lose the willpower that he was contributing so I have
one less willpower than I did before and now after the staging step but before we resolve the quest
there's an action window here where I can play faramir's action ability to boost my willpower
some folks call this the golden action window because it is so useful to be able to adjust your
willpower here after I've seen everything that's come out of the income counter deck there are
lots of actions that are really good to use in this action window and thermirs is one of the best
ones to use here so let's exhaust pharamir and I'm going to give a plus one willpower boost to these
three characters that's one two three four five six seven willpower minus two threat strength
is five progress tokens and that is just enough to clear this QUEST card as soon as this happens
we immediately go to the next Quest stage before doing anything else even if you were to clear the
quest in a different phase using a card ability you still immediately go on to the next Quest
stage now this one just has some flavor text and so we immediately flip it over and there we go it
says forced when you defeat this stage proceed to one of the two a chosen path stages at random
okay so that's only after we finish this Quest stage we skip the travel phase because there's no
locations and I'm going to engage these dolgeldor Orcs because they have a 10 engagement costs and
my Threat Level is higher than that then we start the combat phase I deal a shadow card and I want
to kill this guy as soon as he attacks so Aragorn has the three attack strength that I need so I
should probably defend with someone else glowing would die so I don't want to lose a hero if I can
help it since then I would lose all the resources that he's gaining me each round I could chump
block with the snowborne Scout but I might want to save him for a bigger enemy later I might
also want to take this as an undefended attack but let's pause really quick to explain what that
is taking an undefended attack means I don't need to exhaust any characters which is great I'd have
more characters available to attack with but then I take the full force of the enemy's attack as
direct damage to one of my heroes that means it bypasses my Hero's defense and goes straight
to their hit points sometimes you really need to take risks like this to keep ahead of the
encounter deck but this quest in particular can really punish you for taking undefended attacks
you've already seen some of these shadow effects that punish you for taking attacks undefended so
it's always safer to declare a Defender if you can alright I think the best choice here is to
declare my snowborne Scout as the defender I'm going to do a chump block let's resolve the shadow
effect and see what it is oh no oh this this is probably the worst Shadow effect in this entire
deck this is awful it's a shadow deal one damage to each character the defending player controls
two damage instead if this attack is undefended oh this is awful so this is going to put one damage
on everybody so that's actually gonna kill gloin and it's gonna kill my Silver Load Archer and
my snowborne Scout and put a damage on Fair bear alright at least I'm glad that I spent that
resource token on glowing so I don't lose the resources that were on him but when a hero dies
they go in my discard pile and any attachments that were on them go to their respective discard
piles too and before we go on to do the rest of this let me just first trigger this ability
from this card in my hand this is Brock Iron Fist he's not a great card but at least it's a
little consolation in this case it worked out well for me here it says response after a dwarf
hero you control Leaves play which glowing just died so yes that happened you Brock iron fist into
play from your hand and put into play means that I don't pay that resource cost and my Silver Load
Archer also dies so let's put him in my discard pile and probably the worst thing about this
Shadow effect is that I just lost my defending character so what that means is that since I no
longer have a declared Defender this now counts as an undefended attack that's right so if a Shadow
Card kills or removes your Defender somehow then the attack is considered undefended so this is a
two attack strength undefended attack which means I need to place these two damage tokens directly
on one of my heroes and the choice is obvious here because two damage would kill Aragorn so it's
gonna go on theodrid all right well after all of that now I get to declare attackers so let's
kill this guy I'm gonna exhaust Aragorn which is three damage to zero defense that's enough to
kill the orc and now it's the refresh phase so I'm gonna ready all of my cards again and raise
my Threat Level by one up to 31. now before we head into the final round I just want to say
thank you for watching this far in if you like this kind of content please consider subscribing
to see more and you can do me a huge favor by hitting the like button so more people can find
this video now let's finish this Quest foreign to each hero Brock is not a hero so he doesn't
get a resource I'll trigger Stewart of Gondor on Aragorn to add two extra resources to his pool and
draw one card from my deck I'm gonna play gandell from my hand for five resources let's spend all
those from Aragorn's resource pool now I'm going to choose the option on Gandalf that lets me draw
three cards when he enters play so let's see what we got here all right I've got another copy of
Brock Iron Fist which is unfortunate because he is a unique character which means there can only be
one copy of him on the table at a time so I I can have multiple copies in my deck but since I can
only play one of them this is just a dead card now in my hand I also got another Gandalf which again
is sort of a dead card right now but there can only be one copy of him on the table so I can't
play him right now oh and this is a great card to end the quest with this is a five caused event
Grim resolve it says action ready all character cards in play that's all heroes and all allies
that we get to ready in any action window I'll show you that in just a bit I'm going to commit
every one of my characters to the quest except for faramir and I'm going to trigger theodrid's
ability to add one resource to Aragorn's pool but I'm not going to trigger Aragorn's ability
you'll see why in just a minute now after this step of committing characters there is an action
window before I do the staging step so I'm going to use faramir's action right now in this window
to boost everybody's willpower by one and then I'm also going to use the actionability on Grim
resolve to ready all of my character cards in play that costs five resources so I'm gonna spend three
from Aragorn and two from theodrid and all of my characters get to ready back up again now the
reason I'm playing Grim resolve now before the staging is because there are some encounter cards
that punish you for having exhausted characters and speak of the devil the card that we got
is necromancer's reach it says when revealed deal one damage to each exhausted character and
this now totally whiffs because I don't have any exhausted characters so there's no damage dealt
I just get to discard that and there's one other important Point here that I want to make and
that's that when revealed effects like this one are resolved immediately there's no time to react
to something like this so let's say for instance that I had not played Grim resolve to ready all
my characters and let's say everyone was still exhausted after I reveal this necromancer's reach
card I could not interrupt it to play Grim resolve to prevent the damage I'd have to resolve the when
revealed effect completely first and then after staging is over there's another action window
where I could play actions again so that's why it's really important to consider when you play
your actions and which action Windows you use it's a complicated thing but it matters and one last
note is that you never put treachery cards in the staging area you always just resolve the effects
and then discard it after alright so as of this moment I have 13 willpower and there's zero threat
strength in the staging area so I would get to place 13 progress tokens on this Quest Card which
is just completely Overkill and I could have even used faramir's ability a second time right now
to get an extra four willpower since there's no limit to how many times you can use his ability
it's only limited by the number of times I can ready faramir and I know you'd be asking this
too and the answer is no the Overflow program address that would be 13 minus 2 is 11. those 11
progress tokens are just lost they don't overflow onto the next QUEST card I have to clear off
everything before I reveal the next QUEST card and now is when we do the forest effect on this
QUEST card it says proceed to one of the two a chosen path stages at random all right so that's
going to be one of these two cards I'm going to shuffle these up and let's see which one we get
all right it's don't leave the path this has a winner revealed effect it says when revealed each
player must search the encounter deck and discard pile for one Spider card of their choice and add
it to the staging area alright but this other text is really important it says the players must find
and defeat one ungolian spot to win this game and on goliant spawn is a really big nasty spider
so I can search for this card now so that I can defeat it and win the Quest right away so I'm
going to do that I'm just going to fetch this card right now so we can work on defeating this
Quest now this is a Nuance that we're going to touch on in the next video but it doesn't say to
reveal the card it says to search for the card and add it to the staging area so this when revealed
effect on angolian spawn actually doesn't happen right now adding a card to the staging area does
not trigger the when revealed effects on the card okay so right now there's no travel phase
because there's no location I'm going to engage this spider so I can fight it it's the
combat phase I'm going to deal a shadow card and let's declare Gandalf as my Defender now as
soon as I declare a Defender there's an action window where I am going to play a card for
my hand called ever Vigilant this is a one cost event simply says action choose and ready
one Ally card so I'll spend one resource from theodrid to ready Gandalf now why would I ready
Gandalf now why not just wait until the attack is resolved well in some quests these shadow
cards will punish you for having an exhausted Defender so it's always best to kind of just
get in the habit of readying your Defenders if you're able to right before you reveal the
shadow effect that'll help protect you against some of those nasty things okay let's resolve the
shadow effect and it is nothing so we determine damage that's five attack minus four defense on
Gandalf that's one damage on Gandalf and now we get to attack this spider I'm going to declare
everybody as an attacker that's four plus one plus two plus two plus three that's 12 attack
minus two defense on the spider is 10 damage and that is enough to kill angolian spawn and that's
the last objective on this QUEST card there are no Quest points so that means we have completed
Passage through murkwood click here to watch part two where I'll teach you everything else you
need to know to play this game let me know if you have any rules questions down in the comments
and you've been watching the game Locker Godspeed foreign
