by woodshow
It seems like most of the "balance" complaints fall along the lines of "if something good happens, it's too easy... if something bad happens, it's too hard." I suppose there's some truth to the idea that the luck of the draw comes into play, but it also seems like you can make decisions that mitigate the bad while increasing likelihood of the good.My primary partner is my 12 year old son. Whenever we lose a game, we take what we've learned about the scenario and tweak our decks, sometimes even replacing heroes. We then go after the quest again. To us, that's what makes it fun. We build decks (usually more tweaking than building) to better handle the "bad" stuff.
We just finished playing Red Horn Gate, in which we were down 3 heroes!! Forest Snares were holding two enemies at bay, while we brought allies into play to take the hits from the remaining enemies. Realizing we could only hold out for another round (or maybe two), we finally drew a location that would give us the Victory Points we needed to win. My son was able to get Faramir into play, and I quested with all 5 of my characters. It was an all out, last ditch attempt to quest with enough Willpower to win the game, but would have resulted in certain doom had it not been enough. We won with Willpower to spare!! We were both hootin' and hollerin' and high fivin' at our snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
You could argue that Faramir was the good draw that gave us the victory, or you could argue that all those nasty enemies cutting down our heroes was the bad draw that would nearly handed us defeat. But win or lose, it was fun. And that's what matters.