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After a short hiatus, Dan, Derek, Ian, and Matthew are back with a look at the now-completed Ring-maker Cycle as well as this whole year in The Lord of the Rings the card game.
- Welcome/Intro
- Ring-maker Cycle Expectations
- Overall Thoughts on the Cycle
- Mechanics, like Time
- Story
- Scaling difficulties
- Favorite & Least Favorite Quests
- Favorite Player Cards
- Highlights & Lowlights of this year in LOTR gaming
- Thoughts on the responsibilities of community contributors
- Get in touch!
- E-mail: thegreycompanypodcast@gmail.com
- Twitter: @thegreyco
- Website: https://greycompanypodcast.com/
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thegreycompanypodcast
- Community Calendar: https://greycompanypodcast.com/community-calendar/
- Become our Patron: http://patreon.com/greyco/
This episode brought to you by all of our Patrons! A special thanks to these newcomers:
- Stephane
- Brian
- Peter
- Ken
- Moritz
- David
- Mike B
- Stephen R
Thank you!
Opening music from The Lord of the Rings film soundtrack. Bumper music, as always, by Portugal. The Man
Grey Company Podcast 
Pingback: Poll Results: Most wanted from Ring-maker Cycle | Hall of Beorn
So, finally an episode and something to reply to!
First, I was scared as hell! “thegreycompanypodcast.wordpress.com doens’t exist. Do you want to register this wordpress?” WHAT?! That must be a bug.. Again… What about leaving ‘the’ out. Same response. Okay, this is scary. Google is the answer. Aha, I fear of what it has become. A .com site. That’s always cool and my hope is that the Patreon succes has ledt to this! 🙂
Then secondly, a great episode! Many times I just wanted to participate in the cool discussions about the cards and quests. Weakest card: Well… We all know who that is. Hahahahaha lol.
But the last part I found a bit disturbing. Dan begs us (If we, consumers, are to be begged, we consumers should be really! ashamed.), talking about burnouts, what? Is it really that bad? I have caught myself once for posting a comment on one of your youtube videos about a mistake you made, but the reason why was that I just couldn’t resist it. I forgot of course that the video was already made and my comment wouldn’t make any differnce. What I am trying to say is that I would really want you to win and I thought my comment would have helped. (stupid of course) Maybe that is an urge for more people who post comments about mistakes. As with Mitch his Q&A video and now this last bit, I get sad. Can I see what we are becoming? No, but you shouldn’t excuse for having a live and spending your free time into podcast and video episodes. As I said above, I felt ashamed for Dan to beg us to think about what’s going on in their lives and the timeconstraint that you are on. Not that Dan said that, and I think it is good to explain what’s going on in your lives/heads, but that it has come so far. Like we customers have become Thorin in some strange way.
Probably the above text is not really readable, but I hope I never have made you feel attacked or offended. I wish you the best and hope you are continuing down the road that you are travelling on, because I LOVE your content. I am new member of this community and game (June this year) and was thrilled to see that the game wasn’t dead. The opposite was true: TFTC, HallofBeorn, MasterofLore, COTR and this podcast! Awesome!
Your episodes about the strategy and metagame are great! I wish you had the time to make more episodes. 🙂 Also, the new videos are great! The first time with Derek on Twitch (sadly I was to late), I had fun chatting with him. Because that is where all of this may be coming from. In my point of view, you are like celebrities. And awesome, generous, fun, sympathetic guys.
Anyway, I have rattled way to long and still I hope you won’t TLDR (To Long Didn;t Read) this.
Happy New Year in advance!
Thanks as always for your comments, Diedert. I wonder if your understanding of what Dan said seems more extreme since you’re not a native speaker of American English? Dan didn’t mean ‘beg’ in a literal sense. We aren’t groveling. I believe he was just pleading for understanding.
Also, I think our community is relatively mild in comparison to some others. At a certain point we were speaking very generally about how rude folks can be in the internet. I don’t know that anyone has been outright, intentionally rude to us. They just maybe act in a way that’s more serious than I think is appropriate without taking into account certain factors that can effect our videos.
But I appreciate the encouragement. We love recording and playing and wish we could do it more often as well.
Well, that may be true, but I’m still sticking with my statement that you shouldn’t have to defend yourself just for making content. Not everybody is sacrificing their free time to make content and spent their money. Kinda made me sad I guess. But anyways, thanks for the reply.
Secret talk here: I may contact you, Derek, about writing somewhere in the near future. 🙂
I know Matthew said that it is impossible to lose Encounter at Amon Din. Well, it’s hard to admit it, but I lost it two-handed. Yep. I threated out. In fact, there were five dead villagers by round three, Beregond died, Hirluin’s army of Outlanders failed him, and Spirit Pippin was basically dead weight. It took nine rounds to fail. The very next day, I ditched Hirluin and Mirlonde (I like to win a quest with the new hero, so that’s why I kept Pippin. The only time I have broken that rule was Blood of Gondor), brought in Eowyn and Beravor, and won. By a lot.
Anyways, great episode, as always! Haven’t got Antlered Crown yet (trying to catch up on nightmares), but I have to agree with Ian on favorite/least favorties quests!
I’ve lost that one as well. No worries! 🙂
-Derek
Good to know that I’m not the only one. But now I smash it every single time. I think I even did a play through with no dead villagers. Can’t wait to hear MAtthew’s opinion on Lore! 🙂 (My personal favorite sphere-go Wingfoot!).
I agree 100% with you guys on the solo/multiplayer difficulty. A great example of this is Voice of Isengard: not that hard in solo, but even with two players, it becomes brutal. a friend and I once lost five times subsequently to “To Catch an Orc” because location after location churned out of the encounter deck. I’ve had similar location-lock situations in Into Fangorn as well. The whole solo/multiplayer issue took some of the fun out of the Ring-maker cycle for me, and I think the designers could balance that a little better. All in all, though, 2014 was a great year for LOTR:LCG and 2015 can only bring greater adventures (and more awesome podcast episodes!). Here’s to the new year!
“None knows what the new day shall bring him.” – Aragorn, The Two Towers
Yeah the scaling is bananas, but I suppose it makes victory that much more exciting 🙂
Interesting discussion about responsibility. I think everyone playing the game has a responsibility primarily towards themselves to play correctly. By publishing this correctedness extends to the recipient. Everyone has a responsibility to adhere to the rules but no one has a responsibility to play well. I think that distinction is important to make.
That’s a good distinction. Well said!
Suggestion! Maybe in some future episode you could talk about some handy tricks that could help players not to make mistakes. I mean extra tokens put on some cards or placing the cards in a certain way or using some extra reminders or anything like that people have found out to make it easier to remember all the forced effects and special conditions and what not. And if there are some hints for exclusively for physical play/digital platforms you could talk about that as well. I’m sure some people have thought about this and there would some good ideas to share!
That’s a really good idea. I love bits and dice so I will experiment a bit to see if I find a method that works.
-Derek
Hey all. Producing a blog, a podcast or any tother content for public consumption takes courage to do. Kudos to all the hosts.
As for the suggestion by Pekka, I think it’s a good topic. I for one, split the staging area into two areas so that I may separate the cards I need to keep looking at for effects when they’re in the staging are from the others. I also use coloured tokens to remind me at what stage in the round I need to look a that card. If you want to really go in this direction, you may want to take a look at the playmats I designed. There found on boardkit.wordpress.com. Cheers.
I’ve noticed a number of the episodes on this website are not functioning– the links just lead to dead mp3s. I’ve been binge-listening to all of your episodes, and was especially curious to listen to this one! Any possibility that these episodes could be fixed?
If not, no big deal, of course! It always makes sense to look forward rather than back, anyway 😉
We recently changed podcast hosts so there likely have been errors. I’ll look into it soon! And thanks!
-Derek