Overall Score: C+
Difficulty: 
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The Hunt For Gollum is a quest in line thematically with one of the core story plots of the entire middle-earth story-line, as the title suggest, its about finding Gollum himself.

Hunting Down Gollum as an opening quest to the first Lord of the Rings the Card Game adventure cycle feels just right and thankfully as one might expect from a first expansion in chronological order, it is a quest that is not that difficult to overcome.  Even if the only cards you have in your card pool are those in the core set, your well equipped to beat it and as such this expansion is an ideal place to start for new players.

That said, this expansion is not exactly easy either, definitely a step above A Passage Through Mirkwood which is universally accepted as the easiest expansion in the game, best used as an introductory adventure.  The difficulty of the quest is largely due to one of the less likable ways to lose games, commonly referred to as Location Spam.  A phenomenon some quest suffer from in which your ability to quest is hindered by a mounting amount of Location encounter cards hitting the table until you are just overrun by sky rocketing threat.  Its not terribly fun to simply lose to locations, but its worth pointing out its also one of the simplest “puzzles” to solve through deck building.

There is also the matter of the Saurons eye cards, a mini deck made up of some pretty hard hitting Treachery cards like Pursued by Shadow, Treacherous Fog (indeed) and Evil Storm.  Fortunately the enemies that can drop in the Hunt For Gollum are not particularly tough or troubling with the exception perhaps being Hunters From Mordor.  This quest is certainly going to feel quite tough for a beginner, but after playing this quest a few times most players ultimately learn a lot about how to defeat your standard run of the mill LoTr quest, not that there are particularly many of them in the line as a whole.  This quest isn’t going to require a lot out of you before you solve the puzzle of how to beat it.

Overcoming all of these effects and this quest is just a matter of having a deck that can quest well with some utility to control the Encounter deck to avoid those nasty Treachery cards and a couple of good allies to help you knock out the few enemies you might face.  In terms of Lord of the Rings the card game, nothing more than a fairly standard deck.  Its really kind of hard to go wrong here which is a bit deceiving in scope of the game as a whole considering some of the other quests in this cycle will really require some pretty specialized decks to defeat.  Its a good second adventure after the introduction that is Passage Through Mirkwood and a good place to learn but perhaps not quite enough to prepare you for your next challenge, or showing off the best side of the game.

Overall I liked this quest the first few times I played it, in fact, I often use it as a warm up or for testing decks because any deck that is beaten by this quest is not likely to do particularly well anywhere else.  You should effectively be able to crush this quest once you get basic deck building and card play skills down, even if you only have the core set to work with card pool wise.

Above all else I really liked the theme in this quest and perhaps its one of the main reasons I warm up to it, chasing down clues about the whereabouts of the infamous Gollum just feels like a very Middle-Earthy thing to do.  Its a fun start to what really is an amazing game and while I think most veterans will look back and refer to this quest as “too easy” and too generic once you get a bit deeper into the game, I think chronologically its a very good place to start learning about some of the unique elements of the game.  In fact I typically recommend this for new players as a place to start rather then the core set mainly because I think other then Passage Through Mirkwood, the rest of the core quests are really too tough for new players.  The Hunt For Gollum is really a good middle ground, a great place to earn your stripes and get into the proper mindset of the game.  I don’t believe Passage Through Mirkwood does a whole lot more than act as a introductory adventure to learn the game.  With the Hunt For Gollum you will feel more like you are playing Lord of the Rings The Card Game proper like.

When its all said and done however, Lord of the Rings The Card game has a lot more to offer than what you find in The Hunt for Gollum, this is by comparison to the rest of the countless expansions one of the weaker quests overall quality wise.   There are just a lot of other far more enjoyable and diverse quests then this one, its not one you will likely be going back to a whole lot once you get into the game, unless you are like me and using it as a testing ground for decks.