Month in Review: December 2020

This is it, the final month of a year that lasted a lifetime. While there is a light at the end of this tunnel, I hope that end will come soon so that things may return to normal in the new year. I will only briefly talk about this month for the game and the blog, as I have another article lined up with all the statistics of 2020 when it comes to my collection, my playthroughs, the blog, Patreon, etcetera.

December has been quite a busy month for me. I have started the Youtube channel for the blog and have uploaded several videos to it. I have also received Hunt for the Dreadnaught and various Nightmare packs this month, and was lucky enough to participate in a 13 player game against the Dreadnaught. I hope to play some more games over the internet in the months to come, starting with the winter LCG Con near the end of January.

December

FFG has also been busy during this month, releasing Hunt for the Dreadnaught to us. There won’t be a lot of news from them in the future I expect, but I am still hopeful for a continuation of the game after the hiatus. FFG will also be shutting down their forums, forcing the community to go to other corners of the internet to ask for help. I hope that the people in the Reddit, Discord, and Facebook groups will help out the new players, as I expect a bunch of them will have gotten LOTR LCG for Christmas.
But where FFG is dropping the ball, the community project A Long-extended Party is picking it back up! We have gotten their first announcement article this month, and various creators (including myself) have gotten to spoil some more cards from their first Deluxe expansion. I am looking forward to playing the new scenarios and seeing how the new Rohan cards will slot into the decks.

Scenario analyses

I have completed the reworked articles of the Core Set scenarios this month, and will be returning to more current content next month. We still have 6 scenarios from the Vengeance of Mordor cycle to cover, and those will take a while to properly disect. We are also making progress on some of the POD scenarios, and I am looking forward to sharing those with you all in the new year. Once all scenarios have been covered, I will go back to the Shadows of Mirkwood cycle and rework those articles like I did with the Core Set.

Nightmare analyses

I am slowly building up my Nightmare collection, and am pleased to learn that I have collected over half of the packs ever released. So I will be looking forward to bringing you all some new Nightmare articles as well. I think I will start with the Dwarrowdelf cycle, and start to cover the Khazad-Dum scenarios first. Hopefully I can collect the rest of the packs next year, and I should have some more support with this from various other co-authors who will also be bringing more Nightmare analyses.

Deckbuilding

The deckbuilding series has completed the Lost Realm Deluxe box this month, and will be continuing with the Angmar Awakened cycle in the new year. Next up will be Wastes of Eriador, which is probably going to take a while, so please be patient with that. I have also received a suggestion from someone to do a strictly thematic deckbuilding series for the Saga’s, and we will be looking into bringing this to you all next year as well. I am not sure when the first articles on this will be released, but will let you know as soon as they go live!

Additional articles

This has been a month filled with additional articles. Not only did I publish my own thoughts and spoilers on the AleP project, but I also revived the First Impressions series for one more article. The Hunt for the Dreadnaught pack really deserved a dedicated article, as it included a new contract and the quest is just a lot of fun. It will probably be a while before I get around to covering the quest in detail, so at least you have my first impressions to read.

I also did an article on the artwork in the game. This got recommended to me during the third Poll-antir, and it was a lot of fun to cover the many different artists that have contributed to this game. Of course, I couldn’t cover them all, but the biggest artists got a shoutout in that article. It was also very well received by the community, which is fantastic!

For next month, I expect at least 2 additional articles. One which covers 2020 in numbers related to what I have been doing for the game. And another to celebrate the blog’s third birthday towards the end of the month. Can’t believe that the blog is already this old. Seems like yesterday that I finished those Core Set scenario analyses… oh wait, that was yesterday…

The Future

I hope 2021 will be more forgiving to us all and will allow us to participate in conventions again towards the second half of the year. I am impressed with how the community grew this past year, and how it adapted to more online games when physical games were impossible. I hope to participate in Con of the Rings and Lure of Middle Earth next year, but I am not making any promises this far into the future.

As for the blog, I hope that the new year will see the conclusion of all the quests at least in Normal mode. We have a few left to go, including some Saga, POD, and the final cycle to be covered. From there, I will look into completing my Nightmare collection and to work on completing the Nightmare reviews as well. There is a lot more in the pipeline as well, so the blog isn’t going anywhere in 2021. It may see a dip in content though, as I have some construction to my house planned. That will interfere with me writing articles for about 2 months, but I hope to continue to release more articles from my legion of co-authors.

Articles will also be a little less frequent compared to previous years thanks to me having a job now. Work is a lot of fun, but it does take away a lot of time and energy to write articles. I have had a pretty good taste of combining the two this year, so I hope I can maintain that balance in the new year.

I have also already begun work on the loot for next year. More details will follow soon, but this is going to be a very useful item for everyone who wants to log their games. It will also be a lot of work for me, but I hope to have some help of some amazing patrons of mine. I do not yet know when the deadlines for signing up will be, more info on that once I have completed the prototype.

I think that about covers the immediate plans I have for 2021. Read more about it in the 2020 recap coming in a few days. I wish you all a happy new year, and hope that it will just be a regular year, not like 2020 was… Hope to see you all in person next year!

~Aa’menealla nauva calen ar-malta~

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One thought on “Month in Review: December 2020”

Magnum Marginas says:

31 December 2020 at 18:04

I hope there will be another release of ‘A Shadow in the East’. That will be the final piece for my LOTR LCG puzzle!

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