Month in Review: November 2022

With me being out of the hospital and recovering from my treatments, I had some more time this month to get back into the game and work on the blog some more. Progress is still a bit slow, and I won’t meet all the goals I’ve set for myself at the beginning of the year, but under the circumstances, that’s fine. November was a relatively quiet month, with not a lot happening with the game. And with not many articles released on the blog, I think we can make this a short and quick article. Shall we?

November

As I mentioned, it has been a quiet month. With the release of the Fellowship of the Ring box in October, it has been nothing but silence out of FFG. While we can reasonably expect no new content, we are due for an announcement article for the next repackaged cycle. I had personally placed my bets for a holiday season release, but that’s looking unrealistic at the moment. So we will keep waiting until more news finds its way to us. AleP is also still in between cycles, needing some more time for their next Deluxe, so I think that we won’t see new cards for the rest of the year. It allows you to ask Santa for an upgrade to your storage solution or to look at other games.

Scenario analyses

This is the only section where I put in some work this month, finishing two articles and revisiting the articles I wrote at the beginning of the blog’s life. It was good to get to see these quests again and dissect them properly. Now that they are finished, I will have time to complete the Shadows of Mirkwood cycle revisit with the Dead Marshes and Return to Mirkwood in December. I don’t think any other cycle will need this treatment, allowing me to shift focus to the Nightmare scenarios.

Saga/Nightmare analyses

I have been playing around with the Saga scenarios a little bit more this month since I realized I rarely play the later saga scenarios. Aside from a campaign mode, you barely see them hit the table. It has helped me with fixing some things for the field guide, and I will hopefully get their articles soon enough. The Nightmare scenarios will take a little more time since the NM Blood of Gondor, and NM Morgul Vale are notoriously difficult quests to beat. To come up with a good strategy for these quests will take a lot of time. I expect to work a bit more on these quests in the new year, after which the NM Ringmaker cycle will prove to be a good challenge to keep me occupied for the year.

Additional articles

For December, I expect two additional articles. The first is the in-depth look at the Field Guide I wrote this year. I would hope to release the article along with the books that many have been waiting on for so long (thank you for your patience so far!). The other article will be my yearly review article. Strap in for a long look at the blog’s stats as well as what I played this year myself. Now with the quest log, I managed to keep track of every game, allowing me to see what I played. Some sections, like the collection graph, will be a bit shorter due to the lack of new stuff released this year.

The Future

With the end of the year approaching fast, I hope to release a few more articles before we head into 2023. I think I’ll have plenty of time for this since I am technically still recovering from my cancer. I had my second CT scan on the day of writing this article, but the results wouldn’t be in time to make it into this article. So, for now, let’s assume the best-case scenario where I am able to recover as normal and will soon be back at work again. That will still be built up in stages, allowing me enough time to rest. But since I cannot sit still even if I’m told to, I will likely be using that time for the blog.

The biggest project right now is still to get the loot out before the end of the year. Last month has seen a lot of progress, with me finishing the summaries for each quest, all the tips and tricks being added, and some more mockups for the pages being passed back and forth in the team. See the image shared in this section for one of our current proposals, but by no means is this final. The rest of the time will have to be spent on writing the letters to the 16 remaining Patreon supporters so that all the letters are ready when the books arrive. Doing all the postage for these packages will be quite a chore, but since I have the time next month, I hope to make it all work out.

I remain hopeful for a good outcome of my scans and hope to share some positive news soon about it all. Right now, I cannot do anything other than wait and thank everyone for supporting me through this difficult time. It’s not been the easiest year, but the occasional message or online game has helped me to get through it a lot easier than I otherwise would have. I just hope to be able to repay that support with the loot as soon as possible and that we finish this year on a high note. Should the results turn out more negative than I have hoped for, I will likely still share it, but expect some delays in everything promised in this article. I can’t help it; such is life.

~Aa’menealla nauva calen ar-malta~

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One thought on “Month in Review: November 2022”

Android Andrew says:

8 January 2023 at 02:20

I love the look of those quest summary cards! Really excited to see them be released! I’ll certainly use them.

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