QOTW Recap: The Three Trials

‘ “The bones have spoken,” spoke the chief. “It is decided then:
You will undertake the trials to recover the Antlered Crown
for the Boar Clan. Success will grant you and your master our
friendship. Failure will grant you death.” ‘

— The Three Trials insert

Cycle: The Ring-maker Cycle Adventure Pack 2

Week 39/40, 2026.

Queue a crossover event with Admiral Akbar, this quest put us all in a bind! With our backs to the wall a group of Dunlendings make their attacks like bashing fish in a barrel. Many players came prepared!

The Three Trials’s Stats

Groups registered: 9
Total attempts: 9
Most attempts: 2
Average attempts per entry: 1.1
Official difficulty: 5/10
Community-rated difficulty: 7/10

Total number of wins: 10
Average win-rate: 100%

Average opinion on the quest: 4.4

Since this quest made it into the the community’s top 20 favorite quests for Con of the Rings 2026, it’s no surprise that it’s rated this highly. It’s also not a surprise that there’s a 100% win rate, considering people came well-prepared with decks to beat a challenging, but fun, slate of quests.

A few folks got to play this banger of a quest for the first time. I hope you play it again for the variety, and if you don’t own it give it a shot on Dragncards!

Achievements

The achievements for The Three Trials are a challenge to complete. The first one, Warden of the Keys, asks that you load one player up with all three keys to risk suffering three different Guardian effects at stage 3. Easily achieveable with a three hunters deck in a four-player game that has sufficient block as the effects are pretty minor in normal. Despite this, there were no entries that recorded this achievement this week.

The second achievement, Just Doing Their Job, is a reward for pure focus in The Three Trials. If you can weather all three attacks from the Guardians, then you can likely get this achievement without much fuss.

Warden of the Keys

In a multiplayer game, complete the scenario with one player controlling all three Key objectives.

Just Doing Their Job

Complete the scenario without destroying a Guardian enemy during stage 3B.

Encounter Card Opinions

The Favorite

The favored card for this quest is actually a trio! The Boar’s Guardian, The Wolf’s Guardian, and the twice-named Raven’s Guardian are one of the pillars of variability for The Three Trials and the order that you deal with them throughout the quest can make every run feel unique.

I like the design of the Guardians. They are each unique and bring something different.

The Least-favorite

There was a clear winner for least favorite card, and it was a topic of discussion at the Con: Cave Barrow.

If drawn as your first stage 2 Barrow location it can slow the entire table’s momentum by quite a lot. Unless you’re running a series of Three Hunters contracts, you had to be strategic about which allies got to stick around. Either that, or you could bribe your teammates.

Things worth sharing from the games

I used Hobbit-sense to prevent the three Guardians from attacking me to gain the “Just Doing Their Job” achievement. It was fun to get Sting in my opening hand to bring out a weak Spirit of the Wild. Otherwise, the game went fairly uneventfully.

Heirs of Earendil discarded a Stone Barrow, raising threat by 10 and immediately progressing to the next quest stage!

Chad and I played it at the Con together just two player. As always, this quest is awesome. He kept chumping with his dogs though 😂

This was my opening game for Con of the Rings in the hotel lobby. When we advanced to stage three, we immediately killed all the guardian enemies, which was cool. Then the encounter deck proceeded to pull the back into play with treachery cards.

Played this at Con of the Rings. Our 3-player table had an Rohan discard, Oathbreakers/Blue Wizards, and Dúnedain deck. We were able to handle combat well enough, spread the Keys around so we each had a Guardian, and then quested through on Stage 3 to win. We saw Grim Foothills a lot, which slowed us down a bit. Probably not the best fit for my Dúnedain deck given there is only one other enemy in the encounter set, but I did manage to keep one or two of those engaged at all times and Beregond provided the table with a sentinel defender. Fun quest and felt great to get it in at the Con with friends!

I need to play this one again to really explore it. Nice that you can choose a little bit how the quest will go.

Our intrepid Elladan/Elrohir/Idraen player managed to use Heirs of Earendil to discard the Cave Barrow from play, giving us the chance to play as many allies as we’d like and moving past the hardest of the three quest locations.

At some point after revealing stage 3, I got up to get some water and came back to find that all three Guardians had already been killed and we simply had to travel to Hallowed Circle and win quest out! Nightmare mode got absolutely crushed!

Every time Curse of the Wild Men came out we only had a handful of non-unique allies, so it was a nonbo to see.

Decklists Used

“A Conspiracy Unmasked” (BoF Frodo, Pippin, Sam Gamgee, Merry) – https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/508215

Three Hunters Elladan, Elrohir, Idraen
https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/623520

I used Blue Wizards 2 Hunters: https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/587542
Chad was using my Surprise Bears deck: https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/539699

Grimbeorn, Na’asiyah, Damrod

Dúnedain (Amarthiúl, Beravor, Beregond)

Noldor https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/68414/nulled-orenull-door-1.0

Alatar/Pallando/Le. Aragorn (https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/697492)

BOF Side quest deck

If you haven’t yet voted on the difficulty of the quest over at the LOTR LCG Quest Companion, feel free to do so here: The Three Trials on the LOTR Quest Companion

For the next quest in the cycle, you can submit your playthrough of Trouble in Tharbad using the form here: https://forms.gle/2iihQ9tSmztKEWjJ7.

If you want to share in the discussion of this quest live, join the Cardboard of the Rings discord and look for the Quest of the Week channel: https://discord.gg/J39HRGeNJ

And for achievements for Trouble in Tharbad, this is what we have: