The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game – Nightmare Decks: The Road Darkens (2016)

From the publisher: Middle-earth and The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game are full of adventures, and your road goes ever, ever on. Sometimes, when the mood strikes you—or when your heroes take a wrong turn—you may see that road darken… and then darken again. Nightmare Decks allow you to revisit your favorite scenarios recast within the darker and deadlier shadows of Nightmare Mode. Each Nightmare Deck introduces new encounter cards that you exchange with specified cards from the adventure's standard encounter deck. The result is a more challenging adventure that comes full of novel and thematic new twists. Bundled as one sixty-card product, The Road Darkens Nightmare Decks modify each of the three scenarios from The Road Darkens Saga Expansion. Because each Saga Expansion endeavors to stay as faithful to the books as possible, it may sound like a daunting task to create sixty new cards to reshape the Fellowship's travels through the second half of The Fellowship of the Ring, but lead developer Caleb Grace assures us that the Nightmare Deck afforded him a welcome opportunity to include many of the story elements he was pained to cut from the scenarios in Standard Mode: I'm always excited to design Nightmare Decks for our Saga Expansions because there are always things that I had wanted to include, but we simply didn’t have the room. While working on The Road Darkens, I found myself saying things like, “This will have to go in the Nightmare version” whenever I had to cut something that I liked. For example, serious fans of The Lord of the Rings may have lamented the exclusion of the Watcher in the Water’s many tentacles, or the absence of the Balrog’s fiery whip and flaming sword. Nightmare Decks give us the opportunity not only to increase the difficulty of the scenarios, but to appeal to our fans by introducing more of these memorable parts of the story.