Nightmare Assault on Osgiliath

You have returned to Minas Tirith just in time to join the army of Gondor as it marches to Osgiliath. An army of orcs and southrons have garrisoned the ancient city, but Lord Boromir means to retake it. Eager to strike a blow against Mordor, you will see the city retaken or die in the attempt…

The timeline of Osgiliath has always been a little fuzzy to me. I can never remember which faction controlled the city at which times, and when (and by whom) attempts were made to reclaim it. I think that stems from the movies muddying the waters, since they tell a very different story of Osgiliath from the books. So I did a little research in an attempt to clarify my mental model and in the hopes that I could place this quest, Assault on Osgiliath, in its proper historical context.

Time for a history lesson

Osgiliath ceased to be a civilian city generations before The War of the Ring. A civil war in Gondor and a plague both weakened the city’s resolve, and fueled rumors that it had become haunted. The final blow came when the city was captured by Sauron’s Uruk-hai in TA 2475. Sauron held the city only briefly before it was re-liberated by Boromir—but not that Boromir. The Boromir we’re talking about here is an ancestor of everybody’s favorite Horn of Gondor trumpeteer, and was serving as the Steward of Gondor at the time.

After the city’s capture, the civilians never returned, but because of its strategic location as the best crossing-point over the Anduin river, Gondor continued to garrison the city as a military stronghold for the next 543 years. Boromir—this time our Boromir—and his brother Faramir were stationed in Osgiliath when Sauron attacked it once again in TA 3017. This time Sauron had the aid of the Easterlings and Haradrim and was able to take the portion of the city on the Eastern side of the Anduin. The Gondorians threw down the great bridge connecting the two halves of the city, stopping Sauron’s advance short of capturing the Western side.

This was later known as the first battle of the War of the Ring.

Haradrim Warrior by Smirtouille

Gondor retained control over the Western portion of the city. This remained true up until TA 3019, when (against the advice of Faramir) Denethor sent his last remaining son along with a small group of men to defend Osgiliath in an attempt to prevent the Enemy from crossing with his army. This attempt was unsuccessful, since Sauron’s forces had built barges on the Eastern side of the city in secret, and Osgiliath was overrun. The events that followed culminated in the Siege of Minas Tirith.

Now that I’ve got all that straight

Just because I’m curious about this sort of thing: When was this quest, Assault on Osgiliath, supposed to be set? The flavor text mentions Lord Boromir vowing to retake the city, which means it was under the control of Sauron’s forces at the time.

Since the history of Osgiliath actually contains two different Boromirs, it would be fun to think of this quest as representing the battle led by Steward Boromir 500 years before the War of the Ring. That’s perhaps even the more “thematic” interpretation, since we know that battle actually happened and that it was successful. It might even be fun to try to build a “generic Gondor” deck to represent the ancient clash of armies (although I’m not sure we have enough generic Gondor Heroes for it to be competitive).

Given the fact that the Heirs of Númenor / Against the Shadow cycle has a comprehensible and contiguous storyline, though, I’d like to consider when it might have occurred during the events of the War of the Ring, instead. As I mentioned in my history lesson, Gondor never fully lost control of Osgiliath during the timeline of the Lord of the Rings until the events of the Siege of Gondor—at most, they lost control of the Eastern half in TA 3017.

Perhaps “retaking the city” merely refers to recapturing the Eastern portion—but if so, we know that Sauron will possess it once again by the time TA 3019 rolls around in order for events to unfold as they did. Perhaps we are meant to fail in our quest to retake the city—but failure seems an unlikely premise around which to build the game’s plot. I suspect that the real reason for this somewhat odd plot point is the same as what caused my own initial fuzziness on the subject—the plot alterations made for the movies have interfered with the public consciousness’ understanding of the events surrounding Osgiliath.

But I like to have a clear narrative idea of what’s going on as I play, so I’ll attempt some headcannon to reconcile things.

Let’s assume this does indeed happen during the events of the War of the Ring. This places the quest sometime between Sauron’s first attack on the city in TA 3017 and Boromir’s departure for Rivendell in the middle of TA 3018, with about a year’s time between the two events. There’s plenty of time in a year for either half of the city to go back and forth as the two armies skirmish over it. Perhaps this is one of many battles fought over Osgiliath between TA 3017 and TA 3018. It’s possible the city is seen as “disputed territory” during this entire time. Assault on Osgiliath, then, represents just one of many potential battles over the ruined city.

Of course, Sauron’s forces still needed to maintain control over the West side of Osgiliath long enough to build those secret barges… but I’m going to have to stop poking holes in this plot at some point.

I thought we were talking about a card game

Mechanically, Assault on Osgiliath is what passes for the Against the Shadow cycle’s obligatory Location-focused quest. The quest has only one quest stage, and that stage has no quest points. Instead, the game is won when the players control all of the Osgiliath Locations in play.

To capture an Osgiliath Location, the players simply have to explore it. Once explored, an Osgiliath Location is moved to the first player’s area, signifying that that player “controls” that Location. Many Locations have conditions on them that return them to the Staging Area if the controlling player performs some action, like taking an undefended attack. Other encounter cards can return Locations you control to the Staging Area as well, resulting in a bit of back-and-forth as the game goes on.

Many encounter cards scale up based on the number of Locations that the players control, causing things to ramp in difficulty as you progress further in the quest. Of particular note is Relentless Attack, a Condition Treachery that reveals an extra encounter card each round if the Staging Area has fewer Enemies than the number of Locations the players control. If you’re not packing Condition removal, this card can end games if it comes out too soon.

During Setup, each player must select a Unique Location and an Enemy to add to the Staging Area. There are four Unique Locations in the encounter deck to choose from, each of which works differently, making this one of the primary strategic decisions of the game. The King’s Library is a fairly standard Location, requiring that the players reveal an encounter card to travel there. The West Gate provides an Action that hunts out another Osgiliath Location in exchange for making The West Gate the Active Location immediately. Ancient Harbor cannot be explored through traditional means, instead requiring that you exhaust Heroes during the Combat phase to place progress on it. In a similar vein, The Old Bridge can only be explored through the expenditure of resources.

When playing the non-Nightmare version of the quest in solo or 2 player, it was almost trivial to clear all of the Locations in the Staging Area on round 1 or 2 and basically ignore the Enemies. (It also had this weird self-defeating Treachery that sometimes simply ended the quest for you, too). This has been fixed in the Nightmare version by adding an Osgiliath Location called The Palace Remains to the Staging Area during Setup. This Location gets +1 threat each time you capture a Location, and you’re not allowed to travel there until that number has reached at least 5. This single addition prevents those trivial wins from happening, ensuring you’ll be sticking around for the long haul.

At the end of the day, this quest is pretty straightforward: just keep exploring Locations until there aren’t any left.

You can see all of the encounter cards over at the Hall of Beorn.

Building the deck

Despite this quest’s focus on Locations, most of them aren’t actually too bad—with one annoying exception they range from 1 to 3 threat. The real challenge in Assault on Osgiliath is the Enemies. The vast majority of the Enemies in the deck have 6+ combined Defense + HP, and most of them sport attack values ranging from 5 to 8. The trick isn’t actually finding ways to explore Locations quickly—the trick is figuring out how to take on multiple super-tough Enemies right out of the gate.

I experimented a bit with a Blood / Fire Boromir deck (built on some of the same principles as the one popularized by Seastan) but the problem was that the archetype relies on a lot of non-Gondor cards in order to get set up consistently. Without easy access to card draw, I wasn’t able to get Boromir his toys fast enough. The deck was always overrun in just a few rounds.

But frankly, there’s no reason to rely on crazy combos or a single Voltron Hero for this quest. Tactics Allies provide plenty of cost-effective attack power, and Gondor has access to several significant Ally defenders like Defender of Rammas and Defender of Cair Andros (especially when paired with Raiment of War). All I need to do is spam out Tactics Allies as fast as humanly possible, and it shouldn’t be long before I can deal with Enemies of any size.

“Spam out Tactics Allies” seems like a pretty good core for the deck, but it doesn’t quite solve the fact that I still need to be able to quest. If I pick Heroes that have at least a little bit of willpower, I should be able to tread water in this quest as long as I keep engaging Enemies to keep them out of the Staging Area—but I’m going to need a little more oomph once I’m ready to actually clear out the quest.

Fortunately, Tactics provides a couple of options that play into my core mechanics: Trained for War and Delay the Enemy both allow me to quest against the Battle keyword, putting all of that surplus attack power to good use once I have amassed my army.

With my guiding principles figured out, the Hero selections and deck contents become pretty easy to just fill in:

Deck: Raising an Army

Theme: The army of Gondor

“This then was the end of the debate of the lords: that they should set forth on the second morning from that day with seven thousands, if these might be found; and the great part of this force should be on foot, because of the evil lands into which they would go.”

—The Last Debate, The Return of the King

Hero (3)
Hirgon (Beneath the Sands)
Mablung (The Nîn-in-Eilph)
Prince Imrahil (The City of Corsairs)
Ally (28)
2x Boromir (The Road Darkens)
2x Defender of Cair Andros (The Black Serpent)
3x Defender of Rammas (Heirs of Númenor)
3x Envoy of Pelargir (Heirs of Númenor)
3x Henneth Annûn Guard (Celebrimbor’s Secret)
3x Honour Guard (The Wastes of Eriador)
3x Knight of Minas Tirith (Assault on Osgiliath)
3x Knights of the Swan (The Steward’s Fear)
3x Master Ironsmith (The Thing in the Depths)
3x White Tower Watchman (The Drúadan Forest)
Attachment (8)
3x Favor of the Valar (The Battle of Carn Dûm)
2x Raiment of War (The Thing in the Depths)
2x Secret Vigil (The Lost Realm)
1x The Red Arrow (Beneath the Sands)
Event (12)
3x Feint (Core Set)
3x Gondorian Discipline (Encounter at Amon Dîn)
3x Shadow of the Past (Return to Mirkwood)
3x Trained for War (The Drúadan Forest)
Player Side Quest (2)
1x Delay the Enemy (Across the Ettenmoors)
1x Gather Information (The Lost Realm)
3 Heroes, 50 Cards

This deck on RingsDB

Strategy

This deck dumps down a massive Ally army quickly, then leads that army to victory.

Each Hero facilitates this goal in a different way. Hirgon gives me a discount on my Allies, and Mablung gives me extra resources to fund my army. Prince Imrahil functions as a kind of pseudo-card-draw (since the deck lacks draw otherwise) filling in the corners by providing me with extra attack power or defenders as needed.

I usually mulligan for one of the Allies with 3 attack (Knight of Minas Tirith or Boromir) because they’re the fastest way to build towards being able to kill an Enemy every turn. Ideally I’d like to get out a strong defensive Ally quickly, too, but that’s less important since Prince Imrahil can always provide a chump blocker on-demand.

The Heroes almost exclusively quest—the Allies are capable of carrying the Combat phase on their own. There are a handful of Allies in the deck with 1 willpower that can help out during the Questing phase as well; most of them aren’t very cost-efficient, but in mono-Tactics you have to take what you can get. In general, though, I just stall until I manage to find a copy of Trained for War or Delay the Enemy, which I try to time effectively to make big quest pushes.

The play’s the thing

Win ratio: 3 / 5 *

I found this quest surprisingly difficult to keep track of. There were a lot of effects in play at once, with Locations often doing something different based on whether they were in the Staging Area, the Active Location, or under a player’s control. The asterisk up there is because I’m fairly certain I forgot to check for Forced effects on Locations that I controlled during my second win. That was the game I won by the widest margin, but it’s possible that I made a rules mistake that would have changed the outcome. I could have played another game to make up for it, but by the time I realized my mistake I didn’t really feel like playing again.

Most of these games were pretty close—it often took a long time for me to find the requisite 5 Locations so I could travel to The Palace Remains and end the quest—but once I got there, the deck frequently changed tactics and started dumping out Locations like there was no tomorrow. One game I seemed to have everything well in hand: my Ally army was operating at maximum efficiency, I had cleared The Palace Remains, and all I had was a single Osgiliath Location in the Staging Area left to clear—but the encounter deck just kept revealing more Locations. A bad round saw me lose control of 2 Locations, and then I found myself in a death spiral that I couldn’t quest my way out of.

My final game was really close, too—on the last turn, I had 8 Osgiliath Locations under my control, and another one as the Active Location with an empty Staging Area, but my threat was sitting at 49. Any of the many encounter cards with the Doomed keyword would have spelled the end for me, not to mention any of the multifarious Osgiliath Locations remaining in the encounter deck. It all came down to a single card flip—which turned out to be Invading Orc. I had won, but only narrowly!

Normally I like it when quests come out close—after all, it’s exciting when you don’t know how things are going to turn out until the very last note is played. But in this case, I didn’t find it quite as exciting. I think this was partially due to the deck that I ended up using—after all, this is the third mono-Tactics deck that I’ve built for this cycle, and I’m getting a little tired of the archetype. That wasn’t the whole problem, though.

This is one of those quests where you’re at the mercy of the encounter deck to be kind to you in order to complete the quest. You need to clear 5 whole Locations before you can clear The Palace Remains and finish the quest, but you only start with 1. That means you’re going be waiting for the encounter deck to deliver another 4 to you, and without encounter deck manipulation, you could be waiting a long time. I eventually settled on choosing West Gate as my initial Location so I could use its Action to guarantee me a second Location whenever I was ready for it—but it can still take a long time to wait for the encounter deck to deliver 3 more Locations to me. This was the reason I included Shadow of the Past—it gave me the opportunity to stack the deck a bit more in the event that the encounter deck discarded all of the Locations as Shadow Effects.

Even with me employing these tactics, though, I still felt like I was generally just hoping the encounter deck would play along. During some games I got the number of Locations I needed right away, while during others I had to wait a really long time—but I never felt like the outcome was fully under my control. The encounter deck cooperated, or it didn’t, meaning that my ultimate success or failure was orthogonal to how well my deck was performing.

Final thoughts

To be clear: the Nightmare version of this quest is way better than the non-Nightmare version, since it’s no longer trivial to win. The Nightmare upgrade took what was basically a non-quest for low player counts and made it into something playable—even fun when the cards fell just right. But in the end Nightmare Assault on Osgiliath isn’t going to be winning any awards from me; it’s a middle-of-the-road sort of quest that suffers from the “but I thought I was done with this” effect that is unfortunately all too common in “clear all the Locations” type quests.

Ah well, they can’t all be winners; after all, the Against the Shadow cycle has been pretty stellar so far! Next up I’ll be walking the Path Less Traveled, probably into the Sands of Harad. After that, I’ll be back for more Thematic Nightmares with The Blood of Gondor!