Greekgeek said:

Sounds like you haven't played "Twilight Imperium III"

TK

Our games are usually a full group affair but to be honest MEQ doesn't really require all that much in the tactics department.  On average we have at most maybe a half dozen combats in a game.  I have actually played games where we have had as alittle as 3 combats to win.  The game is very much centered around your movement and positioning.  Collecting tokens and knocking out Suron plots or just ramping up one character to showdown the RW's is a pretty common tactic. 

My feelings on the game tell me that an expansion needs to bring more combat into the game and get people more involved with Sauron instead of avoiding combat and just knocking out his plots.  There also needs to be some balance that helps the sauron allies later on once a hero or two gets leveled up and auto defeats enemies.

Baenre said:

Frog said:

I did have a chance to play this and after 4 hours we were only half way through the game.  Definitely in the Arkham horror ballpark of insanely long games.

I'd much rather spend 7 hours playing Descent then this.  (And I am a Tolkien fanatic)

Frog said:

To me it seems utterly unfathomable that anybody could take 4 hours for 5 turns (since the normal game is max 10 turns, barring one Shadow Card, which could add a turn). Even reading the rules + learning while playing, people should get an idea of what they are supposed to be doing after a couple of turns.

Then again, as a ballpark figure for my play speed, Arkham Horror is an under 2-hour game, probably 90-100 minutes on average (14 turns), on rare occasions goes above 2 hours. MEQ is 75 minutes, 90 max for me.

Dam said:

Our Arkham games are friggan 6-8 hours.  This is with people who played the game 20 times already.

I love Lovecraft and Tolkien.  Own all of their fiction in nice hardcover editions.  But I really don't like either of these games.

Our games are usually really long, too...lots of looking up rules at first, but I don't think it's going to get THAT much faster.  With Talisman (a game I actually love dawdling through), if we're in any kind of hurry, we pump the stats to begin with to keep a game under two hours.  Arkham:  played three or four times now, none under four hours.  Descent....don't get me started.  FoD we only played once, but it seems much more reasonable - going to try again next week and see how that goes.  Usually there's some way to house-rule a way to make things drag out less....you could require fewer seals in Arkham, for example.  I personally like how the long games play out in terms of narrative, but it's not always possible to take the time.