by chockle
Dam the Man wrote:
Yes and no. Yes, you'll be getting closer to Sauron, but no in the sense that you have a lot of room to work with. If you start :sauron: at 12, each hobbit can take 11 damage and still live, hell, you can have all the others take 12 and the Ring-bearer 11 and still win. Life tokens are checked three times (end of Moria, HD and SL). Even if you never got a single token (which is very unlikely as the main Activity line gives you Ring tokens) you'd take 9 dmg and still be 3 away from Sauron. Sauron moving is much worse as it effectively counts as 1 dmg for all hobbits, instead of 1 dmg on a single hobbit per missing token. And moving hobbits backwards is also doable in the base game alone, expansion adds options for moving Sauron back.
Also, there's the 2 "Ring Bearer Move One Towards Corruption" tiles and the "One Hobbit Moves Two Towards Corruption Or Sauron Moves One" tile. Of these 3, it seems typical that certainly 1, and often 2 will get drawn, which accounts for about 2 hobbit damage per scenario.
But then again, there's Athelas, which prevents one hobbit from moving on the Corruption Line as a result of missing Life Tokens, which could save up to 3 damage on a hobbit.
Winning 4 of 4 sounds extremely lucky to me. I'd guess they're starting Sauron at 15 and as peakhope says, the number of hobbits matters. I know the Rush the Main Activity Line can actually win, because we've done it (Sauron start at 12, 4 hobbits). The nice thing is when you can't move the Main Line, you can draw 2 cards or heal, so there's always plenty of cards, making Traveling in Morder easier. But I've seen it fail too, enough that we haven't tried it in a long time. Plus it isn't any fun.
btw, I do think that Rushing the Traveling Line in Morder is the way to go.