How do people beat scenarios using extra locations? Someone said he's won playing eight locations with a single character. I think you have to recharge your blessings to do this.
I played solo through Black Fang's dungeon with Amiri and Kyra using the 4-player setup.
Kyra got pummelled by a Werewolf on turn 1. (As can happen with Kyra, she was fighting with her hands.) The henchmen and villains were nowhere to be found. I burned through blessings like crazy for extra explores, but I still lost on time with 19 cards left in three locations.(I had lost several fights and failed to clear barriers, plus I found Black Fang more than once.)
With extra locations, you can't corner the villain. You end up finding the guy several times before you can beat him. In my game, Amiri found Black Fang with two locations closed. Kyra temporarily closed her location and Amiri beat Black Fang. In a regular 2-player, that's the game.
For fun I kept playing to see how long it'd take the duo to succeed. Eight more turns. Failed by a wide margin. I think you have to be lucky to succeed at this.
In fairness, I used the starter setup for each character, not having carried them through the first two scenarios, although I've played those with other characters. (I'm still learning.) Kyra didn't have Augury, which would have helped big time. Also, not all my allies could be discarded to explore.
Vrog Skyreaver has been doing 8 locations, I've been doing 6. But we've both been using Lini with multiple Cures and Auguries/Scryings. We can Cure the blessings back into our decks and animals recharge when used to explore.
My Lini at the end of Hook Mountain cannot kil more than one Troll henchman unless she finds a nice spell (Fire Sneeze!) or weapon, so she might have problems coming up. I guess she can just defeat the villain to banish these henchmen, but one set of fireballs per scenario is limiting.
My wife and I are doing 8 locations with 2 characters. She is Lem, I'm Ezren.
Both of these characters are recycling their deck pretty efficiently. We Augury/Scry location decks a lot. I cast Haste to take extra explores, Lem uses stuff and cures it back.
I think that the game has a problem with its non-magic using classes being able to do similar things (but am uncertain if that is true or not).
My wife and I do 6 with 2 characters. Merisiel and Kyra. We started that in mid-AP1, so it was before we'd been able to grab things like both Staves of Minor healing for Merisiel, but those items have been crucial for our strategy, which is explore 2-4 times a turn, every turn. Allies and blessings rarely get used for anything other than exploring, though that is gradually changing in AP4, with its harder monsters (especially trolls, which necessitated us picking up Charmed Red Dragon, and also saving Poog instead of using his +3 on a whim). Difficulty is a bit balanced by Kyra being able to recharge Sararenae, and Merisiel being able to recharge any blessing used for Dex.
Since Merisiel operates best by herself, we almost never occupy the same locations, and even after dropping her Father Zanthus, Merisiel rarely requires a cure (2x Healing Staves help, as I said). We've lost on time maybe twice, and we almost never temp-close locations, though we almost always opt to close the location after killing the henchman, unless we've scouted the deck and seen something necessary.
My Lini "8 location" build is heavy casting, and all spells are geared towards either attack or heal (god, I wish I could rock a aid!). I generally tend to find the location that would be easiest to clear out for me first, and then go to the next one, and so on (I love me some temple). I look forward to seeing if I can keep up the trend in part 4.
I would love it if you could put a video up of a playthrough or something for this at some point.
I'm guessing I could learn some things about better Lini play if I could watch how you play this considering my Lini/Valeros team isn't nearly that effective.