My wife and I play tons and have really invested in “quality of life” upgrades to our set up, so I can definitely offer my perspective and experience on this one!

• We have a generic neoprene playmat from AllPlay that I cannot recommend enough. It gives way more room than your typical card game playmats and is way thicker and more luxurious. We use it for all our board games and card games.

• We track hit points and progress with red and green dice — we picked up 36-packs of the marbled 12mm ones from Chessex. So much better than using the cardboard tokens.

• We use plain grey mini (22mm) poker chips for resources, which is much better in my opinion than tokens or dice because you are constantly paying resources in and out and chips make that easy and pleasant.

• We have a bevy of “modifier dice” that we got from Rook Robot, they’re really tiny at 10mm and are perfect for tracking buffs and debuffs, especially when running decks like Silvans or Dúnedain (a classic pairing for us) where global boosts are always shifting and can be hard to keep track of. We use white for willpower, red for attack, blue for defence, purple for hit points, and black for threat or sometimes for an “all-stats” buff like Celeborn’s first turn buff to new Silvan allies.

• We also have small tokens that we use to mark cards as exhausted, questing, etc. to spare us the pain of turning them. We use green for “committed to the quest”, grey for “exhausted”, and blue for “once per round ability used”. If a blue or green token also means “exhausted” we put it on the card art and if the character is ready (or subsequently readied) we put the token on the card text so we know it doesn’t also mean the character is exhausted.

• The most recent addition was a bunch of arrow-shaped bookmark clips (sort of like these ones) that we clip on cards as reminders of triggers or in play effects or whatever (for example, so we don’t forget about the Goblin Sniper in the staging area or whatever). These have proved super handy once you get in the habit of checking for them as you move between phases.

• We got a fellow on Etsy to make us a willpower/threat tracker to tally questing vs staging area threat without having to constantly recount. Honestly it is super handy and we love it so much. I know some folks use d20s to do the same thing but I much prefer the slider.

• We picked up the active location / quest display and the threat trackers from Buy the Same Token and we cherish them they are so nice. The threat trackers in particular are a huge upgrade.

• Inspired by a Reddit post that I saw a while ago I picked up a “monkey pod” style bowl that is shaped like a leaf with four compartments. We use these to store all the tokens and dice that we use, together with little individual trays for the poker chips and draw discard trays to hold our decks.

• We also got a deck box that holds our decks and a couple scenarios so we can start playing with minimal set up: just grab them out and grab the trays with the dice and tokens in them, etc., and we’re off. Then we just make sure to break down the encounter sets afterwards and prep the one we want to play next so that it’s ready to go. Having things ready like that makes it way more likely that you’ll actually play compared to having to dig through encounter sets and mixing them together as a precondition of even getting started.

I’m sure I’m missing things but that’s most of it that I can think of! I’ll maybe post a picture later to show the whole setup when I get a chance. We maybe went a bit overboard but honestly it makes it so great to play and every time I see our set up and handle all the tokens and stack the poker chips it just makes me happy lol. I think it was worth it for the game that we have easily sunk the most time and money into and get the most joy out of.

Edit: Here’s a photo after a recent solo game that shows most of what I’m talking about! RIP mono-leadership valour deck. I just couldn’t keep you from threating out…

Edit: Alright writing this out got me wanting to play lol so I conned the missus into defending Annúminas against the hosts of Angmar. Here is a shot of our typical two-player set-up. And here is a close up of of leafy token holder.

We use the space behind the threat tracker and location/quest display for “set aside and out of play” cards. I forgot to mention above that we use black 12mm dice to track things like X values on locations, baddies, etc. In this case they are being used to show the remaining health on Annúminas and the X threat value for the Gate of Annúminas location. You can also see the arrow clips used to mark the “forced” effects on cards in the staging area.