My game "group" consists of solely me and my brother, and we each play 2 investigators. We play with all expansions we have, and we do not remove any cards: Curse of the Dark Pharaoh, Black Goat of the Woods, Dunwich Horror and Kingsport Horror. When I said we do not remove any cards I meant just that- we don't even remove allies. Instead, we remove 4 allies the first time the terror level rises and 3 allies on the following times (there are 34 allies, so this methods makes them equilivant to 11). However to balance this, when we shop for allies at Ma's, we only draw 2 allies and choose one. I found out that it's much funner to choose between just 2 allies rather than them all (even if it's just 10 or so).

What about you? How many players are you? how many investigators? and which expansions?

Previous Great Debates

My playing group mainly consists of me, my housemates, and whichever of my friends come running when I switch on the Bat Signal (so to speak). Between us, we own all the expansions, which we keep in one integrated box. I plan to buy Innsmouth when it comes out.

We play with a quite heavily tweaked mix of expansions, and usually swap some stuff in and out for each game. I tend to leave in all the Arkham Encounters from all expansions, because they're one of the few types of cards where there's little downside to having as many as possible. Except for the ones which require things we're not using.

(My reason for cutting a card is often pure laziness: I can't be bothered putting an additional small deck of cards out beside the board if there's only a one-in-one-billion chance that anyone will actually use it during the game. Black Goat memberships are a classic example; hardly any cards actually provide one, even if you just use BGotW and the original game. The same goes for Velma's Gratitude, the Coded Messages, and that type of thing. I just remove the specific encounter cards. No-one will ever notice anyway. Also, it's a form of protest against sloppy game design...)

Mostly commonly we play with four or five players, although I've played games with as many as nine players. Which you're not even meant to be able to do.

The nine-player game was played outside, at night, by candlelight. Half the players didn't know the rules. We were playing with the Dunwich Board, and against Atlach-Nacha, who beat us. At least, I think it was Atlach-Nacha. It was quite dark.

Games are usually me. I've just gotten two new players up to date with all the expansions.

I use every expansion whenever possible.

Most of my games are 3 or 4 investigators, depending on if I'm alone or they're joining me.

I don't think this stuff counts as debate anymore. I liked the debates more when we were comparing the usefulness of two close candidates.

Yeah, but I can't really think of any more "vs" debates... ideas will be welcome.

Nor can I. Just name the threads like:

Your game group, and how many investigators do you play, and with which expansions.

No need for "Great Debate" branding anymore.

"Great Debate #25: actual debates vs. surveys."

thecorinthian said:

Debates are definitely better intellectually. Maybe we should have a thread debating how much we can nerf Daisy to make her "fair."

kroen said:

When playing with others, we're two to five players each playing one investigator. All in all, there's a pool of 10 players who enjoy playing Arkham Horror, so in theory we might have games with more players, but it's difficult to arrange because of conflicting time schedules.

When I'm playing with others we either play without exapansions or with one expansion. Somehow the games are still more challenging than my solo games.

My gaming group consists of 10 people. For Arkham, we limit it to 6 people, each playing a single investigator. We always include both the DH and KH expansions, and include cards from the KiY expansion.

We typically run 2 players with 2 investigators each. We own all the expansions, but lately we've just been playing League games.

My game group is about a dozen/1.5 dozen people, it shifts week-to-week; we've had the fun times of running two 8 player games simultaneously. Recently however, we've been leaning towards smaller games (4-5 players) just because they take less time. Usually what ends up happening in our larger games is that people get bored with waiting and get distracted with other things, which just prolongs the game when it comes time for their turn. For expansions, we'll usually play exclusively with a new expansion for a month or two, and then we'll switch between older expansions that hasn't seen much light recently. If we combine expansions, we put everything together at the same time; we've got 5 complete sets(base + all expansions) of arkham in our game group, and another person owns at least the base set, so we're usually covered for anything people feel like doing.

Big game groups are interesting.

My group consists of 14 people, but I tend to play in a limit of 4-6 players, since larger groups take very long to play. Since we have enough players anyway, everyone gets to play only one investigator. By now, there are 5 arkham horror game collections in my group, so the expansions we're using varys with the collection we're playing, and therefore most often with the person we're playing at.

Tibs said:

No, Tibs! >smack< Bad! Bad Tibs!

During the week, it's just me, playing 3-5 Investigators (mostly 4). On the weekends, I can usually get at least one member from a cult of 4 Singles, 3 Involveds, and 3 Marrieds. From the latter two groups, about half of the time we can finesse the Significant Other to play too. Any two player games, 2 Investigators each; any three-plus player games, 1 each.

Usually Kingsport and King in Yellow, but lately it's been Kingsport and Black Goat. One of the Singles dislikes Kingsport, so we only play Dunwich+small box with him.