1. Draw a blight card when a location is closed

2. 123 no mythos 456 mythos card

3. In the woods, isle, or cave lose one stamina take a 1000 membership

4. No kingsports rifts, they suck

5. Outerworld card= Black Goat some kingsport some dunwich esp the ones that have their gates and the goo ones from dp

6. encounter card= kiy plus dh and kh locations

pittplayer said:

No YOU suck. The rfts are the most ingenious thing FFG has thought of. Also, with no rifts, no one would have any incentive going to Kingsport.

Whoa there. Back up.

pittplayer said:

1. Interesting idea, but then just play with the King in Yellow herald when you want blights. With this rule, the herald is pointless.

2. No way. Having all the expansions together doesn't make the game harder in this area. If you had a special rule for increasing the number of Dunwich gates or Next Act cards drawn, that would be different. Frequency of certain types of mythos cards are the problem, not the number. Mythos cards being drawn at regular frequency is absolutely manageable. Besides, the official rule for the game is to count all bookkeeping stuff as -1 investigator for each board expansion after the first. This work perfectly.

3. Nah, I like the rare chance of bumping into the cult, even better than the rare chance of finding an exhibit item. A rule that makes Corruption cards more frequent would be better.

4. Uh. Aside from the Epic Battle deck, rifts are the best thing about the Kingsport board. In fact, the mechanic is genius in that it never gets diluted with multiple expansions. If you're not going to use the rift mechanic, then don't even use the board. Besides, this game is about challenges . Kingsport rifts are far from being an unfair challenge.

5. I don't know what you're recommending, but the biggest problem here is the lack of location-specific encounters. You may want to just come up with a clever and easy mechanic to deal with this problem, just as with the Mythos card dilution.

6. If you're not using BG and CotDP encounter cards, then you're barely even using the expansion. Encounter cards offer most of the theme of the small expansions.

You may want to just limit the number of expansions you're using whenever you play. Of course, Arkham is good for customization, so play it as it makes you happy. But these are not recommendations I would make to anyone who actually owns all the Arkham expansions and wants to use them all.

answers

1. Rifts are to clunky and cumbersome when you already have so much stuff to manage. Plus they dont make sense why kingsport rifts in arkham?

2. To many cards for a normal table. Come on i dont need 4 million cards in a mythos deck.

Basically i want to shorten the amount of cards to deal with while mantaining what i love about the expansions being the blight cards, corruption cards, the kingsport and dunwich boards and meeting goos in outer worlds. I can fit all the cards i like in 1 box and not have to set up for 2 hours or just play with one exp even though that is fun sometimes

the 123 456 mythos rule is because my group likes exploring arkham and not starting the game in a rush, plus normal games we have 2 player games

pittplayer said:

Ehm... what exaclty does the "123 456"-mythos rule mean? O.o

mythos phase roll 123 no mythos phase roll 456 have a mythos phase makes the game more managable

I think that would make it too easy. If you think the game is too hard with just 2 players, I don't really know what to tell you. I've played many, many, games with just two players. Sure, sometimes Kingsport becomes a problem with two players, but I easy have the highest win-rate with just two players.

Your best fix to make the game easier and better to explore with two players is to control two investigators each.

Acebob said:

I've done this for several games and it makes a good game for the two of us. Some of us don't count final battle wins as wins and they aren't as much fun for us or at least as satisfying. I agree playing two investigators with a skipped mythos is an optimized game, but its not more optimized than a regular four player game in most cases, unless you are using the really superior investiagors like Mandy, Wendy or Daisy and maybe a few others.

pittplayer said:

Oh. That really makes the game easy .

kroen said:

Please remember the cardinal rule here: Attack the opinion, not the person. Everything except for the first three words are acceptable.

We enjoy spirited debate here, but please – keep it on topic.

- Jeremy @ FFG

Vitus_Prem said:

Have you tried it? If you play 2 investigators will all the rules like there are four investigators, it's no easier than a four investigator game except you will definitely have a unified plan whichis often attainable in a normal game, is it not?

If you play a 2 investigator game with no other rule change than half as many mythos phases, yes it will be usually be very easy and you'll probably get your fill of exploring Arkham, however.

Rules-as-written is my favorite way to play. With the exception of a couple small house rules—put in play for theme , not difficulty.

Well, pittplayer, it sounds like you're well aware that you're using your own House Rules, so I say, go for it, whatever works for you. (I got a few House Rules myself that others here would never use.)

My only advice is to be careful. When you get used to playing with your own rules, it's sometimes very difficult to go back to the Rules As Written. And if FFG introduces a new mechanic (perhaps in Innsmouth) that you already have a previous House Rule for, you may end up ruining your first impression of a great mechanic.

Case in point: someone once had issues with adjusting their Focus during Upkeep, and then having a Skill Check later in the turn that they didn't adjust for. So they House Ruled that if one didn't us "all" of their Focus during Upkeep, they could "surprise-use" them later to adjust their sliders before a Check during the Encounter Phases. He had not purchased Kingsport yet, the expansion that really started using Focus in different ways, mostly as a new cost or commodity. I warned him, if he got used to being able to adjust his sliders during the Encounter Phase, then Kingsport was just going to utterly piss him off when it started making him lose or pay his Focus, because he would be losing twice as much potential action as the rest of us who only used our Focus during the Upkeep Phase. (I hope that makes sense.) And then he would hate Kingsport due to his OWN rules, not Kingsport's, and that wouldn't be fair to him or Kingsport.

So just be careful. I don't want you to miss out on Innsmouth because you didn't learn to play the game As Written.

Welcome to the Carnival, pittplayer!

mageith said:

If played lots of two player games, even though we usually decide to choose our investigators then... so it's almost always the joe - ashcan team.

And I might add, we tend to win 75% (by sealing, of course) of the games, using no house rules (but heralds from time to time).

Still, I have to admit, it's challenging, but that's no reason to cut down the mythos phases this extremely in my eyes...

Our house rule is monster toughness counts at time of defeating ie red sighn brings them down one and Festival make a deafted cultist permanlty +1 toughness for spending!

Vitus_Prem said:

Well that's better than we do with our Mythos house rule. And its better than most people do with a normal four player game. (See latest stats below.) So I can see why you would think cutting the Mythos in half would be too easy. I do slightly better than below and the vast majority of my victories are seals or closing. But I know I wasn't doing that well in normal 3 investigator games, let alone 2 investigator games--we had way too many final battles. The random Mythos works well for us. So unless we find your secret, I imagine we'll keep on with it.

There have been 1399 reported sessions:

62.8% were reported as victories:

459 Victories by seals
263 Victories by Final Combat
156 Victories by closing all gates
1 Victory by "For the Greater Good" mission

• Team size vs. % won by sealing gates:
1 3.6%
2 24.6%
3 27.3%
4 37.8%
5 30.3%
6 45.2%
7 20.0%
8 33.3%

It all boils down to that i like to explore for like 5 or 6 rounds and visit all the locations i want to and do some zany stuff having fun with it, i am not saying this is for everyone but it is more fun for me to explore then to focus on beating the game.

mageith said:

Hurm. Maybe it's 'cause we tend to play all expansions at once... and Joe & Ashcan make a great team. Joe can use his clue tokens to do anything that's needed while Ashcan's the one to re-buy "the king in yellow" or "the old diary" after Joe gained his clue tokens for reading them. Plus, Joe starts with 3 clue tokens to begin with, so you got a sealed gate in round 4. If we're not playing against a fast awakening GOO (like Y'Golonac), there usually is enough time to get the arkham hot spots stable by the time the doom track hits 9. From that point on, things go fast, but are manageble, if there's not a gate burst at a sealed location. If that happens, things tend to get a little ugly and make us pray to the gods of men for an elder sign ^^''

pittplayer said:

That's because you are essentially playing a 4-investigator game which is the optimized number of investigators for the game which usually allows for some exploration risk.

However 5-6 rounds per investigator is a lot of turns. Where do you go?

or why not keep everything seperated... when you have a encounter you roll a die and then draw from the expansions set the die roll comes up with...

1: base

2: CotDP

etc

Then you could have each investigator playing his own expansion That would be cool.