After having read over the rules for the expansions and recently played the base game twice recently, I think I realize why Sands of Al-Kalim is so highly regarded and why I believe Frozen Wastes will be too. When I played the base game with several friends recently a couple of them had real difficulty getting any item or ally cards and keeping said cards even though they weren't doing anything wrong. With Sands and FW, You have options to get items and allies other than hoarding your gold and hoping you don't get knocked out, and are pretty much guaranteed to get a few items/allies at least. With Sands, you have the quest rewards and with FW you have the legendary items and the clue tokens. This way it lessens the feeling of getting constantly screwed over if you have a run of bad luck. The two times I recently played it, once I played with softer knockout variant and once with normal KO rules. One way seemed way too easy, the other seemed way too harsh. I have been thinking of using a house knockout rule where a random item/ally is lost and if you only have one item/ally, you don't have to discard it, but keep the losing all your gold. Feedback welcomed/encouraged.

I think I'll steal the random item/ally loss from that. I've been playing with just losing all your gold but I think the option of choosing will make it more interesting.