Hello,

Considering the new options that allow for gate seals to burst, does Kingsport Horror prolong the game too much? This is a concern from a buyer's view, since I seldom find the time to complete AH games because of their lenght...

Would anyone know where I could find such information?

Howdy,

Dunwich and Black Goat of the Woods also contains these gate burst cards, so they are not Kingsport specific. When I play I have only had about 1 or 2 of the gate burst cards come up so I don't think they will interfer that much. If you are really worried then you can always take them out.

I've been rarely getting games over 2 hours since using DH (which as previous poster mentioned has gate bursts, in fact, it introduced them). Granted, these days, running everything but KH, bursts are a bit more rare, but still a constant worry.

Then again you get the occasional:

-seal Graveyard

- same turn Mythos phase: gate burst at Graveyard

- drudge my way back to Arkham and close gate

- later on, new gate at Graveyard

- seal Graveyard

- same turn Mythos phase: gate burst at graveyard (fixed deck, fixed deck!!! at least that what I was thinking)

I don't think Kingsport prolongs the game much. Not any more than any of the others. In fact if you ignore Kingsport while it's in play it'll make the game much quicker... In that you just get overwhelmed almost imediately.

Considering gates don't open in KH I'm going to say no.

If time is a issuse play Yig or start the game with some gates alreayd sealed.

I never thought AH was long as game time, It can be awsomley fast or pretty slow as a medium amount of time, but never an epic time like TI3 or WOW:TBG

I'm gonna go with, "Probably not."

If you ignore Kingsport and just let it happen, charging into it whenever necessary to close a Rift, your game will probably last about the same.

If you send a player to be the Kingsport Sentinel, spending his own mini-game chasing down Rift Progress markers, your game might take a bit longer since your Gate-Closing team will essentially be one player short. But in the long run, I doubt it will make that much difference.

Of course, keep in mind this is ON AVERAGE. As with any AH spread, some games will just be surprisingly quick, and some games will be arduously long.

I found that it did in the first game, but afterwards we "got" the rythem of Rift progression and knew when and when not to go after Kingsport which settled the game time back to normal running time. Though the epic final battle is oft very quick indeed...

Dunwich actually made the game faster anyway, Injury and Maddness cards allow Investigators to bounce back much faster than normal, rather than loosing equipment and then spending a turn in Asylum/hospital to get higher than one san/health.

Kingsport doesn't really slow down the game, if you ignore the rifts it will speed the game up ( which can be a good thing if you just want to fight the GOO)

I liked rifts in kingsport, and because i am generally a solo player (1 investigator) I love the tension it adds to my games

I don't find that it slows the game any. As one of our illustrious posters indicated, the first time I played KH, getting used to the new mechanic slowed things a bit. After that, no worries.

I play with my sons every other week, and find that the games go fast when we focus on playing and slow when we spend time goofing around and making jokes. Funny how that happens!

Interesting feedback, thanks! I usually play solo (my friend group is all made of parents, such as I) but I did notice, with DH, that taking care of the rifts did consume a bit of energy. I think I'll playtest KH a bit before acquiring it, noticing the price tag. But I love the concept of Arkham Horror's towns...

My group normally plays withi all 5 expansions and I've found that games will only take over 1.5 or 2 when we are playing while making jokes, telling stories, socializing and all that. But if we just stick to playing the game, it can take us only an hour or so.

It depends on your goal and how many players there are.

As others pointed out, if you are OK with defeating the GOO in the final combat, the final combat can come sooner.

If you want to seal or close, you can do that with ignoring Kingsport all together. Since I usually play 4 player games, we find ignoring Kingsport is quite viable. I've never had more than doom token appear as a result of Kingsport. If the rift comes early, we will send one player to close it. It will take 10 or more turns for a rift even to appear and then it only spits out a doom token every sixth turn or so. The average game is around 20 turns. A bad day will be two additonal doom tokens. I've never had a bad day yet.

You still have to contend with the occassional gate burst. To reseal a gate burst takes up to 8 turns for one player. (5 to collect clue tokens and 3 to go through the gates and come out and close and seal.) I've never had more than three in one game and I'd say less than one is my average for gate bursts.

Some (many?) players consider a final battle to be merely a draw, however.

If you have 5 or more players, I'd probably want to have one player up in Kingsport control. No additional doom tokens is better than one additional doom token.

@silenceindigo: You've mentionned that you usually play solo games. I found that playing with Kingsport Horror with a single investigator is very hard, since you just can't do Rifts duty in Kingsport and still be at the top of your game for all the stuff happening in Arkham proper and the need to visit Other Worlds. If you play alone, I would suggest you use 2, 3 or even 4 investigators.

Acebob said:

I'm mostly playing solo with 4 investigators and I've never had a game take less than about 2 hours. I mean, setting up the board(s) alone takes me almost half an hour!

The longest game I've played yet took almost 7 hours... and that was using the first three expansions, only.

I've only recently acquired The King in Yellow, so I don't have statistically relevant data yet, but I had the impression that adding it speeded up the game (mainly because of the double doom markers to avoid Act I from happening...).

I'm going to slightly disagree here and say, "It sometimes can."

If the gate bursts never come up (in such a way as to burst a gate), your game of course won't be effected. It might go slightly faster, because they give you extra clues.

However, I find that if it does burst a gate, it can set the game back about 15 minutes, depending on the speed of your group (this varies wildly I'm sure).

If you make sure to keep constant gate-closing pressure, it shouldn't be too bad. What I mean by that, is that even if someone's hopped in a gate to seal gate #6, if someone has 5 clue tokens, they should go in too, just in case something goes wrong (this is good advice in general, even without Gatebursts.)

For about 5 to 6 weeks, I used base game plus Kingsport Horror, with the occasional smaller expansion. We scored a victory by seals every time, which is somewhat of an indictment of the expansion in itself.

To the question, though, does Kingsport Horror prolong the game. It does seem that gate bursts tend to slow the game down, while the double-doom-token Mythos cards tend to speed it up. The last game we played before I removed Kingsport featured three gate bursts toward the end of the game. It added about 45 minutes to the game. And a tiny bit of tension. But we scored yet another victory by seals.

We also had a rift open for the first time, as a result of a Mythos card, and it was underwhelming. It made me wonder why we always stationed an investigator in Kingsport for rift duty, which Dam described in another thread as lame/boring/thankless. Perhaps the reason was the menacing description of open rifts in the KH rulebook. So Mageith's statement that ignoring Kingsport all together is quite viable appears to be true.

But what does that say of the expansion itself? It just seems to water down (pun, unfortunately, intended) the AH experience. I'll use investigator's, GOOS, investigator cards, heralds, but that's about it.

I think the fundamental problem of this expansion is that none of its locations are unstable. So investigators go to Kingsport out of a sense of obligation to prevent something lame from happening as opposed to accomplishing something that will increase their chance of victory. Plus, open gates spewing out monsters are what generates AH's tension.

Foxburr said:

As I've said many times before, Kingsport will be considerably more tense when Innsmouth and stronger aquatic monsters are introduced. As for the base game plus KH... Ewww... Kingsport doesn't really add to difficulty much (although some of it's AOs and the epic battle cards do). All it does is make you need about 1/2-3/4th of an investigator to handle exploration there. Dunwich is considerably more entertaining in my opinion. And BGotW with the herald is probably the easiest way of toughening your game. Kingsport is an expansion, not a considerable challenge. Innsmouth will change that a little ;') GAHHHH! I CAN'T WAIT FOR INNSMOUTH! ::Tries to find and eat Dam::

Avi_dreader said:

What do we know about Innsmouth?

We only know what we suspect. ::Tries to eat Quizoid::

Avi_dreader said:

::scampers up tree::

Quizoid said:

::Tries to eat tree::

Quizoid said:

Aquatic movement will be more prominent, and Bokrug is an Ancient One.