We were against Yig. Bob and Rita were dead. Gloria was about to die, and Wilson was soon to follow.

Yig had one hit left. By that I mean one success. Gloria had the Sword of Glory, and Wilson had two (!) Enchanted Blades and a Cryptozoology collection. Not like it mattered—Wilson had Endurance. A guaranteed added success, which meant a guaranteed win.

And then it happened:

"Finally, the strain was too great, and I collapsed to my knees, murmuring terrible words – my voice growing ever louder with every repetition – 'Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!'"

Bob and Rita succumb to the madness.

.... Why is that fun? I hate that ****, when you lose just because you were unlucky. It's like losing to Act3, which I also hate.

I thought Bob and Rita are DEAD?

Now that's epic stuff. Nice stuff, these '1 roll to rule them all'

I love epic battles, adds a bit more oomph to some of the older ancient ones, also I love the act cards, I always found that AH was too easy until I added KIY. KIY has always been my favourite.

Both of these things are awesome because when you do win its even better, YAY!

Thanks for the post Tibs

Knuckles Eki said:

...

Wilson and Gloria succumb to the madness. Thank you.

Gallagen--yes and yes! While I was equally amused and pissed off by my loss to End of Everything, I do love that card. However, it is not the first time I've drawn that as my FIRST red card >:-O

The Three Acts deck, at its most concentrated, is an excellent mechanic. You have to play the odds. "Is adding two doom tokens worth it? Will it sting me later?" Especially with the Epic Battle, where the final battle possibly induced by adding those doom tokens is particularly deadly, is the Three Acts mechanic an awesome force to reckon with.

Poor, poor Wilson. He had those great weapons from the game's start, but it seemed like he didn't know what to do with them: he hardly rolled more than two successes on any of his attacks. Look what you did, Wilson--you failed Massachusetts, and the world. You made little Wendy cry (blood). Nice going, jackass.

I wanna see if my four homemade characters can do similar thing, Francis is probably gonna mess up the group

If I'm recalling correctly, you're the one who uses the method of removing the "End of Everything" Card and a random Green Card from the Epic Deck and then roll dice to see which color of card you pick?

I've started using a variant of your method and it works great, but I was just wondering if you still use yours anymore? It seems a better way to play the Epic Cards and I commend you for it.

Claybo said:

You mean where you roll a d6 and take that card from the top, so that the red ones become more common as the game goes on, and if you roll higher than you have cards left, you lose (by end of everything)? Yes, I had that idea. But I've never used it

Sound like you had fun with it. I'll give it a go, now that I'm familiar with the green deck. I think I'll just remove one green card and put the EOE on the bottom. It's the same thing, but that way I don't have to memorize the text on it.

Well, you could try this:

When the Ancient One awakens, randomly discard 6 green Final Battle cards from the deck before starting the Final Battle. Reduce this by 1 card for every elder sign token you've got on the board.

KevinW said:

Ooooo! Please make this an official rules change. Please please please please ;')

I think I'll bump down the discard to 5 and add that as a house rule regardless.

When we noticed that the Final Battle was usually over before we reached any of the Red Epic Cards, we decided that it was a shame to not be able to utilize every aspect of the game. Plus, it was kind of lame to reread the same eight cards with every battle.

To fix this problem, we started shuffling the Green and Red Cards in the order of 2 Green, 1 Red, 2 Green, 1 Red, 1 Green, 1 Red, 1 Green, 1 Red, 1 Green, 2 Red, 1 Green, 2 Red.

It worked ok, I guess, but then I read Tibs' idea and we started using that method with a slight twist. We'd take a random Green Card from the deck, but keep the "End of Everything" randomly shuffled in the Red Cards instead of at the end of them.

Our first game was against Yig. We'd had the chance to stock up with the usual Blessings and weapons. Sure enough, on the 3rd round of combat we rolled a six. We flipped over the first Red Card and it was all over...the End of Everything. It was truly Epic! Sure, we'd had the same thing happen to us using the first method, but it seemed much more thematic this way with the Red Cards still coming after the Green but tending to show up at a quicker pace.

With the "End of Everything" card having a chance to show up sooner than you anticipate, it makes stocking up for the final fight far more riskier and tends to force players to win the game by sealing six gates. Plus, it makes the weaker GOO's much more fearsome.

With all that said, I absolutely love KevinW's idea. The more gates you've sealed, the easier the Final Fight. I just hope that people won't quickly seal two or three gates and then spend the rest of the game in the Curiositie Shoppe stocking up for the easier fight. I understand people play different ways and to each their own, I just get vexed when I'm playing with someone and all they want to do is just skip ahead to the Final Fight with a bunch of weapons. I think we are definitely in the Age of Instant Gratification.