Interesting game earlier this evening.

Players: the Athlete, the Reformed Cultist, the Dilletante, and (in my case) the Engineer, who is one of my custom ones.

Ancient One: one of my custom ones, Baneb-Djedet. (During the game he's not very different to Shub-Niggurath - he increases monster toughness. But I was trying to get my group to playtest his final battle, whcih is an odd thing I dreamed up where you just fight waves of monsters, and every point of monster toughness killed knocks a success off the AO. Anyway that's not important.)

Playing with the base game, Curse of the Dark Pharoah, and of course a load of my custom cards from Cult of the Golden Scarab. My random items included a Gladius of Carcosa, and this investigator starts with Kerosene that he basically doesn't need to pay to refresh, so I was fairly well kitted out. On turn 1, I went to the newspaper in the hope of getting a retainer. This worked straight away. My plan was to buy basically the entire general store, because this custom character is particularly good when he's got loads of common items.

Things...did not go entirely according to plan.

Turn 2 somehow resulting in me getting blessed - I don't remember how, it was probably a custom encounter that someone else got. Then turn 3 brought up a custom environment which makes it impossible to move on the white movement paths. So I couldn't get to the store straight away. That didn't matter because I was waiting for money to accumulate anyway - I didn't want to draw an Elephant Gun and not be able to afford it. I went to pick up a clue token at the Unvisited Isle. Turn 4 sucked me through a gate to Rlyeh. The character has FIght 1-4 and Lore 1-4, so this was not encouraging. Fortunately, the first encounter I had was the Dark Pharaoh encounter which puts you in a one-on-one fight with Cthulhu.

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but fighting Cthulhu one-on-one in that encounter seems to permanently reduce your max sanity and stamina - you don't get it back if you win the battle. I wasn't sure if this was right, but this was how we played it. I also assumed that since I was implicitly getting mini-upkeeps between each round, I had to roll for my blessing. I attacked Cthulhu with six dice per round (fight 4, kerosene, gladius) and it took 6 rounds to get rid of all the doom tokens. I lost the blessing about halfway through. My character's San/Stam had been reduced from 5/5 to 2/2, but I won!

The rest of the game therefore presented an interesting challenge. It was no longer worth ever spending money at the hospital because restoring to full was exactly the same as gaining the 1 free point of healing. I killed some easy monsters until I could afford an Ally, then bought a custom ally called Clara Geddes (from my fan expansion) who gives +1 Maximum Sanity and draws you 1 exhibit item. I drew a really good weapon, so no longer felt the need to go shopping.

When the Doom track was at about 7, the Southside Strangler rumour started up. We thought it was worth doing, but there weren't enough clues on the board to get anyone up to a total of 5 clues. Then I remembered that my character had a secondary special ability that lets him give clue tokens to other investigators in the same location. I handed my two clues to the player playing the Dilletante. She had two of her own. She tried to get to the Graveyard to get the last clue. She stopped in the street to kill a cultist. A gate opened at the Black Cave and a Star Vampire moved on to her. She failed the horror check rather than waste the precious, precious clues. She drew the Injury card which stopped her ever having more than four clue tokens. Buggeration.

There was no hope of passing the rumour. The only clue token left on the board was at the Graveyard, so I snuck past the Star Vampire and went to get it anyway. On my way there, I passed by another investigator who gave me an Elder Sign because they were off doing a task and weren't going to use it soon. My encounter that turn got my Father Iwanicki, which was handy. Then in the Mythos phase, a gate opened under me to Yuggoth.

I got a serious of 'delayed' encounters so I was in Yuggoth for five goddamn turns.

When I emerged from Yuggoth, it was the last gate, and I was on 1 Stamina and 1 Sanity. The last act of the game was me getting myself devoured in order to seal the gate using the Elder Sign, and we won. The other investigators had amassed a truly heroic quantity of stuff, by then: the Athlete had fourteen monster trophies, the Reformed Cultist had four gate trophies, and the Dilletante had somehow acquired $33. The Athlete had only failed one skill check in the entire game.

In summary: pretty odd.