Having a party saturday might have more than 8 people. I don't own any expansions yet. Is there an expansion or a way someone has made having more than 8 players at least semi balanced?

An 8-player game will be your party.

If not every person there has experience playing the game, I highly recommend you play something else.

Anyway the only advice I can really give is that you should not play a character and you should do a lot of the bookkeeping to keep the load off the other players and make it so that they only have to worry about decisions with their characters.

Everyone there other than maybe 2 have played but a book keeper isn't a bad idea. We're either gonna play arkham if we have the right amount of people if it's possible (they're all prepared to only play this game if we do arkham horror) or we're going to play other shorter games like Catan and The Resistance.

I don't mind sitting out and book keeping but if 9 other peole show up is there a balanced way to add one or two more players?

If you have couples coming, or good friends, suggest them to use one investigator every two people present at the party. This will make the gameflow a lot more fluid. Being the game cooperative, it should be fun regardless of each participant not having his own character

If you have couples coming, or good friends, suggest them to use one investigator every two people present at the party. This will make the gameflow a lot more fluid. Being the game cooperative, it should be fun regardless of each participant not having his own character

I like that idea. Thank you!

Glad I helped