I played my first solo against Azathoth because I find him to be the easiest. Sure, you die if the doom tokens get to 14, but after while you experience more monster surges and no gate placements once you start sealing gates.

Anyway, I played Darrell Simmons, who's my favorite so far, pretty balanced. I was doing pretty well at the start, got a weapon, some spells, and an ally really early in the game. However, the terror track was giving me hell from the beginning. With the monster limit only 4, and so many gates, monster surges kept happening, throwing monsters in the outskirts constantly. It was hard to fight monsters and close gates by myself, especially in the period in the Otherworlds where I couldn't do anything about it. It ended up reaching 8.

Also, I cheated once.

I'm sure people can understand this, as a noobie player haha, but I drew the first rumor, struggled to close it out by myself, which ended up setting back my game tremendously. Toward the end I got a second rumor, and cried a little before I drew another card....

Rumors suck.

I went insane twice, but I ended up sealing my last gate as doom token track was nearly full. Thanks to an elder sign and my little cheat that is. :I Next time I don't think I'll go as 'easy' on myself as I did. But it was still a ton of fun!

The first plays are always useful to understand how the game works; you're right when you say Azzie is the easiest. No impact on the game, a very long doom track allowing you to make some mistakes and still have time to repair some of them.

If you don't mind a suggestion, even if you solo the game, try to play multiple investigators. 3 or 4 should be ok. In this way you'll see a lot more interactions, and you'll see better the importance of the phases structure in the game.

Happy you had a great time, Arkham is a fantastic game

I didn't know you could solo with 3-4 investigators. I think I'll try that. And maybe handle more than one rumor...

Yup, being the game fully coop, you can indeed assign multiple investigators to yourself If you just play one investigator, it's a mess and you generally end up fighting final battle. As soon as you have more investigators on the board, you can actually plan effective strategies and start winning for sealing / closing gates.

Let us know how it goes

Awesome! It'll be so much fun

The majority of my games have been 3-4 investigators played solely by me. If you want a bigger challenge, go 5 people as that then decreases the number of gates that can be open and increases the number of monsters.

I've only ever played with 3 total players before, so I might start off with three. I'll keep that in mind though. I can imagine this game getting pretty easy (base game, at least).

But how does one keep track of 3-5 players at one time?

Not so sure I understand your question (the first answer coming to mind is: you have the first player token to pass, or? but I'm not sure of what you're exactly asking). Mind rewording it?

For a solo game, is there a special trick to keeping track of all the characters by yourself? Or do you just have everything laid out - sorry for the confusion ! ^^;

Sorry, still don't get it (it's the "keeping track" part I don't understand - apologies, English is not my mother tongue). You give the first player token to one of the 3 characters, then you resolve the phases. For each phase, you perform the action specific of the phase for Character 1, then 2, then 3. Then the phase is over and you move to the following phase and repeat 1 to 3. After resolving OW encounters, you read and resolve one Mythos card. Then you pass the First player marker from Character 1 to 2, and repeat (and sorry if this was not what you asked)

It would be more difficult to keep track of 3 characters instead of one, yes, but it is manageable. You have all the information at your disposal, there is just 3 times more of this information. At least give it a try and see how it goes.

Have a look at some of the solo, multiple character play throughs on youtube, Rick Royals a very good one.