I'm not ready to play Dunwich by a long shot, so planning on integrating Injury and Madness cards when my plastic sleeves arrive.

But then I got to thinking I could add in the 'Arkham only' common and unique items, spells, investigators and AO's.

Any reasons why that would be a bad idea? Or am I trying to run before I walk?

Add the small cards and the investigators, and the Arkham encounter. They'll add variety and make the game a little more difficult (you dilute the Elder Signs in the UI deck, and you dilute the odds of gaining retainers at the Newspaper, Blessings at the South Church and so on)

Do not add the AOs: they are by ages more difficult than those in the core set. Try to win by sealing against all the AOs coming in the core set, then add to the mix the others

Julia's assessment concurs with my own.

But don't be dissuaded by the dilution of the Elder Signs in the unique deck. If you are truly going to go "all-in" down the road, you should become accustomed to not relying on the Elder Signs. They are a nice surprise, but unless you feel like separating out alllllll of the additional items/etc as you get more expansions, you will not be seeing many of them.

But then again, some people DO choose to separate out the extra cards. As was mentioned, this drastically decreases the variety of cards, and to me the glamour of Arkham is how infinitely variable the game is. You will literally never play a duplicate game... or even one that really feels like it if you are the kind of player that constructs stories around the cards you gain and encounter.

Thanks for this good advice I'll go with this and add what you suggest - just hope my sleeves come soon. I don't want to risk ruining my cards through impatience

Itching to play another game but as bad luck would have it Friday is the one day in the week I have to go into the office.....

But then again, some people DO choose to separate out the extra cards. As was mentioned, this drastically decreases the variety of cards, and to me the glamour of Arkham is how infinitely variable the game is. You will literally never play a duplicate game... or even one that really feels like it if you are the kind of player that constructs stories around the cards you gain and encounter.

You know, now you had me wanting to play again, but it's too darn late here. UGH.

Ezuna, Soakman said a great thing here: I played more or less 350 games with Arkham and expansions, and I still draw cards and read encounters that are new to me. And it's breathtaking.

Ezuna,

Just to echo Julia's and Soakman's sentiment ~ I've played more than 125 games over the past six years (this weekend) and still read cards never previously encountered.

Cheers,

Joe

Hey, Joe, you finally played Arkham?!!! CHEERS!!! So happy you finally returned to active play :) :)

I tend to be a bit rambling and don't quite know where to start this so if tl;dr, just skip to the bottom.

I am a completionist through and through, and so I couldn't stand idly by when expansion after expansion was released for AH. I've also been all-in when it comes to gameplay and integrated all new cards and rules straight after tearing the plastic off the most recent acquisition. So I can't really say when it happened, just that it suddenly did: shopping would reliably provide choices between useless items and all the monsters in the cup seemed to be toughness three.

Maybe we were simply unfortunate but we'd seen too many instances of the first gate spawning a Gug and a Cthonian, only to have the second spawn two Dark Younglings and the third a Moon Beast and a Flying Polyp etc. Frantically scrabbling for something to kill even one of those with, we'd hit upon various junk, tomes and missions.

Seeing as how we're mostly playing for the story and not very competitively, our group started a losing streak. To start with, it was fine because we weren't too bothered about winning anyway. After a while though, we realised we'd hit upon a pattern that wasn't going away and so something had to change or our enjoyment would simply peter out. In the end, I sifted through the monsters (whaddya know, at least half of them are toughness 3 or have really evil specials (I'm looking at you Lloigor)) and decided that of the hardest, bordering on demi-gods monsters, one was enough.

So, basically, we culled the monster cup a bit. At first, too much even, but later adding some of them back. We'll also add more for flavour, such as the full complement of Dark Young - if you have all the expansions, there's seven of them - when playing Shub-Niggurath, or all the Lloigors when playing Zhar, etc. In a way, we're cheating but in another we are not. The monster cup definitely gets tougher with the expansions and we were mostly looking to return to the original balance. An added bonus to culling was that the mask-monsters are suddenly as horrifying as intended and turn up with a frequency closer to what was originally intended.

The end bit: So, if you suddenly find that the monsters are overwhelming the forces of good, don't be afraid to take some of the ones from the expansions out of the game. Or, you could be a bit more discriminating when adding them in the first place.

I should add that since we are basically cheating, we are not submitting reports to the AH statistics.

Julia,

I return to AH this weekend after too long of a hiatus.

Ciao,

Joe