After a 14 game winning streak, the wife and I were feeling pretty confident. "Are we just that good?" she asked. "I don't know," I replied, secretly thinking yes, "perhaps we just work better together and overplan compared to most people."
We'd just played two games in Dunwich with our new Dunwich Horror herald (surprised her with Miskatonic for her birthday) and found ourselves wanting one more game before the weekend was over. Time for a challenge we decided. Time to attempt Father Dagon and Mother Hydra together. We should have known better, that the Deep Ones had heard the cockiness in our voices and would have a surprise in store for us.
The starting draft wasn't too bad - Jenny, Silas, and Mark were chosen over Jim, Mark and Gloria. The final pick came between Harvey and Amanda, which was a tough call, but we decided to give Amanda a shot. The ancient one we drew was Nyogtha. The starting equipment was generous - both a sword of glory and a rifle were drawn, on top of some pistols and the fixed flame thrower Mark came with. On top of that, Amanda got Mythos Lore as a skill - things were lining up to make for a pretty decent run.
We like to play a house rule of giving everyone an initial encounter phase at their starting locations. It's the only way we ever see some of the location encounters - and half the time it ends up putting you a step backwards (one time Michael went to the Dreamlands and was devoured by Dholes before the game started). Luck was with us for the initial encounters as well, someone drew a spell, we pulled a few dollars and everyone else managed to pass their skill checks and avoid bad things.
So we pulled our first mythos card... Devil Reef. Not a great start with two Deep Ones Rising tokens already on the track, but with Silas at hand and a Dark Young jumping out, we figured we had a pretty good chance of containing it. The second mythos card Dagon brought us didn't even have a gate on it - at first I was happy, then I read the full text and realized what it meant...
"No gates open this turn but a monster surge occurs" - and every single dimensional symbol moving. The monster cup tried to be nice, offering up some cultists and a ghost, but in the end too much fell into the vortex and it was final combat before we even got to start. (I'm just now realizing that we played this in the wrong order, but since they were basically all cross and moons, we didn't have much of a chance anyway.)
Nobody had much luck with their rolls and after 4 turns and less than 20 minutes on the clock, the game was already over with everyone devoured. Disheartened by this set back, we of course did the only logical thing, reset and start a new game... But that's a story (and loss) for another time.
) - the first game was funny, but that second game was rough.