My friend and I are trying an Arkham Horror Campaign. It's the second time I've tried a Campaign but the first was using Dunwhich and two small expansions. This one is using Innsmouth and selected components from other expansions only and it's proving a lot more difficult ...

The rules we are following are simple:

We have two Investigators each (for a "four player game"); one of which is a total random selection from the pool of all 48 Investigators, the other is our choice of anybody we like. We then pick a random Ancient One from the total of 24 and play.

If we win, the Ancient One is placed in the Defeated pile and any surviving Investigators go on to the next game against the next random Ancient One. Any devoured Investigators are placed in the Devoured pile and are replaced accordingly (i.e. the randomly selected Investigator is replaced with another randome selection, the chosen Investigator is replaced with another chosen Investigator). If we lose the game, the Ancient One is placed back in the To Be Played Again pile and we get four new Investigators.

The idea is simply to beat all Ancient Ones once before we run out of Investigators.

And as I said, it's proving tricky ...

We've played 12 games so far and have won 9 of them. But we've lost 24 of the 48 Investigators!

The Dust Deck alone accounted for 4 Investigators in one game and we STILL lost, meaning we have to go up against it again later on. The Brood Tokens took out the best two Investigators in the game (both of whom only had 2 Brrod Tokens each) while leaving Amanda "Uselss" Sharpe alive with FIVE Brood Tokens at the end of the game. And as for Tsatthogua ... *grrrrr*

But I'm remaining positive and I reckon it's not quite as bad as the stats make out. For starters, we've taken out some pretty nasty Ancient Ones and have only 3 or 4 nasty ones left (including a rematch against Mr Dust Deck), while we've only faced 2 Ancient Ones I would describe as "easy" so far - most of the wimpier ones are still to come.

And even better, we've been avoiding using the really tough Investigators for the time being - saving them for later in the campaign when we're left with the rematches against Anicent Ones who've beaten us already. So Joe Diamond, Mandy Thompson, Patrice Hathaway, Daisy Walker and more have still to see any action.

Going to be playing some more games this evening, hopefully we can get that 9-3 score to 12-3. Hell, even 12-4 I'll settle for; just as long as we've cleared out half the Ancient Ones before sleep catches up with us tonight ... :-)

There was an old campaign style being developed on this forum by Millmaster up to the release of Kingsport, it was working out quite well, and you should probably look into it. You had to fight all the AOs in order and there was a campaign track which recorded the effect of previous games with scourge cards (my idea) that related to certain AOs. Look it up its likely still on BGG.

Stenun said:

That's nearly exactly the same campaign I played several times. The first 2 times I won, one I barely lost and the last, mostly against the Innsmouth board was devastating and very disheartening.

The games were with 3-8 players, though most were 4 and 3. If I played a solo game, I randomly picked investigators from those surviving. If I played with a group, I let those who wanted to pick their investigators from among those still surviving. So everyone who played was in the campaign, though they didn't necessarily know it.

You seem to be doing better in games won but you are apparently very hard on your investigators.