Hello everyone,

I picked up Arkham Horror last week, and spent some time browsing the forums here and reading up to learn the rules, and I've played a couple solo games to teach myself how to play (one with one investigator, and one with four), in preperation for teaching my friends this weekend. Most of my questions I've found already answered here, but I've run into a couple questions that I don't remember seeing. If I'm repeating any I apologize, but here we go:

1. During the final battle with the Ancient One is every investigator considered to be in the same location for the purposes of abilities, such as Carolyn Fern's Psychology, for instance?

2. During the course of the game are there any circumstances under which the investigator decks are shuffled? For instance, if a player is able to search through one of the decks for a specific item or an item of their choice, they would then know the order the cards are coming in unless the deck was shuffled afterwards. I don't see it mentioned one way or the other in the rules. For situations such as this do you search from the top or the bottom of the deck, assuming the answer is (as seems to be implies) that you don't shuffle.

And this one isn't a rules question, but what would you consider to be a good starting Ancient One for a group of new players? I'm going to be the only one to have played, and that only solo games.

Thanks in advance!

Joseph_Lavode said:

#1: Yes, rules state they can trade as if they were in the same location. Trading takes place in the Upkeep, ditto for Carolyn etc.

#2: No shuffling unless specifically mentioned. I do shuffle the decks after each search. There are also cards that allow you to remove cards from the Mythos deck, without reshuffling, basically giving you information on what gates will open, where and when. I do a reshuffle on those (very rare TBH) occasions as well.

Bonus: Azathoth has the least game effect, long doom track, no need to think about final combat. Nyarlathotep is another fan favourite, you get to add Masks in the cup, but very little other impact on the game.

Dam said:

We just name the card(s) if that comes up. If they then get drawn, they get returned then. Same if anyone ever managed Purifying the Town.

I see, thank you! We'll probably start with Azathoth then, and see what happens. And I suspect shuffling the decks after searching through them will probably end up a house rule, here. My sister, who I'll be playing with, has an obnoxiously good memory.

Thanks again!

I have another question, and rather than cluttering the forums with more topics, I figure I'll ask here if more come about.

Are there circumstances where a gate will open and a monster doesn't appear? Most encounters mention both "A gate and a monster appears!", but one of the encounters for Independence Square includes the line "... a gate opens here and you are drawn through it" but doesn't mention a monster appearing. It's the only case I've noticed browsing through the encounters where it is worded in this way.

Joseph_Lavode said:

Some *cough*Tibs*cough* feel that IS encounter is a typo and should've been a normal "a gate and a monster appears". I play it as written. Not a huge balance-swinger either way.

Thank you! And I'm back again.

For Ashcan Pete's scrounge ability when purchasing at one of the stores, can the player draw all 3 cards from the bottom of the appropriate deck, looking at each one before choosing?

And when playing with Kate Winthrop if you draw a Mythos card that opens a gate at the Science Building during setup, what happens? Do you choose another to have a gate open when the game starts, or do you just get lucky and have no gate, monster, or doom token on the first turn?

Joseph_Lavode said:

Sure thing for Pete.

That is what KW's (Kate Winthrop, not Kevin Wilson ) ability does. If you have IH, you add a DOR token, normally, nothing happens, though it is possible the Mythos card text adds monsters. For example "Museum Haunted" would bump Terror up by 1 and add 2 Ghosts to Misk. U Streets, making Kate's first turn movement options a bit limited, though would offer 2 Exhibit Items possibly.

And I'm back again. Thanks for being patient.

When Sister Mary is insane or unconscious in an other world, does she still lose half of her items and clue tokens? It seems like that would be the case but on her card it doesn't mention it.

Second question is can you voluntarily fail a skill check?

There may be more coming, I'm playing another solo game or two tonight. My friends and I lost our game yesterday, and it wasn't the smoothest game in the world either, with me teaching everyone. On the other hand they all said they want to play it again. My sister did say she isn't going to play Sister Mary again though. It went bad for her.

Thanks again!

Joseph_Lavode said:

Insane and Unconcious still happen, Mary doesn't negate those. What she does negate is LiTaS which results from going one of the two in the OWs.

Joseph_Lavode said:

Nope, if you have dice after the modification, you have to roll. Now, you can use certain skills to reroll a check you wanted to fail, but succeeded (Marksman, Stealth, etc.) but those don't come useful in this situation that often. In combat, you can decide not to use your weapons if you want to fail you combat check, Nightgaunt is the monster people normally do this against. Not using your weapons can also get you unconscious, so in the OWs you go LiTaS and can complete "Join the Winning Team" .

Back yet again with a question. On the turn an investigator returns from another world they do not have to evade or fight a monster at the location of the gate they return to. Can they choose to do so?

Just to add a little to whats been said.

When searching the deck for an item most people start from the bottom. You still know a lot of cards but you (usually) don't know what's on the top. Since discarded items go to the bottom of the deck this is important for not drawing discarded items over again (or in Ashcan Petes case reading an old journal again and again and again...)

Sometimes you can use alternative methods for failing skill checks. For instance auto failing a sneak check against a nightgaunt, Useing your bad stat to auto-fail a check to close a gate. However all other dice must be rolled as normal. if you still have some.

The turn you return from OW you do not need to deal with monsters on the gate. I think you can chose to do so if you wish but I might be wrong. Note that if you are in the 2nd part of an OW and during OW encounters get a "return to Arkham' encounter you have no choice but to deal with all monsters that have apeared on the gate on your following movment phase.

And another question. When drawn through a gate in the Arkham encounters phase you are delayed. Do you have an encounter during that turn's Other World Encounters phase, or not until the next turn when you stop being delayed?

Also, when you fail to evade a monster while moving through an area your movement ends. Can you use any remaining movement points for activating tomes, or anything else that might use movement points, or do you lose those as well?

Thanks again!

Joseph_Lavode said:

Delayed has no bearing on whether you have an encounter or not. So you get an encounter.

Joseph_Lavode said:

Failing to Evade removes your movement points. Smart play is to read Tomes etc. before trying to Evade. This works because you only Evade when you want to leave a space with a monster or end your movement phase sharing space with a monster.

Dam said:

So if you are drawn through a gate in that way you have 3 encounters in the other world?

Joseph_Lavode said:

Yep. Of course, if the Mythos is feeling like taking it easy on you, the Mythos card that turn could be "Strange Power Flux Plagues City!". Then again, the Mythos might sucker-punch you and the gate you opened in the Arkham Encounter phase is at the Indepence Square and the monster surge drops a bunch of nasty monsters on you that don't move away. So you're now back in Arkham with an Explored Marker, but are still delayed and will have to deal with a mob of monsters in the next movement phase .

I'm getting comfortable enough now to start thinking about expansions. I picked up the King in Yellow expansion, because I'm not quite ready to expand to more board sizes, but I had a question or two about the bigger expansions.

Which of the big box expansions would you recommend picking up first?

Also, is it possible to use any of the investigators or Ancient Ones from the expansions with only the base board, or are they too tied up with the expansion towns?

Thanks!

Joseph_Lavode said:

None of the GOOs are in any way tied to their expansion board. Of the investigators, only Silly Sally (aka Silas Marsh from IH) is weakened if you use only the base board.

hi welcome to the padded cells. Ink is not supplied, you must remove your nails with your teeth to write on these walls.

1) yes they are all considered to be in the same location.

2) There are many times when decks must be shuffled. Whenever you actually look through them, they must be shuffled. It doesnt realy matter how you look, except in cases where you must "draw the first X card from the X deck" (sometimes this will say "top of the X deck"). In these cases you should follow the instructions and turn over 1 at a time, discarding the rest. If a card says "search for a lantern" or whatever just dive in any way until you find it, then shuffle.

Consensus is Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are best as tutorial AOs. Azathoth has longest doom and no need to go through final battle, Nyarly is not too hard to defeat but time is minimal...

As for expansionism, I recommend you get Dunwich first if you want a harder game, Kingsport if you want one less hard (but still harder).

Hehe, dj2.0, did you miss the posts on page 1 ?

no, just wanted to welcome the newcomer, and HAMMER THESE ANSWERS INTO THEIR HEAD

None of the expansion AOs or investigators are tied at all to their boards. You can use any combination you wish. In fact, if your budget supports it, you can buy all three board expansions just for the AOs and investigators, and just ignore the boards themselves until you're ready to try them.

I'll give my two (three, four and five) cents:

• Dunwich brings a lot of cool everything. It has the biggest variety of new features. The AOs are harder than the base game's, and all the new unstable locations will guarantee that you're scrambling to get those gates closed, and kill the monsters in Dunwich before they enter any vortexes! The biggest problem with this expansion is that the Dunwich mechanic gets noticeably diluted if you add more than a couple other expansions.
• Kingsport, overall, is harder than Dunwich. All its AOs are harder even than Dunwich's. The board's threat mechanic, the rifts, are easier to prevent and safer to close than Dunwich's, but unlike how Dunwich's threat is based on any monsters that appear in town, the rift progress tracks just keep on filling and are a constant threat, and they never get diluted by adding other expansions! Plus, each rift is about as dangerous as the awoken Dunwich Horror itself--and there can be up to three of them! Oh, and while I'm thinking of it: the Epic Battle deck is a MUST have!
• Innsmouth is a solid expansion. However, it is the worst expansion to get first, for a number of reasons that I won't go into here. Innsmouth is also, by far, the hardest of all the expansions. Its AOs are all very tough, as well. If you do pick this one up, make sure you look into applying a house-rule for Patrice Hathaway. Trust me.

I recommend getting either Dunwich or Kingsport first (though I lean towards Kingsport, mostly because of Epic Battle), and get Innsmouth last.

dj is spot-on about Nyarlathotep and Azathoth being the best tutorial AOs.

King in Yellow was an excellent choice for first card expansion (it is the best). Just be aware that more than one other expansion mixed into King in Yellow makes the Next Act cards too infrequent to be a considerable risk. Consider using a house-rule or not using too many expansions with King in Yellow.

For now I don't plan on using more than at most one big and one little expansion together. I buckled and bought the Dark Pharoah expansion, and then buckled again and bought Dunwich and Kingsport. *ahem*

Black Goat of the Woods and Innsmouth are going to wait for holiday time, in the hopes that I can get someone else to buy them for me.

Anyway, as I start playing with these I'm sure I'll find more questions, but for now I'm going to ask for advice on storing the darn things. For you folks who have all of these how do you deal with it? Can anyone recommend a good way to store the cards? Especially the investigator cards? Are rubber bands going to cause any problems? Are there any convenient card carrying sets sized for them? The sheets aren't going to be an issue. Right now I have all the tokens of various types stored using the highly technical "ziplock bag" method, but if anyone has a better idea on those I'd love to hear it.

Speaking of tokens, how do you all keep your monsters from different expansions seperated, since they chose not to put an expansion symbol on them? Can you just keep all the non-spawn non-mask monsters in the cup regardless of expansion, or is that asking for trouble? It doesn't seem like the monsters are tied to their expansions, except the spawn monsters, and maybe the aquatic ones.

Yeah you can throw in all the monsters, and have no worries about incompatibilities with different expansions. As for sorting them, you may be able to observe slight differences on them (like tone of colour, thickness of border) which id them as being from a particular expansion. A teeny pencil mark may also help. If you dont care which specific token comes from which box, just use the list in the sticky threads here that tells you how many of each monster came with each expansion. I generally play all monsters, but remove them using these lists when i want to.

As to storage, knock yourself out, there are plenty of ideas around, try searching these forums and youll see quite a few threads, some with photos. Also, check out bgg (board game geek). They also have some good suggestions. Heres an example from the Innsmouth Horror forums there:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/3539842#3539842

Thank you, and back again.

Does Magical Immunity (or magical resistance) have any effect on spells that don't directly add dice to a combat check, such as Mists of Releh or Bind Monster?