Hi,

First thanks to all that helped me get off the ground, but now after a few games I have a few observations that I would like an educated opinion on.

My wife and I played a few times, her with a Agency/Misk deck, and me with a Cthulhu/Shub deck. The first thing that we noticed was the balance, which could be luck of the draw. We found that during my control, most of her characters were exhausted, and vice versa. We had more than enough Story Phases that ran unopposed.

The biggest considerations was the Terror Struggle. My characters almost always contributed to the struggle, and if she had limited or no Willpower in play, sometimes it was better to let me run unopposed. Both of us tended to run all of the permutations of plays in our head and (Action phase aside, we both knew that a well placed "Event" could change matters) make the play that yielded the optimal success tokens. Maybe we just need to get some more games, different deck combinations. It became less a "Chess" game and more a "Checkers" game.

A few specific questions arose:

1) Support cards - Do the stay attached (Excluding card effects) to the character throuhout? Do the go insane with the character? Are the discarded if the character is destroyed?

2) Wound tokens - Does a refresh phase wipe them off? Do they stay with you when you go insane?

3) "Short Fuse" - Give a character 7 wounds? How often does that card fail to destroy the character? With Toughness +2 you are dead after 3 hits.

Overall we like the game and are going to try some other deck combinations. Not knowing the nuances of the factions, perhaps there are some opinions? And any other game strategy opinions are more than welcome.

Happy Gaming!

Brian

Hi, again Brian, glad you are having some fun.

Regarding terror causing stories to go unopposed, there are two things to think about.

A) You might want to make each deck from one 'human' faction and one 'cult' faction, so both sides have access to terror, at least for a few games.

B) Often in such a situation, I consider committing multiple characters to defend a story even though they are vulnerable to terror. Send along a character for the very purpose of going insane if there will only be one terror struggle. Then your other characters still might be able to effectively defend during the combat, arcane, investigation and skill struggles. You MUST consider characters more or less "expendable" in order to defeat your opponent.

1) Support cards - Do they stay attached (Excluding card effects) to the character throughout? Do they go insane with the character? Are they discarded if the character is destroyed?

Attached Support cards go to the discard pile when a character is destroyed or goes insane.

2) Wound tokens - Does a refresh phase wipe them off? Do they stay with you when you go insane?

Refresh does nothing to wound tokens. If your character has a wound token and goes insane, it is usually destroyed, as insane characters are considered to have a blank text box, therefore they lose toughness. Wound with no toughness -> into the discard pile.

3) "Short Fuse" - Give a character 7 wounds? How often does that card fail to destroy the character? With Toughness +2 you are dead after 3 hits.

Yah, Short Fuse is awesome, and generally only invulnerability will protect a character from short fuse. In constructed-deck play it would be possible to have a character with 7 toughness but most characters are expendable, so it is unlikely to be worth it.

Please continue to ask questions, and I hope you will have EVEN MORE fun.

Chick

Didn't I already answer most of these questions in the "Rules Discussion" sub-forum?

Anyway:

1) As chicklewis noted, when a character goes insane all cards attached to it are destroyed. If a wounded character goes insane (or if an insane character is wounded) that character is immediately destroyed. If a character is destroyed then all cards attached to it are destroyed. If a character is just wounded (but sane), its attachments are ok. If the character is neither insane nor destroyed it keeps its attachments until a game effect specifies otherwise.

2) As chicklewis said, wounds do not go away on their own, and any character with wounds who goes insane is immediately destroyed.

3) There are characters out there (at least, in the CCG) with Toughness +5 and access to additional Toughness or wound-cancelling effects. It is, however, quite handy against your average non-invulnerable Ancient One or similarly tough critter (or G-Men).

You will win more games, usually, if you consider your characters like pawns and are willing to sacrifice a few (or many) in order to advance your overall strategy. This is in keeping with the theme of the literature, where monsters are sacrificed by their masters as they deem necessary and the poor, human investigators are lucky to survive a single encounter with the Mythos without losing their wits or dying.

Oh, and for the ultimate response to Short Fuse , in the CCG Shub had a 2-cost event, Cannot Be Stopped with the text: Disrupt : cancel any number of wounds. Then, draw a card for each wound cancelled in this way.

yes, in fact i see i duplicated my questions in another forum. bad form on my part, but thanks for the great infomation.

we may try different mixes of factions, but since we got to know the cards a little bit, we are going to stick with the faction mixes we have for a few more rounds.

any recommended faction combinations?

is it common to "pass" and not commit any characters to a story? it seems like early in the game when you may only have one or two characters in play, you cant really afford to expend one, if you know you are going to fail a terror struggle.

i've read some strategies on how to stock your domains initially, but what are your early game strategies on domain loading and early play?

thanks for the help

brian

I'll let others comment on LCG faction combinations and domain loading (since most of my experience is with the CCG), but with regards to 'passing' at stories - my attitude is that stories are the key to winning the game and if you pass then there'd better be a very good reason to do so.

For example, if you have a milling deck and reckon you can win before your opponent, then all you need to do is slow them down 'enough'. If you have a Patsy you're happy to sacrifice to remove the success tokens your opponent will score with their unopposed story (and opposing would cost more than the Patsy ), leave 'em to it. If you have a Seduction of the Tombs and Professor of Archaeology in hand and are planning to play them next turn then you can ignore your opponents' run at the story so long as they won't win it. It's all contextual. If, however, you have no means of rendering their success tokens meaningless by winning the story/game yourself then I'd recommend opposing them and slowing them down so that your chance to win will emerge.

IMHO. Of course, there's no point wasting characters so if your troops will all be gone after the Terror and Combat struggles then you've been outplayed and will have to make the best of a bad situation in later turns.

P.S. Again, I don't know LCG factions nearly as well as CCG (yet), but in the old game Agency worked well with almost everyone (esp. Syndicate and Shub, I think) and I always liked Cthulhu-Haster although it took me ages to figure out a decent deck for them. Yog-Shub and Yog-Misk had merit, Cthulhu could be partnered with Syndicate, Agency, Misk or Shub with ease. In the LCG, I really don't know.

Brian asked: "is it common to "pass" and not commit any characters to a story? it seems like early in the game when you may only have one or two characters in play, you cant really afford to expend one, if you know you are going to fail a terror struggle."

Yes, it is pretty common in that situation, but very unpleasant for the 'passer'. You would, as you point out, only 'expend' a character if you gain some advantage from doing so.

If, for example, you have only one character, then there is no sense in committing him to certain insanity or fatal wounding.

If you have two characters, and one has combat and investigation, it would probably be worth it to commit them, send the less useful one insane, win or tie the combat struggle, win the investigation struggle, and prevent your opponent's 'unopposed' success token.

All a question of judgement, situation, and timing. And in this game such decisions are seldom easy.

Chick

chicklewis said:

Why? All the info is public, so unless you have relevant events tucked away, the outcomes are known. Which leads to either rounds of defensive stagnation (the active player can't win, as the defender will commit fully) or unopposed stories (the active player knows he can't be opposed).

I'm not experienced with this game (only a couple of games so far), but I was expecting more competition for each story, and more nuanced story resolution.

waddball got it mostly right. Another common instance are suicide blocks, when the defending player trades chars for time, if he thinks it is possible to take advantage of such a situation, later.

I noticed that suicide blocking requires >1 character to commit (b/c if he goes insane or is wounded, the story is unopposed). That seems odd to me, as it reduces your available options and encourages more unopposed stories.

I guess I'm mostly struggling with getting my head around what this game is really about. I thought it was more a tug of war over stories, but it seems like in practice it's more "choose your battles" and avoid the other player until that third story is about to be taken. I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that was just my off-the-cuff impression (and it wasn't favorable). Love the theme and the resource mechanism, but the way stories work seems like it's a lot more about draw timing than actual decisions.

Waddball, new players often feel the same way you do. After five more games, additional subtle choices may become apparent, and the story stuggles may become much more tense and engaging. I know that is the way it worked for me.

Chick

waddball, your comments put me in mind of the way I felt about the CCG from when it was just starting out until the Forbidden Relics expansion. With limited card pool and strategic options, the main source of 'surprise' was Events and not interesting or unexpected combinations of effects in play. By the time the CCG ended, the large number of optional effects on the table in the early-mid game meant that a certain amount of anticipation and double-thinking was necessary during the game, enhancing the strategic and tactical challenge.

So, I think the LCG is still in its early stages with a limited card pool and has a lot of room to grow (back) into the game I rather enjoy. Like any good tactical game there shouldn't be an obvious 'best' move but a range of 'good' moves - meaning that your opponent can't anticipate exactly how matters will develop. Right now, the LCG doesn't seem to offer much of that in an average game (hence the comment that Events are the only surprises), but more cards with intertwining effects should fix that in due course... I trust.

Thanks, guys, that's all good to hear. From the perspective of looking for more "in game" decision points, are there any particular asylum packs I should favor over others? Seems like with all the packs that have come out, some of what you're describing should have emerged.

I must confess that while I've been buying three of everything LCG, I have done very little playing with those cards. I'm still using the fourteen-or-so decks I put together in the CCG days (supported by a ridiculously large card pool) and waiting for the LCG to mature enough that deck-building with its card pool feels less robotic. Sorry.

Ancient Horrors is all characters.Mountains of Madness has a bunch of mostly trash Polar events. Once you get in to the summons cycle, things get more interesting. There is an events in each of the first four packs that cause an extra story of a type to resolve at a story. So that extra blocker they sent to go insane isn't enough, as your event makes two terror struggles happen. A couple of the packs have a card that lets you win a story immediately if you win a particular type of struggle by three or more icons.

And once you start getting these packs, you will start getting 10 cards in each pack that come in a quantity of three. These then will become the key cards in your decks, (assuming you only got one core set, which it sounds like). The current cycle is introducing the Day/Night mechanic, and the Dreamer subtype, which may end up adding a lot, but hasn't yet, with only one pack out there so far.

Don't forget that Mountains of Madness has the rather good card Alaskan Sledge Dog of which many decks want 8 copies...

Sledge Dogs, Snow Graves, Elder Things, Shoggoths, Yetis. Don't believe the hype. Mountains compares. First LCG after four Asylum Packs. First white borders, polar region.

We had 1,300 cards. We have 335 LCG cards - 155 Core reprints and 180 Asylum Pack cards. I think it would take five more Cores (~900 reprints total) to resemble the old game. It think it'll take thirty more Asylum Packs, that's six hundred more new cards (780 cards), to make a fleshed out new LCG world. One with only few key core reprints needed in a deck. Thirty more AP. That's three to five years! I plugged in the data above to my old red merlin game, and it comes up all nine dots blinking.