Hey folks,

I was pondering whether or not my strategy for the base game could use a bit of tweaking. I ask because I noticed in the statistical reports that the majority of wins come from sealing 6 gates. Of the games I've tracked, however, the vast majority of my wins come from closing all gates on the board.

So here's what I tend to do: I tend to play with four investigators now. I start off by seeing who can seal a gate the soonest. I get them the last clue tokens they might need then wait for one of the high volume gates (Witch House, Unvisited Isle, etc) to open. I send that investigator through and they seal it up. If anything else should open in a low volume area (Hibb's, Historical Society, etc) I send anyone available through to just close it and get it out of the way so I don't get close to the gate limit. Anyone who isn't sealing a gate in the first 3 or 4 turns is either stocking up on weapons or gathering up clue tokens. If someone is really stuck with nothing to do, I send them to a location for an encounter - maybe for a retainer at the Newspaper or something similar.

Usually I get to a point where I'm not sure how the game is going to go: either I get a lot of monsters and start having problems, or gates keep popping where I haven't sealed them and the doom track gets close to filled. Assuming I don't lose, what usually happens is I seal 3-4 gates; by that point though I've slowed things down and may only have 2 gates open, and don't get any more opening for a few turns. Usually then I just send whoever is close to the gates to zerg through them and try to close them up asap while everyone else gets ready for back up in case they fail. At that point, either unlucky rolls screw me over and the doom track fills or I get to close the last gate or 2 and I win.

So how does it look? Should I be more concerned about sealing gates? Like I said, I usually go for the high traffic areas and don't seal any of the others until those are taken care of - unless I have an abundance of clue tokens or get a couple lucky elder signs. Should I think about just sealing anything that opens to try to get 6 done as fast as possible?

As always, I appreciate the help

Oh P.S - I specified the base game because I'm only playing with that and CotDP right now. I figure with other expansions your tactics and strategies change a lot.

I can't say your strategy is wrong, but possibly it needs a finer tuning.

The game is about sealing 6 gates. It doesn't matter whether these are at high freq or low freq locations, it's enough that you have 6 down on the board. So, it's correct saying that you won't waste time in closing Indep Square or other major locations, but you don't need to wait for those to open to attack the board. Be aggressive. As soon as you have 5 clues, send the first investigator into the first gate available and seal. Be it Hibb's or the Woods, it doesn't matter, it's a seal.

Once you have 5 clues, the priority for picking a gate (in general) are:

- check what gates can you reach by spending your movement (if you need 2+ turns to reach a gate, you're wasting time)

- check whether you can actually enter the gate (i.e. defeat or evade the monsters there); if you cannot, return to the previous point and choose again

- if several options are available, hit the high freq one

Hope this helps

J

That's about what I figured. I think I worry too much about having enough clue tokens later in the game, so I hesitate to start sealing the gates that may only open once. But I get your point: I don't need to focus so much on the high frequency gates if I can just seal up 6 as fast as I can. My mindset was more like "let me just close Hibb's instead of sealing it, because it will probably never open again this game. Then I can use the clue tokens I would have spent on that to seal a gate on the Witch House, because I know that's going to open another time or 2 for sure". I guess I was more worried about closing gates for the sake of monster control and not having the doom track fill up too fast. The next time I play, I'm going to try sealing everything I have a shot to seal. Thanks for the advice

Always happy to help

Additionally: there are 11 unstable locations in the core game. If you always seal, and never close, you can wake up only Yig or Nyarly because of doom increase. If you instead risk, and close Hibb's, then if it opens again it's like a potential 12 to the doom track. Much scarier.

As a general rule of thumb, close only when you're close to losing by gate limit reached and you have no way to seal gates. Or you can close when you know you'll score a victory by closing gate (that's why is very important that if you cash trophies, you start by cashing monsters, having stockpiled gate trophies could mean victory over defeat)

Ahhh I see. I never stopped to think about it, but yeah if every gate only got to open once, it would only wake Yig and Nyarlatothep. Can you explain why it's better to use monster trophies over gate trophies though? I'm not understanding it yet. The only reason I can think of is so that it keeps harder to close gates like R'lyeh out of circulation so you can't get them again.

When you go for a victory by closing gates (so, technically speaking, you don't need any seal on the board, even if in most of the cases you'll have a few nonetheless), you are asked for:

a) that there are no open gates on the board

b) that the investigators, as a group, have a total number of gate trophies equal to the number of investigators playing (e.g., playing with 4 investigators means 0 open gates and a minimum of 4 gate trophies)

If you spend gate trophies instead of monster trophies, you risk that when condition a) is triggered, you don't have enough gate trophies to trigger condition b) as well, hence, victory conditions are not triggered.

Clearly, I would not spend a Dhole trophy (killing that thing is challenging, especially with core game items only), but as general rule of thumb, unless I already have in my possession N gate trophies, I cash monster trophies first.

Hope it has sense, it's 1 AM here and I had quite a week

Ohhh that's right. Lol I swear I knew about that rule, I just forgot about it while I was typing that last post Thanks Julia

Welcome