Well, the topic says it all. I have just got the black goat of the woods expansion but haven't played it yet. But a quick glance at the new cards gave me the impression that you basically have nothing to gain by joining the ""One of the Thousand" cult. Am i wrong here?

Now to question two. Is it just me or are the game boards getting a little to big/requiring too much space. I'm having trouble fitting all the cards, investigators and game boards (i have all the expansions) on a large dining room table. With the (hopefully) upcoming Innsmouth expansion you would have to live in a castle to be able to play with all the expansions at the same time. Would anyone but me be interested in buying a set of smaller game boards for the times when you don't have enough space to use the "regular sized" ones?

Yes their is a point to join...because its cool and the theme of the expansion...sometimes good thing happens "rarely" moslty horrible wet things happen to your pooor investigator and yes that is your blood!

Just punt extra cards on the board, floor, on top of one another...buy a tower to punt the cards on...there is something and you will find.

Though the cult encounters do seem questionable at first glance, only 25% of the encounters are purely detrimental. The encounters at the black cave, unvisted isle and woods are usually pretty bad anyways, but with the cult membership you'll probably get a lot of clue tokens and a lot of corruptions, so it's a double edged sword. As for the boards I usually only play with one expansion board at a time, so changing to that policy will get you more table space.

::Sigh:: I went over this on the old forum in detail... I'll just sketch it out vaguely. The vast majority of encounters after you're a member of the cult are positive in effect. Also, one of the points of joining the cult is to gain corruption. While too much corruption can be crippling, a few of the green corruption cards can be extremely beneficial. It's somewhat dangerous, but if you're playing with three or four investigators, it can be very useful to have one of them with several corruption cards (try to use gate closing to rid yourself of the ones you don't want. Heh... Even the search for milk card turned out to be useful in conjunction with time bomb (or better yet flute of the elder gods).

Let me reply to the question about space for the game materials.

We have a standard-size card table for the main board. There's also room for us to place our player materials along the edge.

We have two expansion boards, Dunwich and Kingsport. Each is on a separate TV tray, placed so the annex boards are immediately adjacent to the main board on the card table.

This works fine for us. If more exansion boards are necessary, we will probably just get out another TV tray.

One problem, however, is that some of the locations on the annex boards get so far from the player, we have to stand up and walk around the table to either read the wording on the location, place or move a player, or place a token such as a monster token or clue token.

No question -- it is getting a little difficult in terms of size.

We gave a demo of the game about two years ago at a public library. Those big library tables -- as in the reading rooms etc -- are perfect.

Thanks for all the replys guys!

I guess i'll have to join a cult the next time i'm playing if it actually can be benificial to the players. It just felt like the investigators have enough on their hands with all the gates, rifts plus the dunwich horror and king in yellow lurking in the wings. But so much of the game is based on the torture of your poor investigator that it would almost be a shame not to let him/her join the cult to make things even worse.

I realize that there are several ways to handle all the cards and gameboards. Its just that i wanted to find a way so that i wouldn't have to rearrange the furniture everytime i play, or bring contraptions with me to manage all the cards. So i thought that smaller game boards would be the easiest way to solve the size of the game. But in the end all the trouble of setting up the game is definetly worth it!

Things that you can do to maximize the space on the table:

-encounters card could be placed in their neighborhood. Moreover, one post in the old forum highlighted how mixing encounters card from 3 nearby together wroked surprinsingly well. (basically you have 9 neighborhoods, so 3 decks of 3 neighborhood each mixed). In this way, you flip over cards as in the Other Worlds deck, until you find a neighborhood card corresponding to your current location. This saves a lot of space and besides automatically shuffle the cards.

-Business card or brochure holders (I've seen a few pictures I think on Boardgamegeek, never tried them though).

I agree that two boards or more means a lot of space. I think there is no solution for that, but to get two tables. On the other hand, it's a good excuse for a few stretching exercise moving around the table

I had the same reservations towards joining the cult when browsing the encounter cards. I mustn't have read enough to realise that they were on the whole beneficial.

I still think it's something of a gyp though. If I'm going to sustain the risk of corruptions and have the additional, non-gate-removable hexagon monster threat, I think there ought to be more of a tactical advantage to joining. Our house rule for our present game is simple: members of the cult are put on default friendly terms with the Black Goat's spawnlings, meaning all hex monsters become elusive to that character. Cult members are thus a little more flexible in that they don't necessarily have to fight the powerful and plentiful hex beasties continually pouring out of gates.

Criswell said:

That... Kindof defeats the point of the ramped up difficulty. Sure, if you want things to be easy, go ahead ;') Personally, I'm never going to use that herald unless I'm in a 5+ player game.

::Shrug:: the problem with your variant is you avoid gaining multiple corruption cards for your characters.