We find the "personal challenge" cards a bit perplexing for the Rookie Cop, Tommy Muldoon. These are new cards that arrived with the Innsmouth Expansion set.
In order to attain his personal challenge, Tommy has to be devoured before doom token #6 is placed. If he loses his challenge -- e.g., is still above the ground at this point -- he loses one maximum sanity. Since he starts with 6, this just means he is now maxed at 5. In other words, the reward is awful, and the punishment is just a wrist tap,
If Tommy succeeds (gets devoured), he is gone, of course ------- the investigator the player next takes will have a bonus of 5 additional clue tokens added to his starting items list.
We find this rather perplexing from a viewpoint of game strategy, since this "succeed" card seems more negative than his "fail" card. Most of us would probably prefer to fail this one.
Second question: Suppose the player who has Tommy Muldoon decided to "succeed" in his challenge -- e.g., get himself devoured. Unlikely, but -- what the heck. What are some good ways to get yourself devoured? One possibility ---------->
One of the new monsters that came with Innsmouth Expansion states, "you are devoured if you fail your horror check." I suppose a person could deliberately move their focus slider to minimize their will, and refuse to use any bonus card to enhance the will check. Thus they could pretty much succeed in getting themselves devoured.
Does anyone else find it rather weird how the game designers set this up for Tommy Muldoon -- or is it just me?