Hey everyone!

We have recently tried to get back to AH with my friends and GF, and been having some issues. We own all the expansions, and keep all the cards and monster tokens shuffled together to make setup easier. However, we noticed that this way, we have almost no control over the difficulty of the game. It sometimes gets extremely frustrating, when we are playing the base game only, and draw a monster from the cup, which we have absolutely no means of defeating, and the game is essentially over in turn 2. I thought about separating cards, or simply redrawing any card that has a symbol of an expansion not in play, but many expansions (Kingsport, Innsmouth) also add basic Arkham encounter cards that reference no expansion specific game mechanism, and separating them would take a lot of variety away from the game. Granted, these encounters also seem to add a lot of difficulty. What have you guys found to be the best way to maintain variety in the game, while still having some control over difficulty? I'm also somewhat afraid of exponentially increasing setup and teardown time by keeping cards separate. What do you always keep shuffled together (weapons, spells, unique items, etc.) and what is essential to keep separate? (mythos cards, other world, etc.). Note that I'm not worried about dilution and sleepy boards, as we rarely play more than one expansion at a time.

Thanks!

Small items and encounter cards can stay together: they don't add difficulty to the game, and they add a lot of variety. As for the rest, I never play with all exp boards in (I did it, and found the game to be a lot less interesting and waaaaay too easy for my taste), but with 2 exp boards (one being always Kingsport, the other one being either Dunwich or Innsmouth) and 1 small exp tops in, to avoid theme being overly diluted, and have a good compromise on duration of the game and challenge.

As for the monsters: remember you can evade those you cannot fight, and closing matching gates is the key to removing them from the board. So far there are probably 2 or 3 very bad monsters in the game only (Dhole, Servitor of the Outer Gods, Moon Beast) so, it should be difficult to have the game ending because of them (and even if you pull them on round 1, then simply spend a couple of rounds giving one investigator the proper weapons, scoop a couple of clues and blast the dude to oblivion)

Thanks!Redrawing any mythos cards with an expansion symbol would also include the ones that actually do something on the vanilla board, right? I guess that's not an issue, as they tend to be more difficult with the gate bursts and double doom tokens Also, are miskatonic horror "double gate" mythos cards tend to be more difficult then the vanilla ones? On a sidenote, what do you usually do if, for instance, you play without dark pharaoh, but you draw an Arkham encounter card that refers to patrol markers. Do you redraw? Do whatever doesn't require DP.and ignore the rest? I'm asking because you said encounter cards are generally fine to keep shuffled in Thanks!

Yes, discard Mythos matching the symbols of the expansions you are not using, regardless of the board they target. And don't use Miskatonic Mythos unless you win a consistent number of games and want more challenge

I resolve Atkham encounters in their entirety regardless of which expansion they belong to

One thing to keep in mind is that Julia is a master player of this game. What she finds easy makes us mere mortals tremble.

As you suggested, setup and teardown suffer a lot from separating decks, so we usually keep everything added in. I know there is one player who made a list of all cards for all decks, numbered them and roll a D100 (or whatever D is appropriate) to determine which card is drawn. He keeps all cards sorted according to expansion and then alphabetically so they can be found quickly. There is a video explanation for his system on youtube but I forget what it's called. We're more old fashioned and keep drawing until legitimate cards are found.

Our gaming group usually resolves encounters regardless of expansions used, precisely to add variety. We tend to resolve mythos cards that are not specific to expansions not used as well. Something that more serious players frown upon but that we decided made the game more fun is to cull the monster cup. Typically, we add only one of each very tough monster (colour from outer space, starspawn, cthonian, etc.) since even if you can sneak them, they make your lives miserable. For flavour, we then add theme appropriate monsters back to the cup. Another thing we tried was removing useless items from the item decks and also the spell deck, although we later added everything back since it got a little too easy. Remember to keep seemingly useless items that are character specific if you choose to go this route!

There are lots of ways to make the game more forgiving. If you're not having fun you should adjust the difficulty as you like until the players get to know the game a bit better. If you focus on the story-telling aspect of the game more than whether you win or lose it is likely you will have a great time regardless though!