Can you guys give me a suggestion on making a full on Arkham Horror experience for veteran players? I'm refering to what expansions or cards from which expansions to add. I already put in the madness/injury cards, I mixed all the investigator cards already, I'm using all the Investigators and Ancient Ones, I'm using the Herald and Guardian mechanic. What else? Others seem to ignore all 3 of the small boxes. I want to involve all the expansions as much as possible.

Add in the King In Yellow - by far the best expansion. However, if you are using all expansions, I'd suggest using Tibs anti dilution for the Next Act. I don't know the link where I saw it, but it's easy to summarize: any time you draw a mythos card that is NOT from KiY, roll two dice. On a total of 3, draw and resolve the top card from the Next Act deck.

Use the Epic Battle cards.

-Villain

Glaaki plus Yellow King herald. No Patrice, no Mandy. Full monster cup. No Guardian. Hidden Gates. All boards, all cards, use the anti dilution, Epic Battle and clue limit per seal rules. Only if you have The Stones to do it though.

Lovecraft said:

Wellll... Having played with the game for nearly four years (has it really been that long?) while mixing all expansions, I can say from experience that it doesn't work well. Particularly the small boxes (they get heavily diluted). I would suggest you use some custom components depending on which expansion you want to emphasize. Take a look at my photobucket page (it's only for Arkham Horror).

http://s622.photobucket.com/albums/tt307/avi_dreader/

Whatley emphasizes Dunwich.

The Black Goat emphasizes Black Goat of the Wood.

The Creature in the Clouds emphasizes King in Yellow.

The Galaxy of R'lyeh emphasizes Innsmouth's aquatic monsters.

You should also take a look on the fan creations section of the website in the Ancient Ones section and the heralds section (right now there's a herald being worked on that enhances CotDP barring dynamics, which is fairly interesting).

As far as I know, there is no perfect solution to game dilution, however I designed a number of things to remove dilution of whichever expansion effect you miss the most (I'll be coming out with one last creation to make Exhibit items available in the next month or two, but I'm not in any rush).

Lovecraft said:

Can you guys give me a suggestion on making a full on Arkham Horror experience for veteran players? I'm refering to what expansions or cards from which expansions to add. I already put in the madness/injury cards, I mixed all the investigator cards already, I'm using all the Investigators and Ancient Ones, I'm using the Herald and Guardian mechanic. What else? Others seem to ignore all 3 of the small boxes. I want to involve all the expansions as much as possible.

By definition, involving all the expansions as much as possible, means deemphasizing Arkham itself. What I'd do to get the effect you want was suggested a long time back by someone else. Draw a Mythos card, if not an expansion Mythos, discard it and play the next Mythos. To stress the expansions more, stretch out the final draw to the 3rd card. There are a 162 expansion mythos (If I counted correctly) vs. 67 Basic Mythos. So the ratio is 2:5 or 1, roughly.

What Herald and Guardian do you plan to use. They are not all created equal, especially the heralds. The guardians are actually more equal than they look at first glance.

You are going to have a relatively short game, probably only 1 or 2 turns more than the Doom Track of whatever AO you use. The things that give you more turns are surges (rare with 20 gates) and bumps (same), Elder signs and other factors that remove doom tokens. With more players you'll have more of those at least. OTOH, some of the AO make gates or mythos come faster. In general, the more investigators you have under your conditions, the better chance of sealing away the Old One.

An Easier (though probably not easy) game under these conditions: Azathoth, Nodens Guardian, Curse of the Dark Pharoah Herald.

Very Hard game: Rhan Tegoth*, Bast and Black Goat Herald or Innsmouth combo heralds.

*There are many baddies, though, but Rhan's a short game anyway and very difficult in final combat (in which you'd be using Epic Battle cards to boot.)

ricedwlit said:

Close! It's after resolving an expansion mythos card that's not from King in Yellow. So that way the anti-dilution doesn't break down when you use only King in Yellow. But yeah, I've gotten cocky and lost to Act III before using this. It really makes the three acts as threatening as they're suppose to be.

I can heartily recommend the touring exhibit and the touring performance set ups as stated in the smaller expansion rules for Curse of the Dark Pharoah and king in yellow. the two set ups are similar but with slight differences. use one of those expansions with the base set, and the appriopriate Herald

Insmouth Horror is also more for veterans too.

Lovecraft said:

Play with the Russian version! (Sorry, couldn't resist...)

MonsieurPoulet said:

That does make sense though.

Big Cards: Innsmouth with Black Goat cards thrown in. Small Cards: all that you have. Mother Hydra, Father Dagon, or both. All monsters, but no more than 3 copies of any one monster, except for all Cultists and Deep Ones (UNLESS any of the monsters left out of the Cup are Worshippers of the Ancient One in play, then toss them back in.) Random Investigators and Ancient One; feel free to leave Ithaqua, Yig, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, and Nyogtha out of the draw.