Just finished my first campaign with a friend. We played Roland and Wendy for Night of the Zealot. In The Gathering, Roland fumbled around and was unable to bring out any of his weapons while Wendy cleaned up the clues. Wendy ended up taking out The Ghoul Priest with several judicious swings of her baseball bat. Roland decided to let Lita burn the house down. We started off Midnight Masks fairly strongly but a miscalculation when Roland decided to take on The Masked Hunter and a poor encounter card draw got Roland pinned down desperately fending off several enemies and unable to take out any of them. We resigned at the last moment having only interrogated 2 cultists. In the Devourer Below we got really lucky with the locations, Wendy getting the location using Willpower to find clues and Roland got the location needing Strength. Wendy's abandonment issues cropped up resulting in more Horror than I was comfortable with but she made her way back to the main path. Two Young Deep Ones cropped up attacking Wendy and Roland simultaneously, but Roland had his shotgun out, took out one at his location, moved back to the main path and took out the one focused on Wendy in one move. Wendy moved to the third location, hoovered up the two clues there and triggered the Act advance. Roland was on the Main Path when the remaining four cultists from the previous scenario confronted him. Unfortunately his shotgun was out of ammo. He evaded the Masked Hunter but took damage and horror from everyone else but was still standing. Wendy took the opportunity to sneak past all the cultists since they were engaged with Roland and entered the Ritual Site. She pulled out a flashlight and gathered clues while Roland evaded the Masked Hunter once more but went down under the onslaught of the other cultists. Wendy began messing up the ritual site but before she could finish, The Masked Hunter got wind of her presence and moved into the Ritual Site. Over the course of the next two turns, Wendy was able to Evade The Masked Hunter at the beginning of each turn while gathering the final clues and finished disrupting the ritual just before it would have summoned Umhordoth.

Good write up. Sounds like a close hard fought win.

I could've sworn we weren't gonna make it. Definitely a few different encounter cards that would have prevented it had I pulled them and if I had missed a couple of skill checks with getting clues and using them to disrupt the ritual. I had pickpocket and Rabbit's Foot out which allowed me to beef up my hand with cards I committed for the skill tests at the end. Never even got Lita into play on the second or third scenario even though we burnt down the house. Going into it I thought our best bet was gonna be throwing Lita under the proverbial bus(I had watched a couple play-throughs online). Never imagined we were gonna be able to disrupt the ritual.

I like that you weren't afraid to use cards in hand for skill tests. The agenda always advances so quickly that you have to give yourself every chance to pass skill tests, usually +2 to the difficulty value. Its the dilemma between the cards skill icons and its cost and text box ability that adds to your decision making and tension in the game.

Thing was, I really didn't have an opportunity to play them instead of committing and since it was the final Act card instructions and we were on the final agenda card as well, I knew exactly what I had to accomplish to end the game, so it was a bit of a no-brainer at that point.