On 2017-05-28 at 2:43 PM, Krysmo said:

Yeah. Maybe as a salesman he can trade assets between players wherever they are in the world, as his action.

Just obnoxiously going on record as saying that I called this ability from the booth:), with iGniGhted guessing the second half correctly. All the investigators look great, thanks for posting on wiki.

Look forward to hearing about difficulty of the AO, picking up my copy today if i'm lucky.

3 hours ago, Krysmo said:

Look forward to hearing about difficulty of the AO...

I'll just copy this from the other thread, credit goes to moytank .

"LOL you're right. I'll start by noting that this was our first impressions of 1 game BUT the new disaster deck dramatically increases the difficulty. You can also add the disaster deck with any ancient one.

We played with 4 investigators, Ashcan pete, The athlete (i forgot her name), Dexter Drake and Harvey Walters along with the prelude for Shudde's set up. Things got bad really fast.

The round track starts at 15 so we thought we had plenty of time to get buffed but my god were we wrong. We failed to close the first gate and doom advanced once which triggered the first of many disasters. A polar storm swept the map hitting most parts of the game board (barely into the game and we nearly died lol). The second disaster destroyed Istanbul and any investigator who's caught in one of these are pretty much dead.

The game now has environmental hazards in the form of destroyed cities. You wanna do everything you can to avoid them since the encounters in them always result in you losing health/sanity, items , gaining an injury, disease etc. Basically everything standard location cards have without the good stuff from succeeding. By the time we hit round 13 everyone either had injuries conditions and/or low health.

The situation got out of hand and we couldn't gain traction to get ourselves properly equipped. Trying to keep up with the world caving in on itself and dealing with disasters made closing portals even harder. This would often advanced doom 2 or 3 times in one mythos phase triggering multiple disasters at once. T-T GG much?

By the time we finished the first mystery, one investigator had died and everyone else were hanging by a thread along with the doom track close to awakening the big daddy. We had to create a relief effort within the destroyed cities to advance the second mystery. Harvey walters got blown away by a tornado, Ashcan pete managed to get a small group of people out of destroyed rome and got obliterated by a meteor storm in the process (we saluted the poor drifter and his dog T-T). Lets just say it was definitely game over at that point. We failed miserably but maan was it epic!

TLDR: Disaster deck increased the difficulty creating hazards around the game board. Health and Sanity management are even more important. GG Shudde Me'll GG

Overall Impressions: I really loved the disaster deck. You are constantly paying attention to your teammates because health and sanity management are even more important. Encountering destroyed cities captured the apocalypse scenario extremely well. The disaster deck brought more theme and helped tightened the gameplay. I'm a huge fan of what this expansion brought to the eldritch horror and would highly recommend it. That being said I CAN'T say that the disaster deck is for everyone. Eldritch horror is already an unforgiving game and some people might not enjoy another layer of difficulty. (One of the players in our group got frustrated from all death and destruction)"

We had our first run through yesterday. Bob was every bit as epic as I thought he'd be. Roland was also pretty awesome, mostly because the services in the expansion were really useful, and Observation is always good. Ashcan did pretty solid in most of the run, but his ability wasn't useful until we discarded a weapon for him, then he picked it up with that talent of his. Rita was right useless, Talents are situational at best, and I'll take Mark or Lily if I want to fight, thanks.

Our first Mystery was Renewing the Seal, which Bob did surprisingly well, getting two of them done (one was handled by Roland, the other by Jacqueline)

Second, we did Exploring G'harne. Roland did well with those, with Lily and Bob helping out.

Third was Disaster Relief Effort. Is it just me, or are those cards not all that difficult to get a decent resolution. Three Disasters had struck, but only the last one ruined a City (Buenos Aires) so we were all crammed in Rome. At least that made it easy for Jacqueline and Jim to cast Blessing of Isis.

I thought it was one of the best sets ever, #2 for small box behind Strange Remnants. The artwork on the cards is great. Coulda used more "devastation" in the Devastation Encounters, but I'm a child of the 90s so that just might be me.

My first game with CiR was every bit as desastrous as you would expect in a desaster expansion and our defeat was EPIC too. We were defeated when the doom token was still only at 10 (you start at 15) but the mythos cards ran out, at this time three cities were wastelands, Rita Young was dead and the other three (we played with all 4 expansion investigators) where fighting for survival, some barely alive. We had a vicious rumor that triggered a desaster regularly as a reckoning effect until we solved it. We had solved one mystery at the time when cards ran out and were not even close of solving the second. I expected a lot from Roland Banks, but he is only good if service cards are available, otherwise he is surprisingly weak for a Fed agent, he has only a strength and influence of two, only the Mauser makes him an acceptable fighter. Bob Jenkins is good, Ashcan Pete to my surprise too, Rita Young however was quite a dud (and dead at the end).
We learned to stay out of destroyed cities pretty fast, only if a mystery makes it necessary you should go there, otherwise stay out, you have very few to win but everything to loose.

I say it is perhaps the best small expansion so far, because it adds not only a new AO, new cards and investigators to the game but also a new element to the game play, desasters, which can be combined with every other AO as well. Frustration levels however go up just as well, it makes the game even more hard to win.