This mission destroyed our team. My rules question pertains to the agenda deck.

I read this as "Move all Brood once toward the same random location." Consequently, they moved in a pack and we moved from location to location to try and head them off. Well, we did until there were 2 running around in a pack each with 2 copies of Tower Beast attached to them. That pumped them to 8 Fight, 6 HP (3-player game) doing 2 Damage & 2 Horror to each character present during the Enemy Phase.

Esoteric Formula, the only way to damage to a Brood, is a will-based attack. We were running Jenny, "Ashcan," and Daisy, none of which has a great Will stat. We killed the first 1, but were unable to kill any more with them running in a pack.

So, am I reading that correctly, or does each Brood move toward a different random location at the end of each Enemy Phase?

From the FAQ entries from arkhamdb.com (which are all confirmed by the creators of the game)

• The Forced effect moves each Brood of Yog-Sothoth in play. If you have multiple Broods in play, after selecting a random location for the first brood, select another random location for the second and so on. It is possible that all Broods will try to move to the same place.

• The Forced effect moves each Brood of Yog-Sothoth irrespective of if they were at the same location as an investigator or not, and irrespective of whether they are ready or exhausted.

You misread. The broods move independently, each toward a random location. As for the difficulty of the test, you need to use the various locations' abilities (and the Powder's if you got it in BotA) to put clues on the Broods.

2 hours ago, Doma0997 said:

From the FAQ entries from arkhamdb.com (which are all confirmed by the creators of the game)

• The Forced effect moves each Brood of Yog-Sothoth in play. If you have multiple Broods in play, after selecting a random location for the first brood, select another random location for the second and so on. It is possible that all Broods will try to move to the same place.

• The Forced effect moves each Brood of Yog-Sothoth irrespective of if they were at the same location as an investigator or not, and irrespective of whether they are ready or exhausted.

2 hours ago, Khudzlin said:

You misread. The broods move independently, each toward a random location. As for the difficulty of the test, you need to use the various locations' abilities (and the Powder's if you got it in BotA) to put clues on the Broods.

Thanks for the response Gentle-men/-women. I'm fine with taking a beating, but it seemed to mount so horrifically. Ironic that horror was so undesirable.

Couldn't Daisy just use Higher Education to attack them pretty easily?

Also, Daisy should be running Encyclopedia, so she could have added 2 willpower to any other investigator to help them.

Yup, that's how I took them out when I played it. The only difficulty is keeping the hand size high enough so you can still use Higher Education. Also remember the movement is at the end of the enemy phase so they don't get an attack right after the special movement.

16 hours ago, FireBones said:

Couldn't Daisy just use Higher Education to attack them pretty easily?

Also, Daisy should be running Encyclopedia, so she could have added 2 willpower to any other investigator to help them.

Both play throughs, Daisy was the all-star and achieved it through Higher Education. Never saw her Encyclopedia, but both Necronomicons were in play by the time the first Act was passed.

The second play through, "Ashcan" had a mental break (trauma) by a combination of 2 Broods he couldn't hit and an Avian Thrall Duke couldn't reach before the end of turn 6 (1 after the first advancement of the Agenda deck). There were a few turns after that where there were only 2 Broods in play. Daisy and Jenny both got 1 away from their max sanity (by The Creatures' Tracks as much as monsters) by Agenda 3, but through Medical Text (she had other problems) and Liquid Courage Daisy got back near 0:0.

Most of the game was played avoiding locations with more than 1 Brood, slowly collecting clues, very slowly advancing the Act deck, and Jenny shooting anything that was a Brood in the head (...once she got her gun). Every time we were guaranteed to be safe from Broods reaching us, Jenny would draw Attracting Attention and we would watch the trip over each other to reach us.

The problem with the Encyclopedia, Medical Text and Necronomicon (both, actually) is that using them cause attacks of opportunity. Jenny was a Godsend with evasion. She succeeded once at causing damage to a Brood (which she had previously evaded, then dumped 3 clues with Powder of Ibn Ghazi). The rest of the time she was support, resident evader, and other beasties slayer.

Poor "Ashcan" never got the chance to hurt a Brood. His cross to bear was that Avian Thrall. His only weapon in play, the Fire Axe, was as feeble as Duke.

And now, a little math. Daisy's base Will is 3 and their base Fight is 6. In order to compensate for the chaos bag, she was throwing as much as 5 resources per hit with the double chance she'd draw an automatic-fail token (because of the bad Necronomicon), which she did at least 4 times. That's the base-line. There's a –5 in our chaos bag, which she managed to pull maybe three times she only covered a spread by 4. Getting clues on them obviously helped, as did her Holy Rosary. There can be no understating the value of the good Necronomicon.

If Daisy got a perfect score, she did 3 damage on her turn (usually spending 9 resources to make it happen). With 3 characters, a Brood's base health is 4, so she still took 2 & 2, assuming there was only one present. It worked better for Jenny to exhaust (by evasion) one or more in Daisy's space to prevent the Enemy Phase retaliation. After that, assuming there were no monsters to prevent it, Daisy would tome-action to collect 2 resources, Pathfinder after the wounded Brood and ideally finish it off. It was just a whole-lot-a-bad on the random moves and encounter deck. We killed the 4th of 5 on the very last turn, before Jenny's Silver Twilight Acolyte chased her down, performed his final attack and sent the Agenda doom to 7.

The mission was more doable the second play, but took every trick we could get into play. Also, we'd been doing remarkably well before that. We'll pick up the pieces and press onward soon. Ugh. Now I know how people felt struggling with The Essex County Express and Blood on the Alter.

I found this one oddly easy, with Jenny Barnes as a single Investigator.

No doubt I had luck with the Encounter deck, but I managed to put 2 Clues on each Brood and take them down.

At first I thought it was too easy, that I had missed something. For instance that Clues on the Brood would be discarded after an attack. But I don't think I missed anything.
Of course low Health for the Broods with a single Investigator helps. Plus they moved in for me beneficial directions, allowing me to gather Clues, place them on the Broods (which does not cost an Action and therefore no Attack of Opportunity), and attack.