Hey there! After a long abscence, we started playing AH again, and I accidentally managed to get EH at 40% off MSRP. After reading through the rules I couldn't help comparing it to AH at every step and seeing how much they simplified some mechanics. Do you guys have any tips on how to best enjoy EH for what it is, instead of comparing it to the big brother at every step? Game otherwise seems good, nice quality materials and cards, nice board, etc.
Thanks!
My advice, as somebody who went the other way and is now getting into AH after starting with EH, is try some of the fun expansions like Strange Remnants, Cities of Ruin and I also enjoyed Dreamlands. Anytime they add new and interesting mechanics, be they disasters, or sideboard adventures, it adds to the game's enjoyment. There are certainly a lot of ways to win or lose the game and given the randomness, it often can be a half full or half empty experience after every mythos phase. The rumors are a lot more sadistic than what I have encountered so far in AH.
True, Rumors in the core set for AH are kinda on the easy side. Wait until you meet Cover Up tho...
The simplified game mechanics are the main reason I have stayed away from EH so far. Simplification generally means there is a greater degree of accessibility and more streamlined gameplay. But it ultimately has to be at the expense of complexity and depth.
I'm sticking with AH. I don't care that we see won't see new expansions for it. The gameplay possibilities with the existing game (+exp) are huge.
The things that are similar but different:
The Mystery and Condition mechanics are pretty cool.
Edited by Wolfpack48
On 05/10/2017 at 0:22 AM, Wolfpack48 said:
- You can trade clues
You can trade clues in EH?!
The inability to trade clues is one of the things that makes AH such a challenge. In fact clue trading would make AH way too easy. How does this effect the game balance in EH?
10 hours ago, Lee418 said:You can trade clues in EH?!
The inability to trade clues is one of the things that makes AH such a challenge. In fact clue trading would make AH way too easy. How does this effect the game balance in EH?
Frankly, it would be near impossible to win EH without being able to trade clues. They are much harder to get in EH than in AH, as you usually need to have a successful Research encounter to obtain one. There's other ways too, but clues are much more precious in EH.
On 10/6/2017 at 5:02 PM, Wolfpack48 said:Frankly, it would be near impossible to win EH without being able to trade clues. They are much harder to get in EH than in AH, as you usually need to have a successful Research encounter to obtain one. There's other ways too, but clues are much more precious in EH.
He is being nice. There is nothing to getting clues in AH, merely stop your movement on the space with a clue and you get it. Or apparently you can also get any clues that spawn on the space you are on. Also in AH, closing gates is a mere roll of one of two different stat categories of the player's choice. In EH, you have to resolve a research encounter successfully to get the clue and hop you have the right stats to make the roll. Additionally, you have to do a multi-step encounter to close a gate and again hope you have the right stats. Just going from base game to base game, EH has some far more challenging mechanics. Now granted I have only played a couple games of AH with the base box, so perhaps my tune will change with time.
11 hours ago, hengst2404 said:He is being nice. There is nothing to getting clues in AH, merely stop your movement on the space with a clue and you get it. Or apparently you can also get any clues that spawn on the space you are on. Also in AH, closing gates is a mere roll of one of two different stat categories of the player's choice. In EH, you have to resolve a research encounter successfully to get the clue and hop you have the right stats to make the roll. Additionally, you have to do a multi-step encounter to close a gate and again hope you have the right stats. Just going from base game to base game, EH has some far more challenging mechanics. Now granted I have only played a couple games of AH with the base box, so perhaps my tune will change with time.
Indeed. It's strategy (Arkham) vs luck (Eldritch): not knowing what you'll be testing blocks players from developing effective strategies. In Arkham, gates have a modifier printed on the gate, the OW is color-coded so that you know what's most likely to happen due to the color patterns, and the number of successes needed to seal is granted (usually it's one, but it's two vs Yog). Sure, some unfortunate events could happen (No one can help you now, for example), but these are dealable with. So, you can plan, send your best sealer into the scariest gate, work out a good strategy allowing a sound victory. Eldritch is more like "hey, there's a gate! Let's send there Investigator X whose strongest suit is Lore! Dang, I had to test Strength instead and this means I cannot seal that flipping gate and I lost the game due to omens triggering the symbol on the gate". Too much luck dependancy for my taste. Eldritch is not more difficult, it has a worse design, which is a completely different kettle of fish.
Beware, I'm in favor of hard games (it's enough that you check the Heralds I developed for AH to get that) and of losing A LOT, but I wanna lose with a fair fight on a game that is strategically difficult; losing at a game I can dominate but that screws me due to its luck-dependancy / bad design... not my cup of tea...
On 11-10-2017 at 1:50 AM, Julia said:Indeed. It's strategy (Arkham) vs luck (Eldritch): not knowing what you'll be testing blocks players from developing effective strategies. In Arkham, gates have a modifier printed on the gate, the OW is color-coded so that you know what's most likely to happen due to the color patterns, and the number of successes needed to seal is granted (usually it's one, but it's two vs Yog). Sure, some unfortunate events could happen (No one can help you now, for example), but these are dealable with. So, you can plan, send your best sealer into the scariest gate, work out a good strategy allowing a sound victory. Eldritch is more like "hey, there's a gate! Let's send there Investigator X whose strongest suit is Lore! Dang, I had to test Strength instead and this means I cannot seal that flipping gate and I lost the game due to omens triggering the symbol on the gate".
That is not a fair comparison, as closing/sealing gates is how you win in Arkham Horror.
In Eldritch Horror you win by solving mysteries, which could be anything from fighting a monster, perform a specific test or resolve a random encounter. You could win the game without even closing a single gate.
Gates, like rumours, the mythos deck and the omen counter are just means to put the pressure on the investigators/players.
1 hour ago, cheapmate said:That is not a fair comparison, as closing/sealing gates is how you win in Arkham Horror.
In Eldritch Horror you win by solving mysteries, which could be anything from fighting a monster, perform a specific test or resolve a random encounter. You could win the game without even closing a single gate.
Gates, like rumours, the mythos deck and the omen counter are just means to put the pressure on the investigators/players.
I'm aware of the differences. The problem with gates in Eldritch is that even if it's true that you don't need to close them to win the game, you still need to close them to avoid losing the game because doom advance is triggered by omens matching gates of the same color on the board. Players don't have a way to strategically counter the action of gates, so, how fast doom advances is tied to a ton of luck. The example I made was just to explain how more strategic Arkham is when compared to Eldritch, and how Arkham has an overall better design. This doesn't mean people can't love Eldritch or have fun playing it, but the point is that they scratch a very different itch, with Eldritch being in general (a lot) more luck dependant and with heavier flaws in design than Arkham (yes, I can go on for hours on this with tons of examples).
11 hours ago, Julia said:The example I made was just to explain how more strategic Arkham is when compared to Eldritch, and how Arkham has an overall better design.
That’s your opinion and I can’t argue with that, except that I don’t agree.
11 hours ago, Julia said:(yes, I can go on for hours on this with tons of examples).
I’m sure you can.
5 hours ago, cheapmate said:That’s your opinion and I can’t argue with that, except that I don’t agree.
Disagreement is always nice, but it's nicer when reasons are given so that different views can be compared and possibly we both can look at the thing in a different way, widening our horizont
otherwise it's just two people saying "I'm right and you're wrong" which never creates anything fruitful. So, please, if you have data supporting your view of the game, I'm more than happy to read them and reason on them
I disagree with the statement that Eldritch Horror is all luck, while Arkham Horror is all about strategy. Arkham Horror has just as much randomness as Eldritch Horror in its encounters, if not more. For example an encounter with a student in the Library from Dark Pharaoh (I think), where the check is easier depending on the sex of the investigator.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that sort of thing, but no amount of strategy prepares for that.
Strategy in Eldritch Horror means Hank Samson and Lily Chen fight the monster, Dexter Drake gets those spells and Charlie Kane does the shopping, but if that gate opens in Charlie’s house, he has to step up and try to close it.
Anyway, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and I doubt I can change yours any more than you can change mine.
Agree to disagree?
Well, actually I'm more than happy to change opinions and debate in-depth about games
I never take anything personal, in the sense if someone dislikes a game I like, it's perfectly fine and I don't feel offended
One important thing to clarify tho: I never said EH is all luck and AH is all strategy, but that EH is more prone to luck-dependancy than AH is (this doesn't mean there's no strategy involved, but that there's a lower amount of strategy able to counter a streak of bad luck, which is quite different). There's math to support these thesis derived from a stochastic analysis of cards (you can easily check my math of EH hosted on BGG and compare it with the math for AH that was done by Richard), but also on a very simple statistic theorem that says that the lower is the sample, the higher is the impact of randomic effects on the sample, so that if in game A your average dice pool si smaller than in game B, then game A is more prone to suffer from deviations from the average (and this is not an opinion, it's just a fact coming from math).
Core EH was quite solid under this point of view: sure, the lower number of dice in your rolls suffered more from randomic effects, BUT the structure of the game was incredibly solid (as it was proved by this marvellous article written by Eugenio). The problems in the game landed with the first expansion, where a ton more of difficult / improbable checks were added to the standard game practice, and this changed a ton the strategic approach to the game. As we moved to Mountains of Madness, we had an overall improvement, back to something more strategic, but then things went totally south with the following expansions, that were uncapable also of avoiding snowball effects (condition A triggering condition B triggering condition C, both in negative and in positive of course), which is something, well, not exactly expression of superior game design. Beware that I'm not saying AH is flawless, but in general, it's better done (saying this after 360 games played - and yeah, I'm close to 75 games played of EH plus for various reasons and at different moments we did the math for the whole game, so, I think my knowledge of the two systems is comparable)
When playing these games I don't do the math, I play to win but I don't want to over-optimize my gameplay through analysis because that reduces my fun factor.
I find AH to be more strategic than EH but think that it can sometimes be a hindrance. Through good strategy you can reduce the difficulty of core AH considerably compared to EH. The uneven gate distribution was fixed in EH, which reduced strategy around targeting high risk areas but increased travel around the map.
6 hours ago, mulletcheese said:I find AH to be more strategic than EH but think that it can sometimes be a hindrance. Through good strategy you can reduce the difficulty of core AH considerably compared to EH. The uneven gate distribution was fixed in EH, which reduced strategy around targeting high risk areas but increased travel around the map.
Yeah, I can see that. Important to know that in AH the gate distribution was skewed also for a specific design reason: that skewed distribution is matched by a skewed seeding of clue tokens so that it's granted that on the board there's a way to keep high the number of clues and allow consequently the resources needed to win the game to be available. Eldritch bypasses this problem since gates don't remove clues from the board, thus the gate distribution doesn't affect your ability to gain clues to pass the mysteries (so, yes, this mechanic works well in both games)
I think there are 2 things that make EH more luck-based than AH:
As of now, there’s only 1 card we have evicted from our EH games (shuffle a Mystery back into the deck), and we are using a variant that ensures mostly equal distribution of snowflake, normal and tentacle cards, and with these tweaks we’re enjoying the game more.
We also don’t like the fact that there is no trophy mechanic, but this is just us, and we have a variant that we enjoy that adds this (and fun).
I posted this on the eldritch board (in a Pick one - eldritch or arkham) and I might have been a bit too harsh, but general sentiment is definitely the same and thought I’d post it here *ducks*
....
I really do like both and have all expansions (so thank god AH is over save the fan expansions - and some of them are great).
But at the end of the day if I had to pick one it's Eldritch. It's faster, and despite what I'm reading here the story and theme is a lot stronger and consistent in Eldritch for me. Sure it's a bit Indiana Jonesy, but the more I get back to Arkham the more I remember some bad experiences of it.
Playing with veteran players of AH (in play by forum and IRL) usually sucks, at least in my experience. The first time I played with someone who had Monterey Jack as an investigator and he 1) traded all his equipment to other players for their money in the first few turns, then 2) spent most of the rest of the game at the Curiositie Shoppe "farming" for Elder Signs, it was kind of novel.
When it kept happening I saw that people weren't playing the game anymore, they were trying to break the system. There are strategies like that for every investigator on the AH boards, and the frequency of these kinds of moves were waaaaay more common than I ever would have expected.
Theme, which should be nice and present, was secondary to maximising the mechanics of each investigator VS. the mechanics of the game.
Every now and then I'll play AH solo and like it. But EH has become for me what a game like this should be : good story and immersion, interesting rules built for clarity and fast play, and a lot of fun with friends. It's also a lot of fun solo.
No reasons to duck, you made a ton of great points
And as said, it's 100% fine liking EH over AH (I played a ton of EH, and I had my fair share of fun with it, so I can easily relate with what you're saying, even if clearly my pick would be AH)
And indeed, heavier-on-strategy also means you can find yourself with players who metagame the system too much and play to break and not play to win. I personally never made use of such a strategy because I want to play "the game as intended" and not "the game as a series of exploitable loopholes", but I can see that if people go the other way, the fun runs dry.
The metagame thing is annoying in general, and it can be done with just about every game you can think of (including EH and even roleplaying games). One way we have solved farming the Unique Item deck in Arkham is simply to shuffle in all the expansion cards for the Investigator Cards (Unique, Common, Skill, Spells) -- makes farming the Unique Item impractical.
The Bank Loan exploit can be annoying as well, though fortunately no one at our table tries this.
IMO, metagamers and system breakers are a player problem, not a game problem.
Edited by Wolfpack48I am with you both on the metagame aspects. I come here to discuss the game, in a general sense, as well as to check my understanding of the rules, ensuring that I am playing as intended. I stopped playing Magic the Gathering due to the meta and netdecking and the last thing I desire is to come to a forum and find the best "trick" to do something. If I was playing a game and somebody was trying to exploit loopholes and game the system, I would ask the person to stop or leave if they didn't want to stop. Never understood folks who thought winning was more important than actually playing the game. I prefer to win or lose based on the overall experience and that to me makes it all the more fun. Again, to each their own.