New expansion and mind Blown

By hengst2404, in General Discussion

So last night's game was remarkable for my group for a couple of reasons. First, the new expansion was a lot more fun that I thought it would be. I chose Daniella Morales, while we had the Painter, Agatha the Parapsychologist and one person chose Trash Scarbourough the spy. Only Trish was able to make use of her story card and wow did we all wish we had worked harder to get our rewards. She ended up with an ability where her focus made her far more formidable in all of her tests. We chose Antedilluviarum as out AO and got to work. In an odd quirk, we only drew one blue gate the entire game and killed off the cultist on the board quickly. After that, we tackled mysteries involving clues and mystic ruins encounters, spells and clue expenditures and one involving research encounters. Despite some delays and dropping to 5 on the Doom track due to a bad gate manager, we ended up winning with 2 doom remaining.

The other remarkable thing is that last night was the first 4 player game we ever played. It was like a different game. The monster spawns, gates and stuff really weren't affected so the game almost felt, if not easy, far more manageable with four versus our usual three. So much so, I am not sure I could go back to 3 player. All these posts I read people saying three was more challenging than four and until yesterday, I just never understood it.

So outside of some cool new cards, spells, items, etc, I was/am disappointed with the campaign concept. It is almost and afterthought, even down to the way it is presented in the manual. On top of this, I did feel like the previews really made this seem more involved and it really isn't. Especially if you don't play against Shude Mell and have some ruined cities pop up. I was hoping for a more organized campaign and not something somebody here or on BGG couldn't have come up with themselves with a little bit of effort and still likely made a better setup. It was also nice to win, as last game against Shude Mell (sp) was not pretty.

I haven't played it yet (it's not in my country yet) but after reading the rules I've been considering the following house rules:

- guarantee Shudde M'ell is in the list

- possibly add another random prelude to each game to shake things up

- stagger the difficulty, start with easy mythos for the first game and go harder with each one until the last one is only hard mythos

- do not reuse mythos cards that have been used (if it wasn't drawn it can go back) customise the deck based on the current and next ao

- allow investigators to keep all their possessions and upgrades. Dead investigators stay on the board for future games

- because of the difficulty of getting the same players together, allow new players to pick new investigators. Existing investigators stay in their location from the last game. And items can be traded with inactive investigators.

14 hours ago, hengst2404 said:

...one person chose Trash Scarbourough the spy...

I like the intentional or unintentional typo here :D

Totally unintentional and yet still funny :)

I had only one game, it was pretty easy completing our personal stories, but once the new rumor and another mythos past around corruption when near complete in our nyral fight it wiped the party in one go. Then we pulled mateo the priest and have the bad personal story that made our final mystery difficult, a dark pact and the new ally went off, so we ended our game with four turns left because it was looking like it was too much of a uphill battle and it was too late at night >_< Now that we know what corruption does, we will be more prepared for our real game next weekend.

I did not mind resources, it gives another action for those on a wilderness/sea space and help versus those expensive 3-4 assets.

I did not like that nyarlathotep had only four mysteries, even those mysteries are expanded due to being adventures they could have thrown 2 more in.