Some friends and I have just started playing Arkham Horror and we're starting to dabble in expansions. The big-box ones are nice because they add some variety to the available investigators, though it seems like the extra boards are usually an exile for someone to go and do busy work (closing rifts in Kingsport, for example). That's another topic, however.

Branding all the cards with the expansion logo makes sense so you can pick and choose which expansions you want to have active in your game. Yet, the monster tokens aren't labeled. Is there a reason for this beyond "monsters are monsters, just leave them in"?

How do other players and groups handle this? Do most of y'all tend to use all the monsters from all expansions every time, or do you go through inventories and sort them out the hard way?

I just have color-coded monster lists in all my expansion boxes and separate them at the end of the game. Since the base game is my roommate's 1st edition copy, the finish on the monster tokens is different so it's easy to tell which cultists or other common monsters are mine. But then again, I'm OCD about my gaming stuff.

Don't know why monsters do not have "labels" as the other cards; removing some of them from the monsters cup, according to the various expansions, could be pretty messy. I generally prefer not using the complete monsters cup, unless I play with Innsmouth

I just use all monsters. Lots of people do. Unless they want to weed their monster cup a bit for a theme game (which in my opinion is a bad idea unless you understand the monster cup difficulty ratios decently).

I just use them all. Sometimes, for thematic purposes, I might remove a few monsters here and there. It won't affect the ratios all that much to take 15 monsters out of the available 100+.

If ratios were important in the first place, more than one Mask monster would have been included with Dunwich!

On the other hand, I've labeled all the monsters with their expansion symbols, so I'm all set

hm.... I know *somewhere* there's a full list of how many of what type of monsters come with each expansion.... I thought it was in the rulebooks, but a quick glance through didn't yeild me any results... Maybe some intrepid forumer with more time than I have currently (or myself at a later time) will be able to find this list for you.

awp832 said:

www.arkhamhorrorwiki.com/Monster

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=114&efcid=1&efidt=26839

I prefer that list because it sorts them by expansion, and is easy to print out for referance use. That being said I use all the monsters unless I'm playing the game with someone new and don't want them to have to deal with some of the expansion nasties in their first few games.

Joseph_Lavode said:

The Arkham Horror wiki link can do that too. Those little symbols by Monster ↓ Movement ↓ Toughness ↓ Dimension ↓ Mask ↓ Spawn ↓ Expansion ↓ Count let you arrange them. So, click on the one by expansion and it organizes them by expansion.

Although almost everyone do differently, I like playing with monsters from selected expansions. It gives some more variance to the games. I marked them with tiny color stickers. This leaves the possibility of playing with all mask monsters but not all monsters... great :-)

Tibs said:

Wow, glad to see how active this community is!

How'd you make the labels, if you don't mind my asking? I thought about taking a felt tip pen and gently putting "DH, KIY" or whatever on each of the monsters before putting them in the bag, but if someone's got a clever way to print out the little labels en masse, that'd be pretty cool.

All my games thus far have been played with all of the big box expansion monsters in the cup, though we generally play base since we're often teaching a new player. Sometimes there's a "Whoa, where's -that- from?" question when something comes out that we suspect is an expansion monster.

Then again, the expansions don't exactly seem to make it much easier to take on some of the monsters they add. : )

I actually threw a bunch of expansion symbols onto a PDF and had it printed on paper that had one sticky side. Then I spent a load of time painstakingly cutting out the little circles and rectangles with an Xacto knife. Miraculously, most of the tiny hand-cut circles came out actually circular.

So, to answer your question... I did it tediously.

If you don't mind "ruining" your monster chits, you can color the sides with a marker. Different color for different expansions.

That way you can seperate them more easyly... I saw that once on BBG www.boardgamegeek.com/image/578363/arkham-horror (this person probably painted te sides green to match the color border, but that's an example of what I mean)

I play with all monsters, although I did color my Mask monsters.

I just took one of those fancy silver glitter pens and put a small letter on the back of each monster tile, just next to the blood drop. In the right light you can hardly see it, and if you want to separate the game (we usually only play one expansion at at time, two at the most) a glance is enough.

::Sigh:: or you could just not deface your monsters ;') it should be the monsters defacing you (pun intended).

I printed out tiny tiny expansion symbols on a sticker paper (or label or whatever), carefully cut them out with a rotary cutter and then spent a whole day painstakingly applying those sticker to the monster markers.

But now it's done.

Afterwards we played an Innsmouth game with only Innsmouth monsters. It was nice to see more deep ones and hybrids compared to our usual games where we've added every monster from every expansion.