Evening all,

My Arkham group is looking at playing Carnivale of Horrors as a one-off standalone, following beating The Path to Carcosa and before playing Return to Night of the Living Zealot. This is also the first game where we'll have four players instead of three, and two of the group (including me) are pretty new to Arkham Horror LCG.

If you were playing Carnivale as a one-off, what would you recommend as an XP spend for either Standard or hard? One of our players has apparently tried to play it before on 0XP (though I don;t know on which difficulty level), and it was described as a bit of a massacre...

Any advice in this regard would be gratefully appreciated.

Cheers.

I haven’t played Carnevale, but I’ve heard it’s tough. For standalone decks, I typically find 19xp or 29xp to be the sweet spot. More than that and the extra weaknesses really start to become an annoyance.

With that said, I think Seekers and Survivors can get away with less and I’d forgive any Rogue that spent more on a load of Exceptional cards, because how often do you get the chance to have a ridiculous deck?

13 minutes ago, Assussanni said:

how often do you get the chance to have a ridiculous deck?

I remember finishing Carcosa with nearly 50 XP (with nowhere near the number of weaknesses that would require in standalone mode), thanks to Delve Too Deep and Bury Them Deep.

4 hours ago, Khudzlin said:

I remember finishing Carcosa with nearly 50 XP (with nowhere near the number of weaknesses that would require in standalone mode), thanks to Delve Too Deep and Bury Them Deep.

My Friendly Neighborhood Jenny player ended a campaign with 70 XP thanks to a copy of Charons Obol and splashing Delve too deep. Also the medallion.

As for the scenario, I usually attempt it when I'm 3-4 scenarios into a campaign, often right after playing Rougarou. Usually that would mean having roughly 12-26 XP, depending on the campaign, group and success/failure of unique scenarios. I'dd say playing at 19 Xp would be fair.

Thanks for the feedback - I think we'll be trying it at 19XP.