My husband and I had never really played any of the FFG card games before Arkham. So we didn’t know anything about this two core set model. We were old D&D hags. And we never were into collectible card games either. But we enjoyed playing the Arkham board game with friends and thought we would give this a try and liked it a lot. We got around the cost of our second core, by buying it on Amazon and using our points. It cost us $2

So we started out as casual players and can call ourselves pretty hard core now. We love playing with the two of us running 4 investigators, or playing with friends. Or using two investigators if we are short on playing time. And we play often. A lot of those core player cards from both sets are in use all the time. And when you think about it, an expansion costs about the same as two movie tickets with way more reusability!

An interesting thread to read here. To the counter position of FFG needing to keep the core set to a certain price point, why did they also chose to not include those cards in the supplemental "Return to the Night"? Seems like that was a great opportunity to include them there. I know the answer that will come, It would piss off the players that already bought a second core. 😕

A second core set is hardly the breaking point of this game. It's another $40. If you keep up with the cycles, which is the intention for a LCG, you are buying monthly packs for $15, and once or twice a year spending $30 on a cycle starter. There are currently 5 cycles, at roughly $120 each. That's already $640 for the core and all the cycles, not to mention standalone scenarios, player mats, return to boxes, sleeves, etc. And that's all just the FFG produced stuff. A lot of us have also put $ into coin capsules, elaborate storage solutions, 3rd party resource tokens, cool leather chaos bags, etc. If you wanted, you could go $1000 in on this game without having to try very hard. So assuming you get into this game, $40 on a second core is really the least of your concerns. That being said, you can easily just buy the core, play solo or possibly 2 players at just the 3 scenarios in the box and it'll be loads of fun. It's up to you.