I've tried the first scenario of Guardians of the Abyss several times now, solo, and haven't yet managed to do well at all.

I initially tried with a Daisy deck (big mistake), and then several different Roland builds.

Anyone managed to defeat this solo? Any strategy tips?

I have yet to play it, but I know that the players at Gencon did not fair well at all from my understanding, haha. My impression is that it is quite hard.

Just finished a first run through with Mark and Sefina (each with 19 XP of upgrades). Was totally crushed. This is definitely the hardest one yet. That said, it was a lot of fun and I look forward to trying it again.

This mini-campaign demands a lot of violence. It's crazy how much fighting you have to do to get through it.

I have had a lot of success both with Ursula and then with Silas. Mobility seems to help a lot, and flexibility of approach (do I evade, do I have a plan, etc?).

We used Leo and Mark decks and pulled off a comfortable win on The Eternal Slumber

When I did the event at GenCon, Matt Newman gave us some advice: don't try to complete all of the objectives for the first part of it. Without giving away anything, there are 6 things that you can do (each having two parts). Don't stress out and try to do them all. The average at GenCon was three of the six, I believe.

Also...

Like Labyrinth, this is (nearly) impossible to solo.

You can try but you will loose...

And that is sad really. These GenCon adventrues are clearly designed for 3-4 player groups.

Also: apparently the 4th cycle has been POSTPONED and is no longer on the printer stage: redesigned according to today's website...

I guess someone messed up with OR the design OR the printing...

I just tried this for the first time. Lost horribly, but am looking forward to trying again.

I did have a question. All the brotherhood cultists have a victory point on the front and another one on the back, usually under the "if you have done this" part.

Is this the same point or do you get two? One for removing them and another for doing the task on the back.

I'm probably wishful thinking but I've never seen victory points on both sides of a card before.

5 hours ago, Magnito said:

I did have a question. All the brotherhood cultists have a victory point on the front and another one on the back, usually under the "if you have done this" part.

Is this the same point or do you get two? One for removing them and another for doing the task on the back.

I'm not sure it's ever clarified relative to the victory display, but generally speaking only face-up sides of cards are resolved. In this case you flip them as soon as they hit the victory display, so only the Victory on the story side will matter. But if they didn't put Victory on the enemy side, they wouldn't go to the victory display at all.

2 hours ago, Buhallin said:

In this case you flip them as soon as they hit the victory display, so only the Victory on the story side will matter.

They don't flip in Night's Usurper, so the enemy side needs the Victory as well.

Thank you. Pretty much what I figured. I was just hoping to snag extra victory and then maybe I wouldn't loose quite as horribly in Part 2. It was... Not pretty.

On 2/7/2019 at 9:57 AM, rsdockery said:

They don't flip in Night's Usurper, so the enemy side needs the Victory as well.

We got wrecked so fast in Usurper that we never finished any of the remainder

But the enemy side needs Victory as well for Eternal Slumber, because if they didn't have it then they'd never go to the Victory display in the first place. I suppose they could have done something like Victory 0 to get it there, which would have been a problem in Usurper (and actually would have made for an interesting dynamic).

3 hours ago, Buhallin said:

I suppose they could have done something like Victory 0 to get it there, which would have been a problem in Usurper (and actually would have made for an interesting dynamic).

The Victory points are there to tempt you into playing Night's Usurper to begin with. You need at least one cultist to guarantee you can break even (otherwise, the only available VP are from the Abyss location and the two copies of Black Wind in the encounter deck). Doing poorly in Eternal Slumber means you have a harder time in the sequel, but it also means you can redeem yourself and get the VP you lost.

(Obviously, the main reason to do Night's Usurper is to get one of the amazing rewards, but knowing you can profit via experience can make it more worthwhile).

Tried again and lost again. Man, this is difficult. Came close though.

Was playing as Finn and Roland. Last turn of the game, Finn is almost dead from Horror and is engaged with Neith. She has 7 damage already, and he has Chicago Typewriter. One shot will kill her. He pumps up his attack... Gets the autofail, she retaliates and kills him.

Roland is left alone and can't manage to knock her off in time.

Bad luck, I know. But it's still a real tough scenario even with luck on your side.

Haha! Finally beat it. Third times a charm. Same team as last time (me as Finn and my partner as Roland). We decided the previous game was just bad luck because we knew we had a strong team with good decks.

And we slaughtered. Neith died with 3 turns to spare and barely any damage on either of us.

On to part 2.

Our Mark/Daisy pairing got totally smashed in both scenarios. We inserted Guardians in between Where Doom Awaits and Lost in Time and Space, so the investigators were no spring chickens.

Daisy had the worst luck - pulling the autofail on her Deciphered Realities and having one of her Old Book of Lore draws show 3 weaknesses, then drawing a second weakness right after the shuffle. She also had to discard cards from her hand regularly due to encounter cards and spent most of the game staring at her Higher Education and wondering why college didn't prepare her for this.

At least we got to farm a few VP and were able to pick our trauma type.