Me and some friends have recently got into AK in the past few months and ended up getting all the expansions. At first I just got CotDP and DH but realized it would begin to delute the threat from DH if I was to add in future expansions so I started by taking a Mythos card out for every CotDP card I put in (So if I threw in a card that openned a gate to the witch house I took one out too). But now I got them all and I decided to seperate it into two games since the amount of cards invovled was just... alot. So I divided the mythos and encounter cards as such, Orginal AK + DH + IH in one set and KH + CotDP + KiY+ DGotW.

I suspect strongly that some players were... intimated by the number of cards. We could get a group of 9 people for mtg, or dnd back in the day, we even played a 9 player game of risk 2010 before (stealing peices from other versions of risk with spare commanders) but I mention AK and we end up with 3 and sometimes maybe 4.

So I was wondering what other people do? Do they just mix it all together, or mix and match certain parts to help preserve some of the flavors (and threats!)? I guess using KH + IH could increase the threat of Aquatic monsters.

And what about item decks? I ended up going through and removing duplicate cards out to trim the size down. I tried to keep the ration of weapons to non weapons the same, or close too.

I mix it together. Then, for every monster emerging from an expansion gate, I roll a die. If the result is less than the number of expansions I'm using, I add another monster.

So with all 6 published expansions: when a gate opens in Dunwich or Innsmouth, I roll a die. If the result is 5 or lower, I add a second monster. Of course, when I add the 7th expansion (Lurker) then I won't even have to roll: all monsters will automatically come with a "double."

This makes Dunwich and Innsmouth less likely to fizzle out.

Also: after resolving a mythos card that's from an expansion other than King in Yellow, I roll three dice. If the sum is exactly 3, I flip over and resolve the next unresolved Act card. This makes the lack of Next Act Begins mythos cards less of an issue.

I don't have any good solutions for theme dilution or lack of things like Exhibit items or Corruption cards. I prefer to address mechanics issues personally.

Happy playing!

I only use one big box and one little box together at a time, myself. I use all the investigator cards and monsters though. For encounters I leave them all mixed in and just keep drawing until I get an encounter symbol from an expansion I'm using, or no expansion at all. I don't like the dilution from using all the expansions together.

Tibs: What happened to your previous anti-dilution variant? I think it's awesome and I might try it myself. I'm talking about that whenever you draw a mythos card, if it's not the next act begins and or if it doesn't open a gate in an expansion board, you discard it and draw a new mythos card which is then resolved normally. This basically doubles the chance of expansion towns gates and next act.

kroen said:

Two main reasons:

1. That variant will continue to dilute as more expansions are produced. Even making Dunwich gates twice as frequent will still make them too infrequent with enough expansions. This new version doesn't make the gates there more frequent, but it does make the number of monsters in Dunwich about on par with what they're supposed to be. After all, it's the monsters in Dunwich that awaken the Horror, not the gates.
2. In the opposite direction: the expansion isn't backwards compatible. If you decide only to use Dunwich with a few expansions, that a-d rule will make gates too frequent (and therefore monsters in that town too frequent). The aim of all my attempts at anti-dilution was to make waking the Dunwich Horror about as frequent as when using Dunwich alone (and the Deep One Rising track in Innsmouth, and the Next Act cards, etc).

I'm with Lavode: one board expansion (L), one card expansion (S). Except that I never play with Black Goat (except its Mythos cards: see below) or Dark Pharaoh (almost completely retired to my closet). So I'm generally playing only one board expansion, occasionally with King in Yellow.

But that's just for the big cards: Mythos and Encounters. I mix all small cards together, tossing out most of Dark Pharaoh (I adopted some Spells and the Allies into Dunwich), and anything related to the Black Goat Cult mechanic. Full Monster Cup as well.

So far, my most successful Mythos combo has been Innsmouth with Black Goat. Since Innsmouth Mythos only pop Gates on its own board, it is diluted the least even with just the base game. Black Goat Mythos are added because it's the only expansion with Gate Bursts not dependent on having any other board besides Arkham in play (Innsmouth has no Arkham Gate Bursts), plus none of the BG Mythos require the Cult Mechanic to be in play.

For Encounters, I use AH + whichever board expansion I'm using + a small clutch of DP/DH cards. The DP cards are the 7 that grant specific DP Allies, and the 3 Dual Color Gate Cards. (I've also adopted the 3 double-doom-token DP Mythos into Dunwich.) The DH cards are the ones that grant DH Special Cards--Sheldon Gang Memberships, Rail Passes, Conditions--and then a few random DH Encounters per neighborhood to even all the neighborhoods up to the same number of cards. If I'm playing with King in Yellow, I add all of its Encounters too.

It's involved, to be sure, but it works for me.

Wow, this is confusing! I'm new to Arkham Horror and this is exactly the post topic I was looking but nuts, I'm not sure what to do.
I just started combining all the expansions just like I would with many FFG games but now I'm wondering if I should have.

Hopefully I am adding to this thread and not hijacking it.

For starters what's the easiest mixing to do? What does not complicate or dilute the game?

It sounds like adding all monsters to the monster cup is fine. Do you also add all 'ancient ones' as potential candidates for the base game? What else can be thrown in without much thought or concern?

If you guys wanted to play with only the main board and no other boards from the big box expansions what stuff would you add in?

TIA!

All the ancient ones and investigators can be used with just the base board. I think the only investigator that effects is Silas, but it doesn't break him. You can use all the items (common, unique, spells, skills) and monsters with no problems. You can still use most of the other features of expansions, such as Injury and Madness cards, the Epic Battle Deck, and Personal Stories. Offhand the only things absolutely tied to different boards are the location encounter cards and gate cards for expansion specific Other Worlds, and the actual mechanics of the other boards themselves, such as the Dunwich Horror track, Rift tracks, and the Deep One Rising track.

Edit: You might want to do some trimming of the Ally deck, though. I don't like including allies that can't be gained through an encounter in the game I'm playing, so I leave out the Dunwich, Kingsport, and DP allies if I'm not using those expansions.

Silas's ability becomes less useful when using only the base board, but on the other hand his "extra Innsmouth Look card" curse never takes effect, so it's all right. Technically the River Docks and Unvisited Isle are aquatic locations, so he'll still get his bonuses there.

Thanks guys.
I'm going to do some play testing/learning today. This will really help a lot.

i definitely mix my expansions together. its so hard seperating them anyways!

I agree with not wanting to seperate them becouse of the tedious effort involved, but once its done its less of a hassle to weed out just one or two expansions rather then the whole lot.

It took some motivation to get started but having control of the theme and overall complexity and size is making a huge diffrence when I play with diffrent groups.

I keep all my expansions mixed in and then just keep drawing until I get an encounter card or mythos card from one of the expansions I'm using (or the base game), unless I'm teaching someone new.

Oh dear, it seems I may have posted a topic very similar to this one. I asked how people play with expansions, because it seems using all of them at once is ridiculously overwhelming.

I posted in that one before I noticed you had posted in this one.

Noted, and thanks!

I ended up doing a lite mix.

I divided the mythos decks into their seperate expansions and then tried to create 4 seperate mythos decks based on what expansions I'm using. So I got one with cards from the main game, dunwich, and innsmouth, got one for dunwich and arkham, and one for arkham innsmouth and kingsport then the spares from botw and cotdp in an arkham only one, then I took out the next act and intermission cards so I could throw them in on an ass need basis. Have yet to used it but created it so that the ratio for gates were sort of the same, just instead of a 10 6 and 2 ratio for the original its more of a 5 3 1 ratio. The gate burst didn't divide well since I had fixed amount, and the final arkham only deck ended up with a 3-3-2 ratio for gates. I might end up throwing the dunwich partion from one of the decks into the kingsport/innsmouth deck for a all boards expansion, other wise I might just use the kingsport board without any mythos cards for the innsmouth/dunwhich mythos deck.

I did a similar thing with the other worldly encounter deck, dividing it up and creating seperate decks so that each realm had 4 cards for each color so I got 4 different decks based on which boards I mix.

For location encounters took out 7 cards from the mixed expansions and added them to each area for the board to bring it up to 14 for each area. I did it partial at random and partial at choosing, making sure each ally had a 2nd encounter added in, but not a 3rd or more. I did add in the cult of the thousand encounters since I wanted to see them used once (thou I may take them out since I hear so much ranting about them).

Figure all in all if I see any of the cards too often I could just start switching them in and out with new ones.

I cut the item decks down, taking out duplicates or sometimes items that were too similar (or unbalanced or useless) but tried to keep the ratio of weapons to non weapons the same.