i've only played the base game a couple of times. i'm pretty new to it.

But we found the game WAY WAY to easy. So, we just don't play it anymore.

I just bought the dunwich expansion. i've heard this makes the game harder and more balanced. is this true.

what about the other expansions, what does everyone recommend? I have the mummy king exhibit or what ever its called too.

I just added all the cards in.

Dunwich definitely makes the game harder (although with a larger team of investigators, not by too much) as there's more ground to cover and more places gates might open. Kingsport doesn't make the game much more difficult in general, but the Kingsport Ancient Ones (and Epic Battle deck) make for a much tougher challenge than most of the basic ones.

Since you already have Dark Pharoah, try playing that as a Visiting exhibition (rather than all mixed in) against an Ancient One who's difficult to beat in a fight (Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth, from the base game)

And just remember, first few games you are still getting the hang of the rules, and will often forget or misread things.

In my first few games I was doing most of the following wrong:

a) I didn't resolve a Mythos card during set-up

b) Moving skill sliders my focus for each skill

c) Adding a seperate other world movement phase between the encounter and other world encounter phases

d) If a Location had an elder sign I wasn't resolving ANY of the Mythos card

e) When facing off against the Great Old One I thought two successes was all that was needed to take off a Doom token, when there were 4 investigators

Stupid stuff to me now, but at the time I was overwhelmed with rules, and couldn't remember it all, so some things were just kind of made up on the spot if I couldn't find it quickly in the book. So I'd suggest you read the rulebook once through, then play a solo game, and read the rulebook at every stage of the game to make sure you are doing it right. Then rinse and repeat a couple more times.

As for Dunwich Horror, it honestly hasn't added that much difficulty for me and my group, if any. If the expansion didn't have gate bursts, I'd actually say it was a fair bit easier.

The Scenarios make it harder...so try those but you have to dig for them under pages it's @ 27 pages worth of digging!

The scenerios do make the conditions a bit tougher to win and are located here: http://new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=6&esem=4

I would also suggest the King in Yellow expansion as another way to increase game difficulty as well as playing with the Dunwich Herald found at the above link. I believe that Kevin Wilso also suggested some ways of making things harder in the game like resolving the gate section on a second Mythos card every round or every other round.

How large a group are you using? With very large groups of players, the game becomes very easy (even with expansions) unless you add in some really nasty herald (like the Black Goat) or Ancient One.

Adding expansions certainly ramps up the difficulty. Getting the Black Goat expansion would be especially helpful, as it contains five cards to give you five different levels of difficulty.

How's about everyone starts out cursed!

thorgrim said:

Yep!

So far, whenever a newbie told me, the game was too easy, it turned out they were playing something wrong. This can be pretty much anything:

• trading clue tokens
• continuing to move after fighting monsters
• picking up clue tokens while passing by
• moving out and back into locations with open gates (optionally while keeping the 'explored' marker)
• not buying an item at the shop even though there would have been enough money
• travelling to a different gate from the other worlds when there was no gate open to the particular other world the investigator was in
• etc.

Many of the commonly overlooked/incorrectly played rules are in the FAQ, but there's just as many that aren't.

The only time a newbie said it was too easy and played correctly that I could tell, is when they go to BGG and learn every strategy there is. Much like a video gamer that gets all the cheats or has a magazine publish every easter egg and map, the game is too easy because it is a guided tour. A subtle oversight can have drastic ramifications. I know how to win, I know where to go, I know what to do. And yet, I just recently got my win percentage over 50% in the base game.

I'm with thogrim, jhaelan and coltsfan, with this one. The rules are relatively complicated at first, so it's easy to make quite a few mistakes in those initial games (and, after approx. 75 games, in my case...I have a thick skull, which is further thickened by drink).

A couple that I committed, shamefully: (1) not paying attention to hand limits for weapons, (2) not exhausting spells, so i ended up using them repeatedly to fight multiple monsters in same area (triple flamethrower, anyone?), and (3) using spells and/or weapons, in addition to base fight/lore check to close gates. After three/four games and multiple re-readings of the RAW, I realized why it was so easy to kill the monsters and close gates! Those were the biggies. And there were a ton of less consequential ones, too.

Anyway, use a herald, if you think the game is too easy. I soloed a base game with BGotW using its herald two nights ago, and started with the dark druid on the first gate. Two turns later, Endlessly Breeding rumor cropped up its ugly head, and the hex monsters were literally swirling (counter-clockwise) around the board. Nasty. Dark Young kept blocking my two investigators onto locations. They ended up being light fare for Yog.

ColtsFan76 said:

Whaaaa? You *just* got your win percentage with the *base* game over 50%?! I thought you played it more than that ;') The base game is total cake, especially if you hang out at the newspaper for easy cash.

Avi_dreader said:

Well, maybe some artisitc license. When I take a good look at just the base game plays, I guess my win percentage went pretty high pretty quickly. But then I dropped back below 50% as I introduced quite a few games to newbies. I guess my win percetnage went back up over 50% again at the beginning of the year. But it has been a while since I played just the base game.

You don't even have to be a newbie to overlook some of the basics and screw up. I was playing over the weekend and Tsaghotha (I don't have the game with me so I know I screwed up the spelling) woke up. I knocked 6 doom tokens off the track in the first round of combat before I realized I forgot the -6 to the combat dice! Oops. Two investigators were devoured after the first round, then when I realized my mistake (even without adding the doom tokens back because I was lazy) my other two investigators were gone by the end of the third round and we'd only knocked off one more doom token.

Ah well, we were happy for one round of combat anyway!

I was recently on BGG when I found a few cool ideas to enhance the gameplay. One of my favorites was one that will also make the game at least a little more difficult. When you draw a portal to an other worldin the mythos phase, place it face down on the board. This way you don't know what world you're going to and what monsters with corresponding symbols will be eliminated when the portal is closed. You turn the portal marker over when you move to the portal to find out that you're not eliminating any monsters and you could be going to one of the other worlds that tend to be nastier to you. If you're not eliminating monsters, it can cause the outskirts to fill faster, therefore also raising the terror track level faster. It also adds another element of being lucky or unlucky as I've had games go really well because I'm getting lucky and getting other worlds that do have the symbols I need to eliminate mosters, but other games where I can't eliminate mosters, by closing gates, to save my life. It can also shorten the length of the game with the terror track rising faster, which is nice if your a little short on time. There were a lot of other ideas on BGG, some great, some terrible, but this was one that I now always use and really like.

I agree there are so many rules (not a bad thing) that you can occasionally skip out on rule. I wish I had a dollar for every time we have forgotten to use the rules on the GOO card or ongoing effects on Mythos cards!! But we have found using the scenarios has certainly made the game harder and a little more fun. It is a great game it's a shame that you haven't played it for a while.

i've been playing since around october but have put alot of games under my belt in a short amount of time...i would say me and my g/f played about a game a night for the first few weeks... most of which were played incorrectly in some capacity... in the base game i would say it was 50/50 win percentage...for christmas i got dark pharaoh and black goat... our win percent remained mostly intact due to dark pharaoh being a little more forgiving imo but black goat being a real pain... (we have yet to tackle the black goat herald... a) too lazy to separate hex monsters , b) too scared lol) but with just the cards not much changed...we then snagged kingsport due to a friends recommendation and put a few more games in which really killed out win %.. maybe it was because we were too concerned with closing rifts that we completely ignored the rest of the games i find kingsport to be extremely challenging with only 2 people (Actually any board expansion seems to be) i then snagged dunwhich hurriedly because it was oop and i wanted to get one before it was impossible to find... after many games with that we have found it is the easier of the board expansions... finally i just snagged Insmouth/KiY/Lurker i can't comment too much on these yet as we have only played 1 game with them but we lost that game lol... AH is all about balance if its too easy there are plenty of things you can do to make the game ALOT harder (heralds, house rules, or play by the rules)... from my own experiences of all the things i can call Arkham Horror I would never use the word EASY

"too"

Sorry. The resident grammarian.

The Old Man said:

Apply for a job at FFG they need a proof reader for Mansions of Madness

thorgrim said:

So very true. I'm on my 9th game now and learned I was making a basic error just before my last game. I will say that the core does seem fairly easy so far, but we've not met every Ancient One yet. Next game we will be adding a expansion. KiY for sure. DH if I can get hold of it in time.

I guess I should look at more of the site before having to go into details that are explained elsewhere on the FFG site. If you look on the house rules section of the support page for the game, it has a bunch of house rules that can either make the game harder or easier. It also explains the reasons for these house rules.

I'm playing a 6 investigator game against Cthulhu, and it's just the one time that i have powerful investigators and everything is going right. Turn 13 or so and somehow the doom track is empty, and I have a third elder sign out that I haven't used yet. Dual gate opening, few monster surges, three sealed gates all kept the doom track from filling up......can't lose.

Nothing like this has ever happened, most games I'm struggling hard to win/frantically trying to keep the AO from waking. Having a perfect and easy game will happen every now and then. Isn't a huge indicator of the actual difficulty involved.

I have lost the last 2 ( basic ) games in a row. Two-investigator teams versus Hastur and Yig respectively.

I tend to think that in a 2-investigator game, in order to stand a chance you cannot random pick investigators. After random picking AO, you must hand-pick both investigators to form a strong team. Am I right on this one? Do you ppl find it easy to beat the base game with every 2 random investigators against every random AO?

Thanx, I love this game and I think it has a will of its own (how else can it be explained that against Yig, from all AOs, I kept drawing Cultists again and again and those cultists always moved exactly in position to block all the gates I wanted to visit. not to mention that rumors tend to emerge at the worst possible moment).

Nah. I've played tons of 2p base games with random investigators and did a fine job. But the game's more fun with 3 because you can have encounters.

Try 3i or 4i games and keep the investigators random.