As the fifth cycle comes to a close, I wondered if it's possible to get a consensus from long-term/completionist players as to what has been the best cycle so far. In my mind, the best possible cycle is not only one which brings the thrills, chills, surprises, and rewards, but one that offers players the most dynamism in replays down the road.

I'm not particularly savvy with these boards, so if there is a way to post a poll you'll have to forgive my ignorance.

Oh man this is a tough question. I won't be considering the player cards for my answer (that would be a very tough question).

The Forgotten Age has grown on me a great deal (albeit with a few houserules) and The Circle Undone has some of my favourite elements of the Arkham Files setting. Both of them have multiple pathways through the story that have interesting repercussions, which provides a lot of replayability.

But for my money, the best of the cycles is still Path to Carcosa. The psychological elements are amazing, the story is intense and enthralling and thought-provoking. The story elements are borne out by the mechanics extremely well. Most of the scenarios are interesting and the settings are wonderful. There's only one truly bad scenario in the campaign. It opens extremely well. There's multiple pathways through the story which change the final scenario a great deal (though one of the paths - my favourite one - requires a specific set of decisions). The difficulty is consistent and most investigators and builds can contribute well. The psychological angle is probably the best way to achieve anything approaching actual horror in the game - it's hard to achieve true horror when you can mow down gods with a tommy gun, but in Carcosa, how much of that even happens at all? It also manages to do a lot of show, not tell in the storytelling, and the realisations still stick in my mind.

I haven't touched on the Return To boxes, but I think that they don't change my answer - Return to the Night of the Zealot and Return to the Dunwich Legacy don't improve the campaigns enough to shift the needle, and Return to the Path to Carcosa is actually slightly less appealing to me than the base version of the campaign (though I am working on a houserule to incorporate elements of Return in a way that makes for the most fun).

35 minutes ago, Allonym said:

Oh man this is a tough question. I won't be considering the player cards for my answer (that would be a very tough question)

I agree that this shouldn't be a factor.

5 hours ago, Allonym said:

The Forgotten Age has grown on me a great deal (albeit with a few houserules)

I'd be curious what those are. The cycle has problems (looking at you, Boundary Beyond) and I've been wondering how/if others have addressed them.

We rotate lead investigator and let them choose the next campaign/priority on character played, then we build teams around their concepts and what we know will happen in the campaign. Based off what my team tends to pick:

We always look forward to our FA replays. That campaign definitely benefits from some foresight, though, like knowing the consequences of supplies, understanding the mechanics of scenarios 4 and 5 so that realistic expectations prevail, and knowing how to spend exp before scenario 6. FA is our current favorite and it's still one we haven't tried all the different endings (it's actually difficult and we generally take what we can get.) In our playgroup, our only house rule is changing the tone of a story choice in the introduction of Scenario 3 so that the consequences make sense.

We generally dislike Circle Undone for it's hokey writing. It's mechanically sound and engaging, if a bit punishing to team builds... it certainly favors an "every man is an island" approach. I feel like we'd enjoy it more if we overhauled some of the story beats. Perhaps we're being too harsh for a casual fantasy horror game, but the absurdity gets to be too much for us in TCU. We dislike the story tone of the last scenario enough that we've skipped playing it in the past and just allowed the bad guys to win. We've only finished it three times, so maybe it'll grow on us.

Carcosa is still, likely, the most replayable, and is easily the one we recommend to new players, with a great story and interesting scenario/campaign mechanics, but our group has beaten Carcosa and Dunwich so many times we tend to avoid choosing them, even with the Return to... options. Although we've never once been able to save Peter Clover, which is definitely my white whale for Arkham Horror. If your team has saved Peter Clover yourselves, imagine me shaking my fist at you in rage.

NotZ is fun, just too short.

So, based off what we tend to pick, from best to least best:

1. Forgotten Age; Carcosa

2. Dunwich

3. Circle Undone; Night of the Zealot

Since we play campaigns in about 4/6 weeks with side scenarios, we haven't started Dream Eaters and won't start until about March so that we can play through the whole thing. We are worried that, much like NotZ, it'll be time to retire an investigator before we've really explored their capabilities. Maybe we'll chain some campaigns together or stuff in all the side scenarios?

17 hours ago, Magnito said:

I'd be curious what those are. The cycle has problems (looking at you, Boundary Beyond) and I've been wondering how/if others have addressed them.

So, given that we don't play solo, the Supplies mechanic is very harsh. The primary houserule we use is that a group of any size buys supplies like a solo player - you spend points as per the one-player specifications, and all supplies apply across all investigators. So, for instance, if an effect allows one investigator with Torches to get +2 experience points, and the group has purchased Torches, each player gets the experience. If the group has purchased a Map, and a location has an ability like "Check your supplies. If you have a map, [do a thing]", all investigators can perform that action. If any number of investigators are poisoned, the group can spend its antidote to heal all poisoned investigators - and if the group does not or cannot, every poisoned investigator takes trauma as usual. If there is a point where investigators can spend Provisions to gain a bonus, the group spends one of its Provisions and the effects apply across all investigators. And so on.

In addition, while we play Hard difficulty, we use the Easy/Standard chaos token effects for a handful of scenarios - mainly those where the Elder Thing effects are poorly balanced (primarily the first two scenarios).

This does make the campaign easier, for certain. We're happy to play TFA on a difficulty that is midway between Standard and Hard. However, these changes don't simply make the game "easier" - the difficulty they eliminate is frustrating and highly luck-dependent.

Aceing The Boundary Beyond is an excellent way to make the campaign more fun, since Heart of the Elders (part 1) is one of the worst-designed scenarios in the entire game and being able to skip it is very pleasant (even if you lose the opportunity for a few experience points).

I would have to say Carcosa is my favorite. It has so many layers and never feels the same. It’s moody and atmospheric and the “psychological thriller” of the campaigns. I love playing The Phantom of Truth and The Pallid Mask, but that’s probably because I lived back and forth between Europe and the States for the first 20 years of my life and have walked the streets of Paris, (even at night, with scarcely a soul around) many times and almost gotten lost in those catacombs.
I really like the theme of reality vs disconnected reality. It’s as though you are doing everything with your peripheral vision. Your mind is filling in the blanks, but how accurately...

Forgotton Age is actually my second favorite in terms of challenge and theme. It has, to my mind, the most thematically well written fist scenario. It really feels like you are on a poorly funded expedition, headed by the worlds worst Expedition planner. It starts out tough and that you are sweaty and itchy (and quite possibly poisoned) to boot, just heightens the challenge. But even that seems appropriate, because, Ursula aside, the majority of Arkham investigators wouldn’t have the first clue what to do on a jungle expedition! We actually created an ally of sorts to help them out. Nellie the Prudent Donkey. She carries everyone’s supplies, so that whatever is needed can be accessed. She balks at truly stupid decisions, so won’t go everywhere, and tends to be highly suspicious of certain NPC’s. Although, she has taken a real shine to Yaotl. (We think it’s the feathers)

Good question; I got into the LCG a few cycles in - I didn't want FFG to suck all my money again - but eventually I caved and bought everything. I should have expected it.

My first full campaign was FA, so I didn't have much to compare it to other than NZ (and I only really liked scenario 2 of that mini cycle). Still like it to this day even with the weird supplies mechanic. But after playing everything but Dream-Eaters (bought and waiting for the final scenarios before playing):

1. Path to Carcosa - agree that the feel of this thing is just dynamite. Creepy, personal, well done. Didn't see much difference with Return To... although less xp!

2. Forgotten Age - for the most part love it. Tough as **** in retrospect, but good writing...feels like they shoved the Yithians in there and could have saved them for a separate cycle, but not complaining much as City of Archives was my favourite scenario of the campaign.

3. Dunwich Legacy - Return To.... improves it a bit too (e.g. the Essex County Express, a really fun scenario anyway). Starts out fun with the double mission too.

4. Circle Undone - parts of it were fun but there's some repetition coming in here. I really wish they'd come up with something else other than ending up in a cosmic land for the final scenario, every campaign. I wanted to like it more than I did.

5. Night of the Zealot/Return To... - it's an intro campaign, aside from scenario 2 I don't really put it in the same category as the others.

As for side stories:

1. Excelsior Hotel - fave so far

2. Guardians of the Abyss - brutal but fun

3. Carnivale of Horrors/Rougarou - didn't mind playing once, but the second time is pretty laborious.

haven't tried Labyrinth yet.

The Yithians felt quite fitting to me. It's about screwing around with timelines, of course they are going to show up.

The Yithian thing was kinda in there the whole time though. Maybe not with Yithian's in your face from scenario 1 like the Serpent people, but I believe that was the point. They were suppose to be a slow reveal, and on retrospect you see how they were involved earlier. The Serpent people were the threat in the open (well more accurately you are a threat to the Serpent people since you come in, kill a bunch of them and break something).

Path To Carcosa is still probably the best campaign from a story perspective IMO, and it has some great senarios.

Other campaigns have higher highs than Path for me. City of Archives, The House Always Wins, Blood On The Altar, The Search For Kadath, Union and Disillusion... but as far as a complete package I think Path is still on top. Forgotten Age is close because I thought the story for that campaign was great and there were real stand up moments in that campaign. Also it was nice to have a campaign that had more of a pulp feel for variety. Dreamlands is still coming out, but I could see it up there with TFA and PtC depending on how it finishes. Also it's nice now to have an option to do a 4 part campaign for less of a time commitment. Also it's nice that the XP curve is high on each scenario resolution for this one to see some powerful cards early.

Although we haven't done the latest cycle yet, of the ones I've done I really LOVED TFA the most. It was thematically sound, the horror was fun, and the different challenges were engaging. We're doing The Circle Undone at this time, and I'm not really "feeling' it... narrative-wise, it doesn't link up as smoothly as The Forgotten Age. Whenever the Witches show up, it doesn't link up with the rest of the Twilight Lodge material... the mechanics aren't bad, but it feels less intuitive then the previous modules.

On 1/13/2020 at 5:00 AM, Eldan985 said:

The Yithians felt quite fitting to me. It's about screwing around with timelines, of course they are going to show up.

Maybe a better way for me to say it was that I felt they were placed in there for a moment, and I would have liked to have a more Yithian-centred storyline as a whole - whether in FA or something else.