Good day, I count the number of portals in the mythos cards (base game), and found something rare....independence square, witch house, woods and unvisited isle have 10 cards each one...graveyard, black cave and unnamable have 6...and the rest only 2....why this pattern?

if we seal the first 4 locations we manage to beat the game very easy....the mayority of cards wil be stopped...and the dificult of the game once you realice that are reduce....

so...my question is, in any expansion this problem is resolve? or the locations always have this kind of arrange?

It's purposeful, some places are just a little more dangerous to visit than others.

For the most part this arrangement sticks, even with expansions. However, Dark Pharaoh boosts some of the lower-frequency places more. And Innsmouth includes a penalty for gates opening on seals, so sealing higher-frequency gates isn't always in the investigators' best interest.

Dunwich and Innsmouth add unstable locations so the issue of "frequency" is less relevant than "how do I keep too many gates from opening?"

MarioelKamui said:

The frequencies remain the same, but some of the expansions fix the problem by adding more locations for gates to open at, by having cards that add two doom tokens instead of a gate, by having cards that reopen sealed gates, and there are a couple other minor ways too.

The base game is very easy to beat if you understand the gate frequencies. Expansions fix this problem.

If you want a quick, cheap fix, get Black Goat of the Woods expansion. Other than adding new items, monsters, encounters and a herald, it also adds mythos cards that includes gate bursts- the only small box expansion that does so. Then again, if you don't have any expansions yet, then a better, quit and cheap fix would be King in Yellow. It too adds a lot of fun things and a cooler herald, and while not adding gate bursts, the act mechanic would be very potent with just the base game- often requiring you to add doom tokens or remove elder signs. It's up to you, really.

In the meanwhile, a cheap fix is starting all ancient ones with 2-3 doom tokens at the beginning of the game. And if the ancient ones are too easy in final combat, you can house rule them to raise their combat modifiers or to give them additional resistances or immunities.

You could also just do gate bursts yourself, without buying anything. Any time that a gate opens on a seal, roll a die. On a 1, the gate bursts. (IIRC, ordinarily the probability is 1 in 7). You can download Dunwich rules for free (or Kingsport, Innsmouth, or Black Goat) to see how gate bursts work.

avec said:

Bad idea. Not only you increase the chances of gates bursting, you're also making them more powerful, because normally gate bursts produce 2 clue tokens.

kroen said:

It really isn't. In the first place, the mechanic that I've suggested is balanced by the fact that you have fewer unstable areas to worry about (and no Black Goat herald). In the second place, 1/6 is 16.7% and 1/7 is 14.3%. It's hard to imagine a reasonable person getting too bent out of shape over the difference between those numbers. In the third place, the second clue doesn't change things very much. If you must have the second clue, it's not hard to think of creative ways of placing it. Like... turning over a second mythos card and ignoring everything except for placing the clue. Granted, the second clue could not appear at a stable location. But that's hardly a game-breaker. In the fourth place, this fix is $25 cheaper than buying an expansion and it takes care of one of the biggest problems with playing with just base set. It might not be your cup of tea, but it's not a bad idea.

But you're giving medium and low freqency locations the same chance of gate bursting :/ normally medium frequency location have about half as many gate bursts as high frequency, and low frequency locations have none :/

Atlach-Nacha has gotten inside his brain, he is seeing gate bursts everywhere !

Kroen - your first point is a simple mathematical fallacy. If you play with the base game plus Dunwich, for each high frequency location, there are 12 gate cards, 2 of which are gate bursts. Therefore, for high frequency locations, there's a 1 in 6 chance of a gate opening being a gate burst. For each medium frequency location, there are 7 gate cards, 1 of which is a gate burst. Therefore, for medium frequency locations, there's a 1 in 7 chance of a gate opening being a gate burst. So the 1-in-6 mechanic works well for both of those situations.

For each low frequency location, there are only 2 gate opening cards, neither of which is a gate burst. The reason for that is pretty clear. If Dunwich had included a gate burst card for each low frequency location, then seals at those locations would burst 1/3 of the time, making them seriously out of step with the rate at which other locations burst. On the other hand, if Dunwich had included more non-burst cards for low frequency locations, then by definition those locations wouldn't be low frequency any more. It seems clear to me that FFG would have included gate bursts for low frequency locations, but couldn't make it work with the mechanics that they employed. The mechanic that I proposed actually allows low frequency gates to burst as often as other gates, which is a further advantage of using it. Why should a seal at the Silver Twilight Lodge be automatically considered safe? How does that balance the game?

If you really don't like the idea of low frequency gates bursting EVER, then you could... not roll the die for those locations.

First of all, I don't need to roll at all. I have all expansions.

Second, it makes perfect balance and greatly adds to the strategy of the game. Should I seal Silver Twilight Lodge and have a failsafe seal, or should I seal The Witch House, gain the benefit of non-burst gates opening int it, but chance of it exploding? With your variant, no one will ever consider sealing low frequency locations. Ever. Thank you for taking a large chunk of the game's strategy and pissing all over it.

Don't forget to move all flyers if you roll a 1 and the gate bursts!

Dam said:

Lovely mental image. Spider webs dripping out of his nose too?

kroen said:

Shall I repeat myself? "If you really don't like the idea of low frequency gates bursting EVER, then you could... not roll the die for those locations."

If you want to find something to quibble about, I'm sure you will. As you may recall, the purpose of this thread is to help MarioelKamui find ways of making the game more challenging. Buying one or more of the expansions is certainly a solution. It is not the only solution.

DoomTurtle- "Don't forget to move all flyers if you roll a 1 and the gate bursts!"

Agreed. That's why I suggested reading the rules on gate bursts.

well...thanks all for the help....the expansions are a great idea...and the gate burst is a great thing to control the probability problem.....and the idea to recreate some arkham boost is a good idea to....

a hypothetical question.....if with the help of the expansions I destroy the high rates and the low rates....leaving all the gate locations equal...this hurt any substancial part od the game system?....I dont know any of the expansion so...I dont know if some of the high rates is necesary to the fluid strategy of the board...

MarioelKamui said:

No problem, glad to hear you found it useful. The expansions preserve the ratios, so high frequency locations remain high frequency locations (and mid frequency locations remain mid frequency locations, etc.)

People have talked about removing mythos cards to alter the gate frequencies; I don't know how successful such attempts have been. It definitely would require stripping out a lot of cards; I have no idea how balanced the remaining ones would be in terms of rumors/clues/monster movement/etc.

But since rolling a die seems to be the solution of the day, it might be easier to just roll a d12 to determine where the gate opens.

To Avec:

I'm with you on the maths. The expected number of burst is fairly identical rolling a die and bursting on 1. Because the total probability is (a) the probability of having a second time the gate given that you have sealed a first time (ie. only one card remains in the whole deck for low frequency ones) times (b) the probability of rolling a 1 on a die, for low frequency gates, this will be ridiculously small... close to 0. :-)

As the total probability scales with the number of remaining locations in the mythos deck, your method is perfectly fine (I mean on a probability point of view :-) !

Curiosity: why "Avec" is your nickname (because it means something in french I kept being disturb when I read it :-) ?

amikezor said:

Thanks! It's good to get confirmation. I think Kroen actually has a point that low frequency gates are guaranteed non-bursts. However, in practice, I wouldn't change my strategy if low frequency gates had a 1% chance of bursting as opposed to a 0% chance of bursting. For me, this game is all about playing the odds.

I didn't choose "avec" for any particular reason. It's French for "with" and it just sort of felt right. If I had more imagination I would have gone with something like Avi dreader.

avec said:

Oh, I don't have any imagination, I stole Avi_dreader from myself ;') I pleased that you view puns as imaginative as opposed to the signs of imminent insanity that they actually are.

Ah. "Avid reader." I didn't get it until now. And you're a librarian, right?

avec said:

:'D

avec said:

the probability, assuming you have already pass 20 mythos cards is approximatively 1/47 * 1/6 = 0.00354609929078 ~ 0.4% for the next few cards.

So if you will be playing 10 more cards, (for the sake of the argument), it is about 1-0.996^10 ~ 3.5%. this is low... :-). Note that is is not an exact calculation. I surely could compute an exact probability (that will be slightly higher), but it will be in that order.

Yes, I kept reading avec, but avec quoi? avec qui ? In french it sounds odd (this is never a word that sits by itself :-), but I like it though.