Good evening,

I'm introducing a friend to the LCG and I’m using Arkham Horror to do it. So I am trying to decide what investigators to play and which campaign.

He said he would like to play a jack of all trades, so I’m thinking Mystic is right for him. Personally my go-to is Jim Culver, Though I don’t know if he’s good for a brand new player. I’m also considering using the new investigator starter decks. For a campaign, I’m thinking Dunwich, but Night of the Zealot seems like a natural starting point.

i will play an investigator that will compliment what I pick for him.

any thoughts?

Phaed

Akachi is a more straight Forward mystic and the 5 will might be more suited more a more traditional play style.

Hmm I’ve introduced 7 people to Arkham, and they started with 3 seekers, 1 rogue, 1 mystic, 1 survivor, and 1 guardian. I found that straight forwardness at the start was a huge deal for the ones that stayed. I quite like how armada does a “training” battle for you to wet your feet, maybe try that? Both of you play as a starter deck for either 1 scenario or the whole night of the zealot? Unsure. Could be interesting.

i have always thrown my friends into the deep end though lol, I feel Arkham’s biggest strengths is it’s versatile deck building, so maybe try letting them create a deck? And start from Zealot as a pair of investigators planning on pushing through?

just some food for thought from my personal experiences

4 hours ago, Sooner535 said:

i have always thrown my friends into the deep end though lol, I feel Arkham’s biggest strengths is it’s versatile deck building, so maybe try letting them create a deck? And start from Zealot as a pair of investigators planning on pushing through?

just some food for thought from my personal experiences

I was thinking this, I am hesitant to use Zealot because the story isn’t as strong as Dunwich let’s say. But I do like keeping it simple so Akashi might be the right pick for him.

you could always do "The Gathering" as trainer wheels, let them die and a get a taste for it, and then leap to Dunwich, allowing them rebuild their deck after realizing half the cards they initially picked are junk in a real fight. XD

10 minutes ago, happy_ythogtha said:

you could always do "The Gathering" as trainer wheels, let them die and a get a taste for it, and then leap to Dunwich, allowing them rebuild their deck after realizing half the cards they initially picked are junk in a real fight. XD

I'm building a basic Akachi deck for him. 😛

The Gathering, I've found, works very well as a tutorial. You lay out the game, and then explain all the elements to them as you go with them through their first turns.

"Right. Here we have the act and agenda, they do this. This is your hand, you have these types of cards. This is your investigator, they can do this. Now, this is a location. In this location you can investigate like this."

And so on. You have to do all that anyway to explain the rules, do it with the Gathering instead of the diagrams in the rulebook.

5 hours ago, Phaed said:

I was thinking this, I am hesitant to use Zealot because the story isn’t as strong as Dunwich let’s say. But I do like keeping it simple so Akashi might be the right pick for him.

Well I also forget most people don’t play the game as one continuous story lol, it’s something that we did naturally and when I found out that wasn’t the “normal” way to play it confused me lol.

idk, I guess the biggest thing is what type of friend you have there. I know my fiancée who plays and her younger brother love to deck build as much as I do, and showing them that aspect had them enthralled. Meanwhile my 2 friends hated deckbuilding, and they much preferred me building their deck and them upgrading.

I find zealot to be the perfect starting place though, with the return to box the story is a lot more varied and it’s a bit more dangerous, which I’ve enjoyed. We always try to role play the game as much as possible, for instance we all introduce our characters and don’t tell each other our decks or what we have in them. We slowly “learn” about each other’s character because we all met at the lead investigator’s house in zealot. We also don’t tell eachother what cards we upgraded to unless it makes thematic sense so for instance: Ethan was playing mark and decided to take versatile and grabbed a mystic card, the idea in our head was my character (dianna) taught him a magic spell to use in case he was in trouble lol.

another instance of this deckbuilding and role playing is me as Preston, I have 1 weapon and that’s it (time woven brand) and I don’t have any throw away allies at all. My story is Preston is a rich guy and while he’s ok going to the jungle, he doesn’t want to be the one digging for treasure. So he doesn’t get his hands dirty as much, so he lets his teammates and allies do it for him, but, he recently got hurt in a scenario so he decided to ask mandy Thompson (my fiancee) to see if there was any artifacts she knew of that would help him defend himself, so he got the brand. As his sanity and max health decrease over time he’s going to be more and more willing to be desperate and jump into the trenches with his teammates.

idk, I’ve liked this approach to playing a lot, it’s created a very enjoyable contestant change in how our character works and evolves, and you create the story for that character. Is your Diana unwilling to use “cultish” cards until she takes on lots of mental trauma? Or is she all about the occult and it feeds her down into a never ending spiral of lunacy? Is mark willing to even kill his allies to stop the monsters? Or will he protect anyone at all cost, even sacrificing himself? just the way we play not necessarily the right or best way, but something that we like to do.

7 minutes ago, Sooner535 said:

idk, I guess the biggest thing is what type of friend you have there. I know my fiancée who plays and her younger brother love to deck build as much as I do, and showing them that aspect had them enthralled. Meanwhile my 2 friends hated deckbuilding, and they much preferred me building their deck and them upgrading.

exactly this. my sister could probably spend the whole evening reading through each deck card and asking how it would work in a scenario and carefully selecting her choices and we'd never get to the game, but she will have had the best time ever.

i don't really like the preset decks or being handed a deck, but i do ike to throw a bunch of stuff in at random and just see how it works/adjust as i go.

10 hours ago, happy_ythogtha said:

exactly this. my sister could probably spend the whole evening reading through each deck card and asking how it would work in a scenario and carefully selecting her choices and we'd never get to the game, but she will have had the best time ever.

i don't really like the preset decks or being handed a deck, but i do ike to throw a bunch of stuff in at random and just see how it works/adjust as i go.

Exactly . Ya I wouldn’t say the starter and beginner decks are.... bad necessarily, just not my personal style. There are always “bad” or “dead” cards viewed by the community, and I love seeing and trying them out to see what they can be used for lol. Like using Preston, I thought he would be boring when I first saw him, yet he might be my strongest built deck yet lol. Arkham is truly a very unique game, and I hope FFG creates more games like it

10 hours ago, Sooner535 said:

Exactly . Ya I wouldn’t say the starter and beginner decks are.... bad necessarily, just not my personal style. There are always “bad” or “dead” cards viewed by the community, and I love seeing and trying them out to see what they can be used for lol. Like using Preston, I thought he would be boring when I first saw him, yet he might be my strongest built deck yet lol. Arkham is truly a very unique game, and I hope FFG creates more games like it

i wonder if that's a Rogue thing: they don't look very strong on the surface, but once you start playing them they can surprise you! i had the same experience with Winnie. out of the box i thought: well, she may not be that great on campaign, but actually playing her was some of the most fun i've had so far!

Okay, first thanks everyone for the tips. Today is game day, and we will be doing Night of the Zealot with Akashi and Winnie!

This should be fun, i haven’t played a rogue in a while so I’m excited to check her out. I’ll report back how it goes later today!

1 hour ago, happy_ythogtha said:

i wonder if that's a Rogue thing: they don't look very strong on the surface, but once you start playing them they can surprise you! i had the same experience with Winnie. out of the box i thought: well, she may not be that great on campaign, but actually playing her was some of the most fun i've had so far!

It might very well be, I played Jenny with the same attitude. I have always been more of a mystic/guardian character (hence my undying love for dianna lol). Rogues seem almost the opposite of that play style, so i never purposefully look at them. Yet my 2 “strongest” decks have been Jenny and Preston, perhaps I’m just destined to be a rogue player lol. Im very interested in trying trish tbh, I think the rogues ability to resource gather and take extra turns coupled with the seekers ability to draw and maintain a hand of cards could lead to some very very broken combos lol.

25 minutes ago, Phaed said:

Okay, first thanks everyone for the tips. Today is game day, and we will be doing Night of the Zealot with Akashi and Winnie!

This should be fun, i haven’t played a rogue in a while so I’m excited to check her out. I’ll report back how it goes later today!

Good luck! When I showed my two friends (the first people I showed) the game we lost the night of the zealot haha

So yesterday we played a game. To recap: I played Winnie, the new Rogue Investigator, and my friend Adam, whom I was teaching the game to, played Akachi as a jack-of-all trades; we played Night of the Zealot, The Gathering.

The way I chose to handle this was to give Adam a brief synopsis about this game, what we would be doing, how its played, etc. Then start play in The Gathering and teach as we went. First game was fairly smooth, little or no bumps. In his Akachi deck I included 2 Rite of Seeking, 2 Shrivling, 2 Spectral Razor, and 2 Mists of R'leyh, so this was a fairly versatile deck. He ended up drawing the Spectral Razors and a Rite of Seeking fairly soon, so he became the primary clue gatherer. We had a couple ghouls and rats pop up so it was easy to teach him combat, he nailed a VP1 Ghoul with Spectral Razor and got really excited. After we got to Act2, we both went to the basement and even though he went second I had to tell him that he still took a physical damage from the icy steps. He got some clues and went to the Attic where he took a horror from the carcass hanging there. We quickly turned to Act 3 and spawned the Ghoul Priest, where we went over some evasion rules because the Priest engaged with me and having a natural 5 foot, it was very easy to evade for me. We moved into the Parlor leaving the Priest behind and I taught Adam how Parley worked, and how to commit cards to boost his test. I had 1 card that I committed for him too so he could see that mechanic, and we were sucessful in parleying with Lita, bringing her to our side. After that it was cake, Priest moved and engaged me, we'd get our hits on it and evade it. We made quick work of it. He was the lead investigator and chose to burn the house down and cussed when he took a trauma because of it. I laughed.

So after we finished The Gathering, I explained how this campaign has 3 scenarios in it, but how the other expansions are up to 8 scenarios. I started packing up the game and he says "we can play another." YES! He was hooked! We played Midnight Masks, which was a LOT more fun because he got the hang of the game quickly, and there were fewer teaching moments. In this game, he drew more combat cards. he upgraded and got a level 2 Withering to replace a Shriveling, and ended up drawing it on his opening hand. this game was more combat oriented for him, and since I drew lock picks as Winnie, I was the primary clue gatherer. We had a lot of fun, though doom ran out too quickly and it became midnight and we had only interrogated one cultist into the Victory Display. We stopped playing after this scenario, but he said he wants to finish the story, so I'm excited for the next time we can play. He's into it. I love when things work so smoothly.

Phaed.

Glad it went well for you both.

That’s awesome man I love that when they get hooked as much as we do congrats on getting a new Arkham acolyte to join the fold.

on a funnier note I’ve always viewed that slick stairs as the person who fell first just kind of being like “hey come on down it’s fine” then snickering as they slip on fall on their butt lol. Honestly if someone took azure flame and asked to just burn the ice I might just let them considering how creative an idea that would be lol.

I always find the cultist part to be the upsetter, either we find all the cultists and win with ease or.... but on this current one I’m going through we only got 1 cultist and still managed to stop the ritual in time, I was very impressed about that lol.

i wonder how your friend will react to a loss and a restart? Might be an interesting way to teach him to build his own deck?

Yeah, if we continue to another campaign, which I'm sure we will, I'll have him build his own deck. He got small taste of it when he was upgrading.

15 hours ago, Phaed said:

Yeah, if we continue to another campaign, which I'm sure we will, I'll have him build his own deck. He got small taste of it when he was upgrading.

sounds like a win-win for you and your friend! well done! : D

16 hours ago, Sooner535 said:

I always find the cultist part to be the upsetter, either we find all the cultists and win with ease or.... but on this current one I’m going through we only got 1 cultist and still managed to stop the ritual in time, I was very impressed about that lol.

hahaha ~ two cultists got away from me the first time i went through. when they popped up later, i just beat them to a pulp as payback. it was strangely gratifying. XD

2 hours ago, happy_ythogtha said:

sounds like a win-win for you and your friend! well done! : D

hahaha ~ two cultists got away from me the first time i went through. when they popped up later, i just beat them to a pulp as payback. it was strangely gratifying. XD

I know, almost more gratifying then killing them in midnight masks for some odd reason lol. I am hoping my Preston dies soon -.- I want to play Carolyn fern or dexter or Luke or..... -.- I tell you what I want, I want to play just me as 4 investigators lol

1 minute ago, Sooner535 said:

I know, almost more gratifying then killing them in midnight masks for some odd reason lol. I am hoping my Preston dies soon -.- I want to play Carolyn fern or dexter or Luke or..... -.- I tell you what I want, I want to play just me as 4 investigators lol

ha! i know exactly what you mean! i'm heading in that direction myself. i want to play them all and build a whole team.

i don't know if i can juggle more than three at a time, but i may yet try it!

5 minutes ago, happy_ythogtha said:

ha! i know exactly what you mean! i'm heading in that direction myself. i want to play them all and build a whole team.

i don't know if i can juggle more than three at a time, but i may yet try it!

Ya that’s my issue >.< it sounds like a daunting task to be sure. On the bright side after a few short games you’ll be able to feel the mental strain just like your investigators do

5 minutes ago, Sooner535 said:

Ya that’s my issue >.< it sounds like a daunting task to be sure. On the bright side after a few short games you’ll be able to feel the mental strain just like your investigators do

play four or more investigators: take 1 trauma. XD