Hello,

I've received this game last week (core & Dunwich Legacy) and have just finished Where Doom Awaits, and so far it's been a blast!

It really is one of the best gaming experiences of the last 10 years. Last week we played with the Roland and Wendy starterdecks the NOTZ core campaign, which we though was amazing.
Now we're almost through TDL and it's even better!!

It's so good I went out and bought

- the full Forgotten Age cycle

- the Circle Undone cycle (minus The Secret Name which I can't find anywhere)

- Carcosa expansion box

- Return To NOTZ

- custom tokens and dividers

Some thoughts/questions:

- My favorite scenario's so far are Blood on the Altar and The House Always Wins

- Essex Express was fun but incredible unfair: I've restarted 4 times, because in multiple tries my group was killed in the first or second Mythos phase, just by drawing encounter cards that gave Doom tokens.

- After playing 10 scenario's, only one was NOT fun: Undimensioned and Unseen. First of all because by completely changing the mechanics our decks were next to useless, and the difficulty was very high. Secondly it was also boring: after defeating the first 'story enemy' we had to wait 5 turns on doom counters to advance the agenda and spawn next enemy spawns; and then this process repeated.

- Where Doom Awaits: this was far easier than anticipated: only one 'story enemy' escaped in the previous scenario, so the only penalty we had was 1 doom counter (unless I missed something?). The end boss enemy was pretty easy too.

- We're already very excited to play the final scenario tonight! But we're not sure what to do next:
1) start my next full campaign (Forgotten Age) with 2 new investigators
2) replay Dunwich with 2 new investigators (now with purple and red classes)
3) play the Return to NOTZ with new investigators

I like to gradually unlock new content, that's why I only 'unlock' the new cards from a mythos pack when we get to it's scenario (so tonight we're opening the Where Doom Awaits player cards); this way it's upgrading your deck after each scenario stays an exciting event! That's why I don't know whether I should play TFA and start opening new packs, or replay TDL with red/purple investigators (those cards are also new to me).

tldr; this game is sooooooooo good

First of all, welcome aboard! (Keep in mind that this forum will be shut down next month, so better post on the BGG forum)

About "unlocking" new content, people will normally suggest that it's better to just open all the cycle at once and allow you to use all of those cards from the beginning (because the creators just come up with all the cards at once and the divide them into cycles without any particular order).

And about "what to do next", all the options that you've mentioned are great! Although I wouldn't suggest to restart immediately the campaign that you've just played, so either Forgotten Age or Return to NOTZ will be perfect (and perfectly brutal, as you will see haha). Just don't get scared the first time you play any of them!

Welcome to the game! Glad to hear that you are enjoying it so much.

The Essex County Express can be a very quick loss at high player counts if you are unlucky with Ancient Evils draws. From memory, I believe his issue was fixed in the Return to The Dunwich Legacy box.

When The Dunwich Legacy first came out I think Undimensioned and Unseen was quite a lot of people’s least favourite scenario. It certainly can be very tough going in blind, especially if you don’t have an investigator with high willpower and/or ways to boost it.

I haven’t heard many people describe Where Doom Awaits as too easy, although having a high Intellect investigator definitely makes it go more smoothly. Perhaps the encounter deck was making it up to you after the luck it sounds like you had during The Essex County Express! We won it on our first play through on the final round before the last Agenda would have advanced.

I agree with the post above: I’d recommend either Return to Night of the Zealot, which in particular really fleshes out the first scenario to be much more than a tutorial, or jump into The Forgotten Age. The Forgotten Age can feel very punishing, but I think that (a) it starts off harder than most campaigns and (b) is more liberal with trauma than other campaigns - so don’t feel disheartened if you feel like you’ve taken a beating early on. I also think that a lot of people weren’t particularly enamoured with the Supplies mechanic that the campaign uses, so if you don’t enjoy that aspect of it don’t worry, you are not alone. It does have some absolutely cracking scenarios, Threads of Fate and The Depths of Yoth are stand-outs for me, and if you don’t know anything about The City of Archives then all I will say is that you should try not to spoil anything about it for yourself.

Thanks for the great replies!

I'll start with Return to NOTZ first I guess, since it was published before TFA
Still looking for the Path to Carcosa cycle, but can't find it anywhere.

Question about "Lost in Time and Space":

Many of the cycles have had one or more packs out of stock for a while. Rumour has it that a restock is expected in February, but whether this includes all the packs from all the cycles I’m afraid I don’t know.

3 hours ago, PearlChoco said:

Question about "Lost in Time and Space":

Normal connection rules apply, it will hopefully all make sense once you start seeing more locations but can be a bit confusing at first.

24 minutes ago, Assussanni said:

Many of the cycles have had one or more packs out of stock for a while. Rumour has it that a restock is expected in February, but whether this includes all the packs from all the cycles I’m afraid I don’t know.

Normal connection rules apply, it will hopefully all make sense once you start seeing more locations but can be a bit confusing at first.

I'm not sure...

I quickly checked all location cards in the encounter stack and not a single one was connected to the yellow circle (which is Another Dimension )

1 hour ago, PearlChoco said:

I'm not sure...

I quickly checked all location cards in the encounter stack and not a single one was connected to the yellow circle (which is Another Dimension )

Connections are from the bottom of the location you are currently at to the top of the location you wish to move to. So the central location, Another Dimension, is a yellow circle location (top left of card) and you can move to red square, green diamond and blue triangle locations from it.

So let’s say there is a location with a red square at the top left, and it has a green diamond and blue triangle at the bottom. You could move to this location from Another Dimension because the bottom of Another Dimension and the top left of this card have matching symbols but you could not move back from this location to Another Dimension because it does not have the yellow circle symbol at the bottom which matches the top left of Another Dimension.

I hope that helps! If not, I’m happy to post some images which may make it more clear.

2 minutes ago, Assussanni said:

Connections are from the bottom of the location you are currently at to the top of the location you wish to move to. So the central location, Another Dimension, is a yellow circle location (top left of card) and you can move to red square, green diamond and blue triangle locations from it.

So let’s say there is a location with a red square at the top left, and it has a green diamond and blue triangle at the bottom. You could move to this location from Another Dimension because the bottom of Another Dimension and the top left of this card have matching symbols but you could not move back from this location to Another Dimension because it does not have the yellow circle symbol at the bottom which matches the top left of Another Dimension.

I hope that helps! If not, I’m happy to post some images which may make it more clear.

Yes thank you, I figured it out myself about 3 minutes ago

On 1/17/2021 at 7:07 AM, PearlChoco said:

Hello,

I've received this game last week (core & Dunwich Legacy) and have just finished Where Doom Awaits, and so far it's been a blast!

It really is one of the best gaming experiences of the last 10 years. Last week we played with the Roland and Wendy starterdecks the NOTZ core campaign, which we though was amazing.
Now we're almost through TDL and it's even better!!

It's so good I went out and bought

- the full Forgotten Age cycle

- the Circle Undone cycle (minus The Secret Name which I can't find anywhere)

- Carcosa expansion box

- Return To NOTZ

- custom tokens and dividers

Some thoughts/questions:

- My favorite scenario's so far are Blood on the Altar and The House Always Wins

- Essex Express was fun but incredible unfair: I've restarted 4 times, because in multiple tries my group was killed in the first or second Mythos phase, just by drawing encounter cards that gave Doom tokens.

- After playing 10 scenario's, only one was NOT fun: Undimensioned and Unseen. First of all because by completely changing the mechanics our decks were next to useless, and the difficulty was very high. Secondly it was also boring: after defeating the first 'story enemy' we had to wait 5 turns on doom counters to advance the agenda and spawn next enemy spawns; and then this process repeated.

- Where Doom Awaits: this was far easier than anticipated: only one 'story enemy' escaped in the previous scenario, so the only penalty we had was 1 doom counter (unless I missed something?). The end boss enemy was pretty easy too.

- We're already very excited to play the final scenario tonight! But we're not sure what to do next:
1) start my next full campaign (Forgotten Age) with 2 new investigators
2) replay Dunwich with 2 new investigators (now with purple and red classes)
3) play the Return to NOTZ with new investigators

I like to gradually unlock new content, that's why I only 'unlock' the new cards from a mythos pack when we get to it's scenario (so tonight we're opening the Where Doom Awaits player cards); this way it's upgrading your deck after each scenario stays an exciting event! That's why I don't know whether I should play TFA and start opening new packs, or replay TDL with red/purple investigators (those cards are also new to me).

tldr; this game is sooooooooo good

You are doing what we did. We started two years ago and bought all the Standalones that were released, Dunwich and Carcosa. TFA was releasing at the time, but was only one Mythos pack away from being done, so by the time we started it, it was all the way released. We’ve been pre ordering ever since! Fortunately back then this game wasn’t as well known and everything was in stock.

We also played everything in the order it was released, adding the player cards as we played each scenario. It was like Christmas over and over again!!
It’s addicting. We still play at least twice a week on average.

Just played through Return To NOTZ, and now I'm ready to start my first TFA playthrough!

Any advice on which investigators are best fitted? I heard I'll need a lot of willpower?

4 hours ago, PearlChoco said:

Just played through Return To NOTZ, and now I'm ready to start my first TFA playthrough!

Any advice on which investigators are best fitted? I heard I'll need a lot of willpower?

Actually quite the opposite, generally having a high agility is a good plan, because it is needed both to evade enemies and pass agility treacheries. For this reason I would recommend Finn and Ursula, they're both really well suited to the campaign. They would be a good pair, but if you're doing solo then any one of them could do the job.

Great!

8 hours ago, PearlChoco said:

Just played through Return To NOTZ, and now I'm ready to start my first TFA playthrough!

Any advice on which investigators are best fitted? I heard I'll need a lot of willpower?

Will is important for all campaigns, but you need agility in this one or you will die! Ok. Maybe not, but agility is important as well.
We have played this one 4 times. 10 different investigators. Twice regular, twice Return to.
The investigators who did best for us were Ursula, William Yorrick (last time we played him, he had Boxing Gloves and was awesome, because Survivors have a lot of Spirit cards) Agnes, (Not parallel) and Rita. I could see Sefina doing well. Father Mateo wasn’t bad either. Leo Anderson was possibly the worst, because of all the agility checks.

I agree with the answers so far: Willpower is still important but comparatively less important than in, say, The Dunwich Legacy or The Circle Undone. Having at least one investigator with good Agility is highly recommended, at least for the first attempt. Ursula and Finn was going to be my suggestion, which I see was the first response you got!

7 hours ago, Mimi61 said:

Leo Anderson was possibly the worst, because of all the agility checks.

We actually just finished Shattered Aeons with him last night. It was pretty rough, he was close to death in almost every scenario. It was basically a race to see if he can play allies faster than the scenario kills them. We barely got R1 so I would call it a success, but definitely not say that he is an optimum investigator for the campaign.