I have been trying to come up with a way to introduce the game concept to friends that have never played and to make it overall very fast - and make it less daunting. I thought that it might be possible to only play my dunwich horror board without the main game board, using only the gates for dunwich and modifying the starting areas for investigators. I imagine many of the mythos cards will be problematic as they refer to the main board. But as there is less board space to cover this could be quicker. They could either run the dunwich herald or pick any of the elder gods with half the doom track already covered. And I could reduce the gates sealed requirement to half as well for game completion.

Any thoughts? And is this listed somewhere else on the forums? I looked but couldn't find anything.

Thanks in advance!

It occurs to me that if you want a short game you already had half the answer there, just set up the base game fill the doom track half way and require only 3 or 4 seals to win.

Shorter game is half of it. The other half is I'd like to reduce the amount of cards needed on the board. So with dunwich only there would be less location cards. I could do double clue tokens with mythos phase and setup. And maybe give everyone an extra common and special item to balance out not having stores in dunwich. I think the main board and stacks of cards can be intimidating for some of the brand new players.

There are a lot of balance issues you still need to address there, only 2 other worlds means only 4 gates in the stack means your ancient one will stand a good chance of waking up before it's even possible to win, where do characters go when they go insane or are unconcious? Terror Track? There is a lot to consider, it's doable by all means just more work than I'd be willing to put into it (and this coming from someone who likes to mod the game). I find that if you are worried about players being intimidated you can take on a Keeper role, handling the cards and tokens for everyone and just let them play their investigators, that works really well.

umm it seems to me you should play another game, you want to play ah but want to change everything about it? if your friends dont want to 3-4 hours in lovecraft land then this is not the game for them.

I tried to run a game on the dunwich board only using:

-double clues at setup and double clues at mythos

-using mythos cards that open gates only in dunwich

-when all gates were out, if there was a indication for gate opened at a new location I instead added a marker to the doom track.

-used dunwich expansion monsters only, items from dunwhich expansion only

-allowed myself to heal stamina at Harney Jone's shack similar to the hospital

Playing one investigator against the monsters and the dunwich horror was pretty grueling. I got devoured once. And then devoured when the Elder God was awakened. Although I did manage to seal 2 of the gates.

Probably won't try this experiment again.

For what it's worth, I agree with Veet's general suggestions. If you're trying to introduce new people to any game, you should be using the base game if nothing else. If you want to limit variables, then the first thing to remove is any and all expansion material.

If you want to make things even simpler, then start removing things from the base game, but always start with the base, since everything released for this game is designed to work with the base.

To keep things simple I would start off by playing with an easy GOO, like Yig. You could start his doom track halfway full if you like, although I wouldn't.

If that's not simple enough, you could remove half of the gates. All the other worlds would still be there on the board but only half of them would have a chance of appearing. Likewise you could remove encounter decks for one or two districts if you really want. Those locations still exist for gate appearances, but nothing exciting happens there. That sort of thing.

Although, honestly, if your friends can't handle the base game with all its bits and an easy GOO, then maybe you're barking up the wrong tree trying to make them play this game.