Hey all,

Just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Mike and I am from the Cleveland, OH area. My friends and I (2 friends to be exact) have completed quite a few games now of AH and cannot get enough! We have added the goat, DH, and KH expansions.

Does anyone else play with the two extra boards at the same time? We orderd the IH expansion next and I am concerned that with four seperate maps, simple movement is going to be very difficult for our small group.

I have read that you can add each person plays two characters, but to me that simply ruins the whole feel of the game.

Final though: I noticed the lurker was released recently, do they plan to release any additional board expansions?

Thanks guys!

Mike

Welcome to the Asylum

It is indeed tough to play with more than one expansion board, the rules do state however that for each expansion board beyond the first that you use you reduce the number of players in your calculations (for things like monster limits, outskirts limits etc..) by 1. So three players playing with all three boards would technically be a 1 player game. Also if you have both Innsmouth and Dunwitch in play it requires one extra gate opening to awaken the ancient one.

As far as releases nothing has been anounced as of yet.

Yeah I just read that rule about the reduction in the number of gates.

Thank goodness, although I will say that my friends and I have only lost two games against, the tome book old one and the spider old one with the gate bursts. The names escape me because I am still at work. However I have been reading about the herald variant and that seems interesting... Any success using this?

I also read that during the lurker expansion, you almost need to use the herald to experience the new cards etc... Any truth behind this?

Finally I have read through some of the scenarios posted here and some look very interesting! Any experiences behind those?

Sorry for the many questions, but I have been looking for a new boardgame to challenge my friends and I with and this seems to be fitting the bill just right.

Heralds can add quite a bit of flavor and challenge to a game, both the Kingsport heralds are good but my personal favorite of the official heralds is The King In Yellow. There are also quite a few well done custom heralds over in the custom content boards (if you like that sort of thing, not everyone does).

Lurker pretty much revolves around the herald, though many people think his powers are more helpful and reduce the challenge and would classify him as a guardian, myself included but as far as guardians go he has the feature of occasionally coming up to bite you in the ass (which is something I like to see in a guardian). The new gate tokens and relationship cards are interesting features that do not require the herald though.

As far as the custom content I've given a number of them a go and have had some interesting experiences with them, check them out and see what you like, I keep a manila envelope in my arkham box with all the high quality prints I've made of custom Heralds and Ancient Ones that I liked and will occasionally pull one out.

Questions are always welcome here.

Yeah it seems that in HP's actual text, even the "good" influences from outside beings end up hurting the characters in some way at the end of the story. I like how AH tries to stay in that simliar line. Too often it seems that boardgames, video games, etc that adapt darker tales like those created by HP; give way to the cliche that there has to be an ultimate "good" and "evil". This difference from the norm, was one of the major reasons I was drawn to AH in the first place.

Quick question about the Yellow expansion. I noticed in the upcoming section for FFG that its under going a reprint... is this to clarify rules etc? I just ordered IH and have no problem waiting for Yellow if its going through a reprint.

Finally what size games is everyone typically running? I feel like four to five people (personally never done five) seems to be the sweet spot so everyone only needs to play one character. I am not to sure if the complexity of the game would translate well to a seven or eight person game; while having less than four players (people would have to play two seperate characters in order to use all the expansions); might destroy some of the mystique behind trying to protect your one and only investigator.

All of the above is in my opinion of course haha.

The King in Yellow is being reprinted only because it sold out. There won't be any changes to the contents.

I play 4 Investigators, almost always now. Either with three other players, or all four by myself. The only time I change that is for experimentation and observation, such as, how the Lurker expansion plays with 5 Investigators.

But I'm in the other Arkham camp, the one that doesn't include everything I own in every game. I never play more than one expansion board in any game, and at best, I will only add one small box expansion on top of that. (Currently, my games are Lurker + DH, Lurker + KH, or Lurker + IH.) I have played several games with all expansions (just to see what I'm missing), and I found two things I don't appreciate.

(1) Theme dilution. On a gameplay scale, this is utterly negligible. Every card does something different, and the resulting chaos is certainly fascinating, but I just don't like all the Egyptian and Backwoods and Aquatic and Theater stuff all blended up on frappe. I'd rather play with one extra town being all the focus; Innsmouth excels at being the center of attention.

(2) Speed Arkham. With twenty unstable locations, With all those Mythos cards, it is totally possible to open seven gates in six turns, and if you haven't closed/sealed one of them already, the next one might wake up the Ancient One. there just isn't time to do anything but close Gates. I like Encounters, and I like fighting monsters, and neither of these things is a good idea in Speed Arkham. I just don't like the rush.

That's probably not what you're looking for, but it is an alternative. And it doesn't require as much tabletop space.

Ah the tabletop space. My friends and I have our game night each weekend, this week just happens to be this friday... A few beers and a complex game just seems to be perfect. However the table top space is insane!! We are contimplating different solutions for this. Right now the best one we have come up with is that each person gets almost a tv tray stand for rolling, cards, equipment etc and the actual table is being used just for boards and mythos/locations cards. This seems to be the best solution thus far however always open to other people's ideas.

Once we added in the Egypt theme it was slightly wierd to see things like sandstorms as an environment when you have acquatic locations. We have thus instilled the "this doesn't make sense" rule to help facilitate gameplay.

Hopefully the expansions will continue however... We still havent conquered all of the olds ones and then when we do plan on adding the difficulty modifiers and actually keeping score.

Hands down one of the best victories had to have been when we defeated the old one who simply destroys the world with only one doom token remaining. Again the name escapes me and I am at work.

It seems that this game as the ability to evolve in so many different directions that I cannot imagine how I could become bored with it.

Sorry still getting over the initial rush of finding a tabletop game that actually holds my interest!

You're dealing with godlike entities (and a couple gods) from beyond time and space, things don't realy have to make sense to happen.

Ha yeah true enough.

Friday cannot come fast enough. My team and I have not played on the DH board yet and we are going to use it in conjunction with the KH board. Should be a blast!

msmithamp said:

These are the solutions I've come up with:

1) Bag for holding monsters hanging from one's chair. You simply reach into the bag and pull out a monster.

2) Same for clues, if you want to save every square cm that is possible.

3) Stack location encounter cards, just like gate encounter cards. Shuffling this single deck shuffles every location.

4) Stack all the less-used special cards (rail passes, memberships, deputy, etc etc)

5) Use a bigger table

6) Use smaller tables/furniture to put the less-used cards on, or maybe all item/spell decks.

7) Don't leave tokens in a heap, stack them

8) I haven't done this yet, but you could make little bases so that your item/spell/skill/etc cards in an investigator's possession stand up. I mean, like the investigators themselves stand up thanks to the plastic bases. Or like Scrabble, think about a longer base to put upright multiple cards at once. You could modify lightly the plastic thingies you use to hang posters on the wall (cut them and give them a flat surface to stand on).

Tox said:

Eep. I can't figure out how to get the quote function off, so I'm posting this separately.

For four, I actually have two stacks, one is for special cards that are almost never used, and one is for occasionally used Special Cards (Deputy is in my useful pile, along with blessing, bank loan, retainers, and Third Eye and Inner Beast). The others I don't even take out of the box unless it's necessary (and of course, it rarely is).

How exactly do you do number three? I only stack my location encounters in Innsmouth, Kingsport, and Dunwich. For Arkham I keep all my location piles separate. Now that you mention this, I might try putting them in double stacks with high frequency visited locations on top, and lower frequency visited locations on bottom. So, probably Yellow, Purple, Green, Orange and something else on top (White or Red). Orange would be in a separate 6th stack (because encounters are taken there more frequently than anywhere else), while the others would be put on top of the other stacks. I'm going to try that next time I play.

I keep all my card decks in business card holders, an idea I borrowed from someone (Tsugo) on these forums about a year ago. At an office supply store I found business card holders designed for 8 different business cards to be displayed in. It greatly aids in saving space.

This is a photo of the holders he uploaded to BGG, I doubt he'll mind my posting it here.

http://boardgamegeek.com/image/308972/arkham-horror

Avi_dreader said:

I make a deck of location encounter cards in Arkham and another for encounters in Dunwich. For Arkham, pile all the cards and shuffle. When you have an encounter, continue drawing until you have a card with the corresponding color. Same thing for Dunwich, although you could just make a single deck with all encounter cards from all boards (but I don't like huge decks because they become difficult to shuffle). That's why I said it is just like OW encounter cards

Tox said:

Ehhh... I think I'll avoid that method, you're supposed to shuffle your decks before every draw. Your way you ensure that your encounters never repeat, but the game was designed with the intention that encounters may repeat. Plus it makes things like Darrell and Dragon's Eye a pain :') Dealing with a search for four colors is already annoying, 11 would drive me nuts. But thanks for getting me to think about this subject :') I'll let you know how my attempt goes later.

Actually I do shuffle before every encounter, my fault if I didn't make it clear in the previous post If I didn't shuffle, I wouldn't be getting encounters I've never seen, well after 20 games

Tox said:

That's... A really big stack to shuffle...

For help on organizing, I went to a sports store on Sunday and purchased a three tiered tackle box. This helps seperate the different pieces from one another; however, I may try to create some sort of holding area for each person. It seems that at least once a game someones cards get shoved underneath the board then hilarity ensues when they try to use an equipment item and of course it has gone missing.

The final idea I had was trying to create some sort of holding device for each player to seperate their cards IE the way money is held in Monopoly for the banker. However I have no idea how this would look or be created or if in the end would actually take up more space. We do leave certain cards in the box however until we use them, IE all the different groups you can join, the white ship, deputy etc... This frees up a little space, but still not quite enough.

Finally we are going to attempt our first 3 expansion game this wednesday. I will say that when we added the DH expo, it had almost not impact. We didnt place the new mythos cards on top of the deck just shuffled them in. There doesn't seem enough mythos cards for the DH expo to really impact the game as much as I thought it would. When you add up all the board expansions and card expansions it seems the mythos deck grows so large that the probability a gate opens in DH is very low.

Just some overall thoughts.

I've now owned the game for about 3 weeks and have had the opportunities for several playthroughs.

My biggest critique of the game's presentation was the rulebook. I find it a bit akwardly arranged and its index is sorely lacking. In my first few playthroughs I spent lots of time flipping between pages trying to locate certain rules nuances. Some smaller criticisms of the presentation: I wish the board had marker tracks for monster and outskirt limits so its was easier to identify what those limits were during gameplay. I wish some of the monsters stuck out a bit more on the board surface. Black boardered monsters can be easy to miss as you go to move monsters or count up how many are in play. I also wish they included 10 6-sided dice with the game, instead of 5.

The rest of the presentation is very well done. The board is large enough to accomadate the amount of bits that need to go on it. The character and item art is for the most part well done. The clue tokens and gates really stand out on the board so you can focus on them as your primary goals. The player and ancient one cards are nice and large (better than Runebound size) to accomadate the info that goes on them and the Slider system for attributes was clear and easy to manage. The short story for each character was a nice mood-setting piece to give you a feel for who you are playing. (again, better than runebound)

During the first few playthroughs I missed lots of the little things that clearly come with the experience of having done it before. Some examples: the cultist you fight and forget to take into acount the Ancient Ones bonus, the Rumor you forget to resolve in the mythos phase. Forgetting to clear up the outskirt monsters when you close a gate with the right dimension symbol. Not understanding how certain abilities worked (I thought the Professor could cast spells with less sanity cost b/c of his ability). However, this is more a "get familiar with the game and its rules" learning curve than it is a problem with the game.

The difficultly is quite high, which is fine with me. With 2 players (every game i've played so far has been such) the Doom timer is brutal. In 2 player games the random gear you get at the start of the game can really make or break your chances for success. I was lucky enough to draw Sword of Glory and Elder Sign with the Psychologist which lead to a very successful game, on the other hand if you end up with a 2 tomes to start you might really be scrambling to get gear throughout your game. Even after multiple games I know there are plenty of encounters I haven't experienced. In fact in 2 player game you really don't have time to visit a lot of the "stable" locations because you are really racing to get clues and weapons ASAP. I can see how with larger groups of investigators you'll have a little more freedom to "explore" but I like the tension as it mounts and the doom clock is ticking.

Finally, the tone of the game is spot on. From the 1920's Massachusetts setting to the wierd creatures you encounter you get sucked right in to the game world. Something would be lacking if the game was set in the modern era with fast cars, helicopters and rocket launchers. There is something very appropriate to the tense atmosphere that the investigators are making do with tommy guns and cavalry swords against ancient evil gods.

Great game, good presentation, rulebook that needs a facelift. Will keep me entertained for some time to come.

Fantastic "fresh-eyes" review! Welcome to the Carnival, Miles601! I would have said very much the same things when I first played AH. (Psst! In my early games, I traded Clues! )

"Will keep me entertained for some time to come." Amen! I'm on five years and counting. Best game ever.

Got any favorites yet? Investigator? Ancient One? Location color?

jgt7771 said:

In my early games I'd close gates without sealing them ;'D

I've played exactly one game (well, with a short run-through to get the feel of it first). I'm finding many of the same things about the game. The rulebook, while a little cumbersome and in need of a much better index and maybe some flowcharts, is at least better than the one for Descent. We played with two people (two investigators each), and narrowly lost the game. We were one gate away from winning when the doom markers filled up, and three doom tokens away from killing the Old One when it devoured the last of us. We're starting to see how strategy and teamwork are going to be big considerations each game. This time, we never even visited a store to buy items: we were running all over the place trying to close gates as they popped open. I find it pretty challenging as it is; if the expansions add to the difficulty and complexity (there's a lot to keep track of!), I'm not sure I'll buy them. My girlfriend, though she's quite happy to play games, gets put off if it seems like we just end up losing all the time (Descent is rarely played here anymore).

I too wish the board kept track of the monster limit for me, and the number of gates that were allowed to be open. I got some really nice overlays to put on the board for this purpose from BoardGameGeek; it's a real improvement on the board and doesn't take at all away from the art or space. In terms of monsters, I set aside a number of little plastic stands equivalent to the monster limit, so the monsters are upright and I remember how many there are supposed to be before they go to the outskirts. Those kinds of things are really worth having around: even with many players, I could pillage Descent for some more, and I bought a bunch on the internet some time ago for general use. I think FFG is also putting their own out. Space-wise (I'm starting to understand that FFG games are a space-devourer on the level of an Azathoth!), I bought a bunch of business card holders to manage the card space on the table, as well as some little plastic containers from Staples to hold all the chits, etc. We have a small dining room table (we have to bring in another table from the front room to play Talisman with the corner boards), but it's quite manageable that way: if I get any expansions (I'm thinking about Innsmouth, if only because I just recently re-read 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'), we'll have to come up with some other plan.

Mostly I love the theme I'm an HPL fan from way back...which brings up a question of my own: Which of the expansions would you guys say was best in terms of adding to the theme, without necessarily just ramping up the difficulty?

I can't answer the theme question, but as for the difficulty, persist and you will find that the perceived difficulty is an illusion caused by inexperience :') play long enough to understand the basic strategy and you will be groaning from boredom at the base game.

Avi_dreader said:

Curator said:

Well... I kindof didn't want to say in case he wanted to try discovering them for himself. So I figured I'd wait for the previous poster to ask.

As for your friend :'D

Spoiler Alert for how to break the base game: don't read the rest of this post if you want to figure it out for yourself.

The problem with the original game is several fold (even if one ignores a few massive location exploits).

The greatest problem is that there are only 11 unstable locations. This basically means that you can wait out the clock as long as you properly gather clues to seal a couple of gates early in the game. Since most Ancient Ones have a doom track higher than 11, you don't need to worry about them ever waking up as long as you don't close any gates.

The game difficulty can also be radically diminished by being aware of how to properly hunt for Elder Signs and The King in Yellow. Since the Unique item deck is relatively narrow, a high priority should be placed on gathering money and shopping for these clue equivalent items. Elder Signs of course will make it even *more* unlikely that the Ancient One will ever be able to wake up.

Money can easily be obtained in the base game by camping at the Newspaper (since the retainer encounters are frequent there) and of course there is the potential exploit involving deliberate defaulting on bank loans after trading away all your items and cash to other investigators.

Finally there is gate frequency. If you are aware that The Woods, Witch House, Unvisited Isle, and Independence Square are high frequency gates (and you need to prioritize sealing them), while Science Building, Silver Twilight Lodge, Hibbs Roadhouse, and Historical Society only have two appearances each in the mythos deck (and hence are quite unlikely to surge or reappear) so you should put a low priority on sealing them, and even be willing to close one of them a game if you are worried about being overwhelmed by the number of open gates, you shouldn't have much of a problem with keeping the monsters under control.

As long as you are aware of the above and have basic tactics down (specialized rotating functions, fighting, sealing, clue collecting, shopping) you should just breeze through the base game. Just remember to not send investigators into Other Worlds without proper equipment, or when very low on sanity or health and you should be fine.

To get around many of these problems, Dunwich should be added to the base game. It gives much better monsters, but the main reason why it would solve the above problems (mostly) is that it makes the unique item deck larger (and harder to get elder signs from), it adds five unstable locations (so you can't just wait out the doom track so it becomes completely unthreatening), and it adds in gate bursts, so you can't just sit around and close a few high frequency gates and just expect to walk your way to a victory. Plus some of the new Ancient Ones in it are quite tough compared to those in the base game (I'm thinking Glaaki and Tsathoggua in particular).

If he can't afford Dunwich, he should probably buy Black Goat of the Woods and play it with the herald. It makes it so gate surges cause doom tokens (so he'll end up going to final battle much more often). That won't be much of a problem if he's willing to count final battles as victories though (since the base game's Ancient Ones are mostly not very difficult to defeat in combat if prepared for properly).

Personally, I think he should give some of the custom stuff a shot, but, keep in mind, a lot of the custom material was *designed* to work with the expansions and won't quite work without them.

A quick fix before getting any expansions would be arbitrarily starting doom tracks with three doom tokens, or with creeping doom tokens (i.e. every mythos phase place a clue token on the doom track, when there are four or five, decide for yourself, add a doom token to the doom track and start the process again). Final combat can also be fixed easily (in terms of difficulty level) by adjusting Ancient Ones to a level of difficulty you think appropriate, i.e. raising their combat modifiers, increasing their penalties, giving them additional resistances or immunities. Take Nyarlathotep for instance, he's a pushover. But if you make him physically and magically immune, have him start off with two doom tokens, and double the number of successes you need against him in final combat to remove a doom token, you'll have a real threat on your hands.

Some people like a challenge, some people don't, but if your friend likes a challenge and comes to understand the base game components and wants to use them anyways, he'll need to customize them to some extent. If money is really an issue for him, he ought to consider mastering the base game, and just modifying it to suit his needs.

Easy Ancient One fixes for only playing the base game (this will make it *quite* difficult):

Yig: Make it so that investigators can not be blessed during games against him (possibly make an exception for Sister Mary). Twice as many successes as normal should be required to remove a doom token from his doom track. Start him with one or two doom tokens.

Ithaqua: give both physical and magical resistance. Start him with one or two doom tokens.

Azathoth: make him start off with five doom tokens.

Cthulhu: when he reaches 7 doom tokens, have his ability reduce all investigators maximum stamina and sanity by 2 instead. Start him with 2 or 3 doom tokens.

Nyarlathotep: make him magical and physically immune and require twice as many successes as normal to remove doom tokens from his doom track. Start him with one or two doom tokens.

Hastur: raise the terror track to four in the start of games against him. Start him with two or three doom tokens.

Yog Sothoth: flip all gates against him upside down until investigators enter them, increase their modifiers by -1, give him physical resistance. Start him with 2 or 3 doom tokens.

Shub Niggurath: Give him magical resistance. Have the final combat attack require investigators to lose 3 monster trophies. Start him with 2 or 3 doom tokens.

Another basic difficulty raising rule along with the above would be banning the use of clues with the fight skill or the shotgun in final combat (I'd strongly suggest this against Ancient Ones without combat resistances, since otherwise it's too easy to stockpile clues and kill them in one or two turns).