Hi all,

My group has recently found AH and we all love it! We've got about 7 games under our belt now, and while its generally been great, we have a couple of issues.

1) Too easy. 7 games and 7 wins for us so far (1 by AO kill, 3 seal, 2 gate, 1 gate and seal at the same time). We have tried the lurker expansion in our last game but agreed with many that it makes the game a bit easier, so for this discussion I won't include it.

We are wanting to push up the difficulty.

2) Too long. Our games have always gone about 4 hours. Whether its 3 people or 7 we always seem to finish right at the 4 hour mark. For our weekday game, we would love to be able to lower the time more to the 3.5 hour mark.

So we would like some common houserules out there that might help us, but at the same time we want to keep each way of winning fairly balanced. In other words, I could houseule the doom track starts half full so we always fight the AO, but then the other kinds of victories are disproportionally hard.

Are there any good houserules out there (or expansions) we should try out to meet our needs?

Stalker0 said:

Um.... I just posted a very long response on this subject in this thread.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=5&efcid=1&efidt=369525&efpag=1

If you really want to shorten game time a bit, make it so you only need to seal five gates, but have the doom track have an additional one or two doom tokens at the beginning.

In terms of expansion purchasing, Dunwich and Innsmouth would boost difficulty significantly.

This one's easy: If you want to increase difficulty and reduce playing time, start your AOs with doom tokens already on their tracks.

When a new player posts that sort of win/loss record, the conclusion I jump to is that they're mistaken on some of the rules. I know in my early games I had a significant number of losses (As I recall, my first five games included 4 losses). Once you have the strategies down the base game ends up quite easy, but it shouldn't start out that way.

I still lose often now, although I'm playing with expansions at this point.

Joseph_Lavode said:

Ditto, double check your rules and look at some of the frequest beginner mistakes threads here and on boardgamegeek. I'll bet anything you're just missing 1 or 2 very simple rules that will make the game a lot harder.

I hope so, because I'm having no where near that success rate and I think I'm a reasonable competent player.

Are you remembering Monster Surges and Terror track in addition to gates and Doom during the Mythos?

My advice: Get Kingsport and play with the Ghroth herald and the Epic Battle cards. Makes the game a bit faster and a lot harder.

-Villain

miles601 said:

We were wondering the same thing and so began combing the rules and checking forums to make sure we were playing it right. We did make a few mistakes here and there but nothing earth shattering.

Yesterday we got the innsport horror and the king in yellow expansions. We tried a 2 player game with the king herald and the innsmouth cards but not the board. We won but it was definately harder, terror track hit 10 and 2 spots left on the doom track with Quannti (I think that's how you say it, the one with the dusk deck)

As I mentioned in the first post, while adding doom tokens to the AO early would certain make the game harder and faster..its mainly because we would just hit the AO faster. We are hoping to keep the balance with AO, gate, and seal victories so I'm trying to find houserules that work well with that mindset.