I am pleased to report that after an 8 game winning streak my group finally had its first loss.

It was a 4 man with the dunwich, king in yellow, and lurker expansions (no lurker just the gates).

My group started off with no weapons, and 2 gate appears encounters that racked up the doom track in short order (one of the gate openings was also a doom gate, so we got 3 doom tokens during one encounter phase).

With monsters and terror track filling up, blight cards started hitting the deck, and soon the streets were filled with monsters.

We went to the AO barely able to get any footing, but even with all of that we were only 2 successes away from beating him.

My group was very pleased we finally found the difficulty we were looking for. We also would like to thank you all for some of the houserule ideas you've posted. We may go ahead and bump some of the AO's difficulty. After this fight (which again was barely a loss even with no items and one player getting devoured off the bat), we can see why a good team can just curb stomp many AO's.

If I may ask, which AO was it that you faced?

Abhoth.

He got all 3 of his children on the board too, and we hit another monster surge that costed us 2 terror tracks and a doom token.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the best way to amp up the AO difficulty is adding the Epic Battle and Sinister Plot cards from Kingsport. Evil stuff like this:

Can be a nasty surprise when you think you're going to win the game (note that Abhoth attacks before the investigators in the above case).

-Villain

Epic Battle cards are fun, but the game is hard enough without them.

Epic Battle cards are both fun and crucial. Makes you really, really appreciate a good seal-win... the way the game was supposed to be

Nearly lost today to Yig in Epic Battle. Our group of three(Lola Hayes, the Actress, Leo Andersen the expedition leader, and Jenkins the salesman) had pretty lousy equipment, and Jenkins failed his personal story, which earned him a curse just prior to Yig's awakening. Bye bye, Jenkins.

It was a really fun and tense game, overall.

I think it's great that the game can sometimes just beat you down mercilessly. It keeps the suspense up for each game so that you really don't know whether you are going to win or lose.

My friends and I played a game recently with the Innsmouth expansion against Chaugnar Faugn. We got beat so badly that it was almost funny. We just weren't able to seal any gates, they kept opening in new places every turn, we were getting the absolute worst mosters, and we couldn't get any good items. In the end, Chaugnar was about to awaken because of the Doom Track, the Deep Ones Rising Track, and having too many gates open all at the same time. We then pulled a Mythos card that added the last token to the Deep Ones Rising track. We were all horribly eaten in one turn.

Chaugnar Faugn is really hard in final battle, especially with a large group of investigators. No more than a total of three successes in a combat round-that's pretty unfair.

zealot12 said:

Actually, he can't have more than three doom tokens removed in a round. So having more investigators doesn't make it all that much more difficult.

Oh, right... My bad.