Let me start off by saying what most people starts their posts with: Sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find it anywhere on this forum...

I have now played all expansions, except Lurker. As soon as we've tried that one too, we're planning to play a game with all the expansions at the same time. My question is: How many players would you recommend for a huge game like that? We're planning to include as many of the components from all expansions as possible, so all the boards, cards, monsters etc will be in.

The rule of the third(s) is always a good one to follow: an expansion board is as big as 1/3 of the main board, and you could use x investigator, where x is the number of '1/3' in play. So 3/3 the main board, 1/3 each expansion board, means 6/3, thus 6 investigators :-)

Anyway, be ready for some "speed Arkham": with all boards in play, it's very unlikely for you to have much spare time for exploring locations. Too many unstable locations, thus you can easily have a new gate opening each round.

You can use all expansions with one player too (I do often), just use at least 4 investigators (more if you like) if you want to have any hope at all of winning!

Thanks for the replies. We don't want it to be "too" hard, although some challenge is expected. We're usually play AH and one expansion with 3-4 players, but I'm sure we can grab a couple more :-)

You can choose which game components you play with even when you're playing with all expansions.You may choose to omit the more diluting and cumbersome elements like Mythos cards and extra boards but still keep using the items/skills/allies, and gate encounters from the omitted expansions, since the inclusion of these doesn't affect the game much.

One thing I've done is to use just the base board and then every expansion component that only applies to Arkham proper. I find it works pretty well. I also go through the Mythos deck and try to balance out the number of gate opening cards for each location, to avoid 5 straight turns of the unvisited isle.

Ornendil said:

Beware that doing so, you significantly alter the balance of the game. Some location have a higher frequency of gates opening there not by chance, and changing this equilibrium changes a lot the game. 5 gates opening in a row at the Unvisited isle imply tons of monsters swarming through Arkham, the terror level increasing (thus possibly triggering the nastiest things, if you play with Dagon or The King in Yellow), tons of problems with certain AOs (able to spawn some special monsters during monster surges) and Heralds (Black Goat of the Woods, to mention an official one) and so on.

Julia said:

this is true. I mostly use this option when teaching new people (which are the majority of my games these days, as in gradschool people's limited availabilities make it harder to get repeat offenders, and my regular undergrads graduated and moved on, sniff). What I do is to have the most common gate locales have 2-3 more cards then the medium and boost the rare gate locales if possible. Usually with this option, monster surges are still pretty common, but it is toned down some. Even so, Black Goat remains nasty. Most of the time though, monster surges don't do much as most get shunted to the outskirts and for most AOs a rising terror level isn't too crippling. And with the dual gates having two monster symbols, getting rid of large numbers of monsters isn't too hard. Now, a monster surge entirely of Mask or spawn monsters might be a different story.

I would agree that sticking with the standard distribution is way to go unless you don't want to scare newbies, i.e. non gamers, too much

Now for experienced players, my group's gone up against the lovely combination of Dagon + Mother Hydra and Cthulhu playing with the Innsmouth board. Each time we lost to the deep ones rising track as it's near impossible to beat Cthulhu with his -8 combat and regeneration.

It is quite difficult to play with all of big expansions' components and mechanics. Gates open all over, a lot of ground to cover, but little time to explore, game effects from all expansions start to pile-up; it's a mess, honestly.

Today we played an Innsmouth+base set+all small expansions session(save for Lurker, which I don't own) and it went well, achieving a smooth sealing victory against Quachil Uttaus.(save for that incidental devouring due to a sudden encounter with Shub Niggurath in an Other World). We still used all expansions' investigator, gate encounter and Mythos cards(with regards to Mythos cards, only those that open gates in Arkham and Innsmouth were used).

Gonna try the same with Kingsport tomorrow.

We play with all the expansions all the time and I'm pretty surprised people say it's so difficult to do. The only tough thing is keeping track off all the random excess stuff like the Innsmouth track AND the Sky AND the AO special whatever you have to track etc etc. We've never actually had an issue with gates open all over and running to get to everything ever. Of course, we've never won a game either but that's because we pretty much suck and everyone just likes to go shopping.

In any case, with all expansions I'd shoot for 5+ Investigators at least.

One thing to note, that you don't even have to divide the humongous Mythos deck if you want to omit certain expansions. Simply, upon drawing, discard cards that are irrelevant to the session you're playing.Much easier than taking out cards and then shuffling everything in.

zealot12 said:

That's what I do, unless I'm teaching someone new to play. Then the giant Mythos deck is pretty intimidating.

Ornendil said:

I see, definitely it has sense. So, good luck with the newcomers :-)

I have all of the expansions (except Lurker) and we have played with all 3 extra boards’ a few times and all extra boards plus small expansion sets once. Always with 4-5 players. Just give everyone one board to be in charge of to ease any problems.

Always a long game but loads of fun, felt like it took longer to setup and pack-up then it did to play.

Best game was Cthulhu with Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, we were doomed from the get go as everyone wanted to shop for cool new things.

In the end fight it was to see who last to be devoured.

All because we played one game against Cthulhu (base set only) and won via gunning him down in final fight and friend said he was a “*****”. He hadn’t played with new expansions and said “Bring it on” so we did!

Paulis said:

I think this is my favorite configuration. Has anyone been able to beat it?