so i am watching the youtube tutorial thingy and the fella says if you fight and kill a monster in the movement phase your movement phase finishes there?? this is not in the rule book ... i don't think.. so which is right? surely if you fight and kill the monster you can continue on your way? if you can't where in the rule book is this stated?

On page 6 of the rulebook under the heading "Evading Monsters", last paragraph: "Once an investigator begins combat with a monster for any reason, his movement is over. Regardless of whether or not he wins the battle, the investigator loses the rest of his movement points and must remain where he is."

If you want to move past a blocking monster, you'll have to pass an evade check against it before combat starts.If there are several monsters in a location you want to travel through without fighting, you'll have to pass an evade check against all of them. If you fail at least one evade check, you immediately suffer the stamina damage of the monster you failed to evade and engage in combat with it.By this I mean, after suffering the damage to stamina, you have to pass a horror check against the monster, and then continue fighting/evading it until you are either defeated or succeed at killing/evading it. If the monster has Ambush,and you fail the first(pre-combat) evade check against it, you'll have only the option to fight it to the end

You have to to fight/evade all the other monsters in your current location on the same turn. If the location with the monster(s) had an open gate, you'll be drawn through it in the Arkham encounters phase after you have dealt with(evaded or defeated) all the monsters there.

oooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmy GOD (that'l be Dagon) this bleedin game is **** near impossible....

Of course you must realize that by "defeated by a monster" I meant that the investigator is either reduced to 0 sanity or 0 stamina(knocked unconscious or driven insane), so it's not like the investigator is devoured and you have to start a new one.

The base game is not hard; you just have to learn the ropes, and read the rules carefully. It becomes easier the more you play.

zealot12 said:

And harder

I meant more intuitive in its gameplay.

doomtube said:

Just take a different approach. Namely that the game isn't about fighting monsters, it's about the gates. And that Evading let's you keep on moving.

Dam said:

What? I'm almost finding myself agreeing with Dam? His sign really is right!

i sort of agree with both of you, however weighing up the risks of fighting the monsters for monster trophies is worth the risk... but the more we play the more the rules become second nature and the easier/harder the game becomes.... it is, possibly the greatest board game ever ever created!!

It is my favorite FFG game by far.

doomtube said:

If by both of you you mean Dam and me, then you are sort of right ;') In my experience, one of the things beginners often get wrong about the game (and by beginners I mean basically everyone except a few Arkham obsessed individuals on this forum— and probably Board Game Geek too, I'm not certain) is that they don't keep their eyes on the game objectives. One of the things that drives me insane when playing the game with strangers is when I see them wasting clue tokens and picking unnecessary fights with monsters (and no, I don't just hate this because I drew a xenophobia madness card).

The game is won by sealing gates, everything else is peripheral (now granted, you might be one of those who considers a final combat victory a legitimate win, but, well, lots of us here don't— it's just too easy to gear up for an easy win that way). The faster you seal the gates, the slower terror rises and the slower the board gets swamped with monsters (and of course the less your chance of accidentally waking the AO by messing up with the gate limit). The best way to fight monsters is to prevent them from ever existing (i.e. by preventing gate surges and reducing their potency by having less gates on the board). I look at everything that does not help add seals to the board as quickly as possible as ultimately a distraction. And no, this doesn't mean I don't buy equipment for my characters. Getting knocked out and Lost in Space and Time is not an effective use of time. On the other hand, running around trying to kill monsters is a waste of time usually. Better to just pick them off when entering a gate or exiting it, and occasionally stopping for a double kill if two happen to be on the same spot.

Granted, like with all strategies in Arkham, there can be exceptions to this, particularly if there's a specific something that you're desperate to trade for immediately and monster killing is the only way to get it (or the fastest way to get this). Or if there's something really nasty on the board that you want to get rid of (like a Colour or a Cthonian).