I've played 10 or so games of Arkham horror and have never seen the terror track go past 4. I always seem to run out of turns before it does much of anything. Especially against Hastur, when terror track matters. ( I know the King in Yellow fixes this, but that expansion is out of print right now.) His 8 clue to close a gate restriction just brings about an anemic Hastur because the terror track never did much of anything.

Perhaps I'm not raising it all the times that I should. The triggers I know of are:

Monster limit in the outskirts

Dunwich horror board monsters wandering into vortexes...

And the occasional encounter card.

So, am I missing anything? Do people feel the same way I do? Have you ever seen the terror track above 4?

LordZon said:

If you know what you're doing, especially with the base game, the terror track might not go beyond two... Custom heralds fix this problem somewhat. The KiY expansion fixes this problem somewhat (when you're only using that expansion). But... Honestly, I don't remember the last time I've seen it hit ten in a game not using custom components.

Some games the terror track is a factor, some games it's not.

In addition to KiY, the Black Goat and Innsmouth Horror expansions are good at increasing terror. Black Goat has a herald that swamps the board with monsters. Innsmouth has a couple unstable locations that are adjacent to vortexes. If a monster moves at all from one of these locations, it moves right into a vortex, which increases Terror.

Some games I played the Track doesn't go up once. Others it gets up to 5 or so thanks to Mythos cards. Sometimes you just can't stop it :-D

Played four games so far, so I don't have a lot of good input, but in two of them the Terror Track has gone up to above 5 (in the first one, it reached 9, but that was a single-investigator game with me being absolutely new).

Biggest thing that seems to bump it right now for me is monster surges. If you haven't done a good job sealing the most common gate locations, and those gates are still open, you might get a lot of surges, which can make you hit that outskirts limit quite a number of times very quickly. It tends to be easy to avoid this if you just keep at least one or two players hunting monsters pretty reliably, but if you slip up a bit this can work against you fast.

The other thing is the Disturbing the Dead mythos card. Get that one and you may see the track go up rather rapidly depending on your luck. (Dice hate me. )

But yeah--it won't happen every game, especially if you're doing a good job. In two of mine it went to above 5, but in the other two I don't think it even hit 3. When we kept the monster numbers down and sealed a few of what I think were the more common gate locations, the Terror Track was controllable.

I wouldn't worry too much, but if it seems particularly slow and unlikely, make sure you're handling the monster/outskirts limits properly (outskirts limit goes down as you get more players) and properly handling monster surges (1 for each open gate or each investigator, whichever is higher).

I'm a one-big-expansion-one-small-expansion player, so I only play with one expansion board at a time. Currently, the small expansion is permanently Lurker, so my games rotate through Dunwich/Lurker, Kingsport/Lurker, and Innsmouth/Lurker.

Dunwich is still a relatively sleepy town: even when monsters lurk there, it can take them a couple of spaces before they leave through a vortex. Often it's not too hard to get someone up there to keep a vortex clean. Terror Track is often negligible.

Innsmouth has Devil Reef. While the "mainland" monsters can be subject to the "Innsmouth Shuffle" (moving black then moving white in subsequent turns can leave a monster permanently wandering Innsmouth Streets), an open Devil Reef Gate can potentially toss whole waves of monsters into the Terror Track. It's not a guarantee, but Innsmouth is much more precarious on the Terror Track than Dunwich.

Kingsport may be "stable" and clean, but it also focuses ALL your Gates into Arkham, like the good old days of "base game only", except now there are Gate Bursts and other nasty updated cards in your Mythos Deck to make all those old geez-this-game-is-easy strategies much less reliable. The end result is usually a choking amount of monster surges, filling the streets with chits and constantly dumping out the Outskirts like a bad flu. My Terror Track will always reach its highest "natural" level during Kingsport-only games...5 or 6 every time.

I recently played a Base+CotDP+KiY gameagainst Hastur and the King in Yellow as Herald. The terror track was galloping forward singing Camptown Races every second round, the only thing that prevented it from hitting 10 was the third act card that ended the game.

I see the terror track as a sort of trimming to the GOO main course. It's not the most important part of the game.

I've played a lot of games of Arkham with my gammingr group, and I can tell you don't be fooled. Each game is unique, most games the terror track is very tame. However, I remember a game where on turn 4 the terror track was on 7! There was little we could do about it, and it was a thrilling game seeing what would happen minute to minute. We even had an 8 player game where we won in 30 minutes, everyone was just in and out of gates and nothing bad happened at all. On the flip side of that we also had a game where we lost on the first mythos phase!!! So don't let the trends fool ya, the game will change every time you play.

Lemme guess: Gate opened in Y'thanlei (or whatever it's called), putting out two monsters, then at the end of turn 1 a monster surge occurred (probably by the actual card, and not just a duplicate gate) and all the monsters swarmed into a vortex and the Deep Ones Rising track opened up? That would be my guess!

I've played a few games, and in my experience the Terror Track rarely gets past 3. However, in our last game a combination of Yog-Sothoth, the King in Yellow Herald, and the Disturbing the Dead" Mythos Card popping up halfway through caused the Terror track to skyrocket all the way up to 10 in just a few turns! (a couple monster surges right at the start didn't help much either.) A number of Blights, aome riots, and a slew of monsters later and we were slaughtered horribly. Just goes to show you never know...

Ugh...the Doyle Jefferies Blight is my least favorite to draw. Though I've drawn the Abigail Foreman card TWICE when 1 below the max gate limit...

It's killing me in the solo 4 investigator game I'm playing. I've got a gate at the Woods and lots of monsters roaming the nearby streets. I don't have anyway to get strong enough (playing against Cthulhu) to get that gate closed.

EcnoTheNeato said:

Really? IMO, Velma is the worst. I mean when she pops out, she starts screaming and it's back to square one again: draw another blight or add a doomer.

That's why the riots are worse ;-) They clog the streets (high Toughness/Damage/Combat rating and decent Awareness), you can't get them as trophies (spawn monsters), and if you DO beat them, 50% chance to raise the terror level. Each. And there's 3 of them. All in different ends of the board. That's why I think they're worse than Velma :-x

Well I perfectly see your point about the deadly Doyle. But what makes Velma even nastier is that she adds salt to the wound so to speak. The terror level increases by 1, and you decide to draw a blight. Guess what? It's Velma. You have to add another yellow sign. What makes her brutal is that she compounds the damage dealt by the King in Yellow.

Yeah, Doyle is one of the worst. Those Riots are a huge pain to kill and a pain to ignore.

The Dean always manages to make an appearance at the worst time, too...

Ugh, I forgot about the Dean...He's definitely up there. Only refreshing 1 card is super-bad! Not to mention him removing an Elder Sign

The refresh limitation isn't so bad actually. It's the **** SEAL BURST that I hated.

Gloria Goldberg and Harvey Walters just lost against Hastur because of the Terror Track.

After 36 Mythos Cards drawn, I had managed to seal only 5 gates (Ind. Sqr. , Woods, Un. Isle, Whitch House, Black Cave), because of "8-clues-to-seal" rule, but TT kept rising because of surges, hit 10, lifted the monster limit, Arkham reached 10 monsters in a split second, which awoke Hastur and with a -10 modifier I couldn t even touch him. The Doom Track only reached 9.

So I guess the Terror Track is a way for the game to punish investigator groups that just ignore monsters and gates and monolithically chase clues-sealings. I think I would have won though, if it wasn 't for the 8-clues rule... And "Disturbing the Dead" didn t help either, was on the board for 2 rounds and added 2 terror levels.

This game is cruel and has a will of its own.

Advosan said:

Ehhh, I can't remember the last time I had a 36 mythos card game. How many expansions are you playing? I don't think your games will last nearly that long once you add in Innsmouth and Dunwich. I.e. you're not going to see the terror level hit 10 often in the future (I predict).

With the base set only when we were just learning a few times the track hit 10. And then Shib Niggurath woke up and very much destroyed us. Now that we know how to manage it it doesn't give us problems as often, but if you let it it can get out of hand.

Because in the Core game there aren't that many portal spawn locations and especially high frequency ones. If you happen to seal 2-3 of the most threatening locations you'll seriously slow down the ebb of monsters. The Big Box expansions add more dangerous locations and you'll have trouble quelling the flood of evil beings into your world as far as I understand it.

I've played 7 now and I've gained a 6th sense for when things are under control and victory is a matter of time in the base game. Therefore I've bought IH and will get DH as soon as my board game vendor restocks it. I want the cards that just adds doom tokens straight up, to keep things unpredictable right up to the end, so I will have a look at CotP. I wish there was more Mythos cards raising terror level.

lolholm said:

You have some of them in the King in Yellow expansion, but do not worry, as soon as you start playing with the Innsmouth or Dunwich boards, you'll discover new ways to have the terror increasing. In case this is not enough for you, and you don't mind playing with custom material, you might have a little tour in the Custom Heralds thread in the Fan creation section of the forum. Some of the Heralds hosted there (Veet's Dr. Herbert West or my Inhabitant of the Lake) are pretty good at boosting the terror level up (in case you feel particularly brave, you can use Avi's Crevice of Chaos :.laughter:

Julia said:

Geeze... The Crevice even screwed me over ;.( Having a half terror track can be surprisingly painful...