Hello everyone, my friend originally got this game thinking it came with 16 pre painted minis(oh how wrong) to use for customs in Heroscape, but when we discovered it in fact was cardboard we tried the game out. And wow I definitely love it, it's strategic, challenging, and team oriented.

But when playing a few questions came up, both with concrete answers, and without.

1. We were fighting Ithaqua, who may discard items. Is discarding considered different than losing? Would having an item which can't be lost or stolen not be able to be destroyed?

2. We were playing a two player game in which it became quickly apparent we were not going to win and would have to fight Ithaqua. It became kind of awkward as I felt I had little goal all of a sudden. What should usually be done in this case? Neglect the gates and try to obtain spells/items? Just try not to be damaged?

3. Everything but Lore and luck is fairly easy to decide, in what cases should I balance these? Should I only focus on lore when I am about to close a gate, assuming I have higher Lore than Fight?

4. Game is great, we already picked up the King in Yellow. How much harder than this than a normal game vs. Ithaqua for example? And what other expansions are good for future consideration.

1. Discard and "lose" are the same thing. Yes, items that "cannot be lost" cannot be "frozen by Ithaqua" either. Lucky you!

2. Personal choice. Some players choose to play the fatalist and give up on the gate closings to "gear up" for the Final Battle. Last minute shopping at the General Store, or trophies for Blessings at the South Church or Allies at Ma's Boarding House are a couple of ways to prepare for the coming of the Ancient One. Other players never gear up and never stop trying to get the gate victory, because you never know what the Mythos Deck might do.

3. Luck is really good to have when you're offworld (lots of Other World Luck Checks). Lore depends more on the character and how important Spells are to them. Yes, switching from high Luck to high Lore to survive an Other World and then close the gate once you return is a great strategy.

4. I'll let someone else go on about this. Bottom line, you can't go wrong with any of the big box expansions (Dunwich, Kingsport, Innsmouth), and King in Yellow and Lurker at the Threshold are fantastic small box expansions.

Welcome to the Carnival, programdude!

4. All the expansions are good. The best are the big-box. If you can't afford that, then get Lurker.

When I recommend an expansion, I always start at the big-boxes because they come with a lot of cool stuff. Barring that, an important thing to add to your games is gate bursts: Black Goat and Lurker have these (all big-boxes do too). Lurker is a better expansion than Black Goat.

Don't pick up Innsmouth until you have another expansion with gate-bursts, and it might be a good idea to wait until you have Dunwich or Kingsport first anyway. Innsmouth is the nastiest, and it also comes with no items or new other worlds (Dunwich and Kingsport do). Plus you wouldn't want every expansion you add after Innsmouth to introduce less difficulty than Innsmouth did.

programdude said:

Like another said, personal choice. If things are totally going wrong, yeah, you may want to start gearing up...but remember that gate seals can add a surprising amount of turns if you have the right places sealed. (Not all unstable locations are created equal, but I'll let you decide whether to spoil the actual numbers for yourself or not elsewhere. :-P) One seal on a highly unstable place can potentially give you a lot of time to work with, so don't give up too soon.

Unless you are already very, very, very well set up for an AO fight, I usually wouldn't go for a "just try not to be damaged" strategy. It's worth a little risk to build up some equipment...AO battles seem like they'll be infinitely more survivable if you go in with a large amount of dice to hit them with / defend with, especially since a lot of them get more lethal as the fight goes on.

In my case...and I don't have a huge number of games under my belt yet...I tend to keep on trying for the seals/closing victories until the bitter end if I'm pretty close to them. If I only have one seal down when the AO gets around 3/4 of the way there, though, yeah, I tend to abandon it and go for building up for the battle.

(Absolutely at least get a Blessing if you can, if you feel you'll be going into the final fight with Yig...that'll cancel out his opening curse ability, and while that's hardly absolute destruction, it certainly helps to get rid of it. :-P Do it very shortly before his awakening if you can, though, since you have to keep the blessing until then for it to be useful.)

On the other hand, I just recently had a game with 3 friends where we had only 3 seals (on middle-instability locations) when Ithaqua reached 7 or 8 (don't recall), and started thinking maybe we should just stop and build up for the fight...at which time we suddenly got 2 Elder signs and an item or two that could hand out clue tokens, making it easily possible to seal 3 gates before Ithaqua got to full. Sometimes it just works out, so don't count yourself out too early!

Probably going to get Lurker myself soon, as that sounds quite neat.