Hi. New to the forums. Relatively new to AH in general, but it's become my favorite game to sit and play. ^^

This game can be downright brutal sometimes, though. I was wondering if anyone can share some of their truly unlucky games. Whether it was a horribly short game, or terrible rolls, or just those really fun games where all seems to be going well and it just so happens that the particular Great Old One you were up against decided to hammer down their authority in brutal fashion.

A lot of you on this site have hundreds of games under you and I think it'd be interesting to recount some of this game's potential to just kick you right in the pants.

A recent game that I played comes to mind. It lasted 4 turns. I was playing with Innsmouth with Hydra as the herald and there were 4 investigators. Started relatively smooth with a gate at the Witch House and people begun their preliminary strategies. The next gate opened at Devil Reef. I always hate it when a gate opens there so early, but this one really hammered that home. The next two mythos draws were also Devil Reef gates. Two monster surges, each time with at least 3 coming from Devil Reef making a total of at least 7 monsters there, almost all of them sharing similar dimentional symbol patterns. Obviously, you can guess what happened. Ghatanothoa awakens and destroys our thoroughly unprepared team of investigators with ease.

It's a pity that game was just before I started reporting them. It would have been a funny one to look back on.

Interesting! Ghatanothoa was also the Ancient One in one of our unluckiest games, but he wasn't as mercifully quick in dealing with us as he was with you. Instead he let us strain our little hearts out and over the course of the game he burst FOUR of our seals! Four of them ! Needless to say, we lost horribly . . .

I've heard of people losing the game before the first turn. Innsmouth makes this possible.

My unluckiest game was actually a pair of unlucky games... Two games in a row with all mythos cards mixed together and my second card draw in *both* games was the one that removes all clues from the board. I was displeased the first time, and freaking out the second time :'D

Two times come to mind...

One game, we drew The Terrible Experiment, successfully passed it (at great cost to our progress and filling the board with monsters), then drew Disturbing the Dead the very next turn. Oh, Rumors, how they suck.

Another game we lost due to an investigator rolling 0 successes on 24 dice in a combat roll while on the second space of an Other World. She had 5 clue tokens in hand, we had one less than the maximum number of gates open at the time, and 5 seals on the board. Of course, the last gate opened in the next Mythos phase, and Cthulhu devoured us all.

I've only drawn Rash of Missing Persons once that I recall (The first player chooses an investigator to be lost in time and space). Of course, Yog-Sothoth was the Ancient One. And there were only two investigators, and they had each just gotten super buffed. We didn't last too long after that. Our spirits were broken.

Still, if I were Yog-Sothoth, that's exactly what I would've done, when I would've done it.

avec said:

Nice attempt to cover up

Well, I had a new unluckiest game last night a pure BGotW game, using the BGotW Herald and no other expansions, vs. Yig.

Not only did we have two different combats in which an investigator was knocked unconscious by rolling 0 successes on 12 dice, but we also got a cursed investigator and put into play three Rumors Good Work Undone, followed by The Stars Are Right, and ending with The Southside Strangler Strikes (still on the board when we lost.) Finally, on two different occasions an investigator in an Other World with 5 clues was ejected to Arkham without an Explored token by the encounter.

If it seems amazing that we lived long enough vs. Yig to clear three rumors despite a board filled with monsters (due to BGotW Herald), it's because we drew and used all four Elder Signs. Alas, it wasn't enough, and Yig awakened to face investigators with no blessings, an average STA/SAN of 2, and practically no clues or weapons.

I played a solo game with 3 investigators and after 3 turns i quit as everything was falling apart...

Hope to get a better game next time...

Need to shuffle the cards

Lurker + Dunwich game last night against Yog-Sothoth. So, that's 21 gate bursts out of 125 mythos cards, and we got 10 of them. Six of them broke a seal. Monterey Jack spent four turns getting beaten up by the Plateau of Leng gate before he could close it. Later, he picked up Claustrophobia as his first madness. Then, a Colour Out Of Space moved at an inconvenient time, and his second madness - the only other madness drawn all game - was also Claustrophobia. Monterey runs off into the biggest open space he can find and is never seen again - taking most of our decent weapons with him, as well as two of the spells we were going to use on not failing The Great Ritual. Darrell replaces him, and starts with an Elder Sign... but no weapons, and each of the open gates has an elder thing and a star spawn on it.

We'd sealed 9 gates in total but were back down to three seals on the board, when two new gates opened in consecutive turns and woke up Yog by "no more gate tokens" (first time that's happened)

We had no decent physical weapons (Cavalry Saber and Derringer), but Rita had Tom "Mountain" Murphy, we both had five clues from trying to get our 10th and 11th seals - and tons of gate trophies from our failed attempts to seal them away - so we might have been able to win even then. Then Darrell decides to spend his clues on an attack - with the +1 Fight skill, this should do some damage. One success from ten dice later, it's all going wrong again.

We got Yog down to two doom tokens, which is better than most fights against them go, before we run out of gate trophies.

They were just playing with us all along, clearly.

Against the base game AOs where you have to make a skill check to survive (except Nyar), never, never spend clues to attack! Only to defend! A single success on a defense check to survive another round to attack is loads better than two extra dice for a single attack (Fight skill), let alone one.

Particularly against Yog, where it's difficult to defend against him... save clues for defense.

Tibs said:

Generally good advice, but not in this case, I think.

If we'd had marginally better physical weapons (if Monterey hadn't been devoured along with his revolver and bullwhip, for instance, or if we'd managed to draw one more common item during the game and so added the carbine rifle to our supplies) then saving the clues would have made sense. But then, if we'd had better physical weapons, we'd have won anyway.

Darrell was getting only three dice a turn on a normal attack - with maximum fight. On average, three clues are needed to pass a check, so spending them defensively gets one extra attack die per clue on average. Spending them offensively gets two each. To get more than ten extra attacks from five clues in that situation, four of them need to be successes.

Rita, who was getting four dice a turn for most of the fight, and didn't have the Fight skill, did save her five clues for defense (and somehow got three successes out of them, which was yet more "not quite lucky enough" from the game)

Tibs said:

I usually do it your way, too, Tibs. Unless someone has a shotgun...Or Mandy Thompson...

cim said:

Yeah, if you're looking at it that way, it is probably better. Only three per turn is rough. Poor Darrell.

Resurrecting an old topic here, but just had a rather unlucky game (though we actually ended up winning, somehow).

To put it simply: we got 4 gate bursts.

To elaborate: we got 2 gate bursts, got "The Story Continues" a little later, and then got the same 2 gate bursts .

We have decided that I am the single worst re-shuffler in the history of humankind. O_O

It should be noted that we were using my custom rule for gate bursts discussed elsewhere on these forums, where rather than breaking the seal and not adding a doom token, the burst adds a doom token and a monster but leaves the seal in place (we've used this rule a lot and actually rather like it, as it makes games harder by pushing you closer to losing, not by pushing you back from winning). I'm actually not sure how it would have played out differently if the bursts were normal...not many turns passed between the first set of two and the second set, so with normal bursts we might not have re-sealed the gates yet, but with our custom rule we got 4 doom tokens added to the track this way. But we were also playing vs. Hastur, so re-sealing would have been very difficult.

Anyway, came down to the most exciting final turn we've had, I think. We had 1 doom token left to go on the doom track, and 1 seal left to go before we won. Fortunately, the only locations left as potential gate openings (without a burst, anyway) were two of the least common, but still, drawing that last Mythos card on the turn before one of us got to exit the gate and try the final seal had us all on the edge of our seats. I think I sat there holding the card, working myself up to reading it, for a full two minutes. O_O

Hilariously, in our first game against Hastur, we had a lot better luck in general, but he woke up and beat us. O_O

Hi everyone

New to the forum (nice topic for my first post I thought).

I have played 25+ games since I bought it as a christmas gift for my self. Most of them with my girlfriend.

Recently got Innsmouth Horror and tried it out. That didn't end well.

Therefor I dicided to try to resurect this topic .

We (me and my girlfriend) started out with 2 investigators each and went up against Chtugha.

To sum it all upp, it went something like this:

Initial mythos: 1:st gate opening

1:st turn: 2 Arkham encounters with "A gate and a monster appear" and another gate opening during the mythos = 4 open gates and two investigators delayed in other worlds.

2:nd turn: Gate opening during mythos phase

3:rd turn: Another gate opening in mythos phase = 6 open gates and Cthugha awakened.

Needles to say, with only 3 turns to gather items and clue tokens and with two investigators locked up in other worlds the entire game, we didn't really stand a chance against Cthugha and his bad habit of destroing our weapons after the first use.

The entire game (not counting setup) took about 15 min.

Oh, there have been so many...

In recent memory, there was a game where any draw from the Unique Deck resulted in at least one Tome. Unfortunately, we were playing against Y'Golonac, and the afternoon game ended before dinner.

One of my favorite "unluckys" was the time there was an undefeatable Vampire in the Terrible Experiment. All the other monsters were horrific, like the Dhole, the Polyp, Shoggoths and Cthonians and Hounds, oh my. To prevent failure, everyone kept trying to whack the one "wussy" monster in the stack: the Vampire. And yet, they would either fail the Horror or Combat Check and be sent away with a phobia or an injury. So the Rumor was failed. Too bad we were playing Glaaki. As the Terror Track rose like a lava flume, one by one, Glaaki's servants rendered us bereft of anything resembling a bonus card before he devoured us all at once.

It's not legal anymore, but there was a time First Player Rex drew the pre-game Mythos card (Strange Sightings), gained a Clue, gained a second Clue via his special ability, drew Ghatanotha's face, and disappeared before Turn 1.

Not necessarily an unlucky game, but my sophomore year of college, I recall once trying to play a game with "all" of the expansions. (I put the all in quotes because at the time we didn't know that BGotW was out. We used the original CotDP, Dunwich, tKiY and Kingsport.) SIt was too long ago to recall most of the specifics, but suffice to say, it was a fairly short game. I do, however, recall that I have always held a grudge against Kingsport because of all of the rifts. They contributed to our not-so-eventual downfall quite handily.

More recently I played a 2-player game with BGotW and Innsmouth. Carolyn Fern and...I don't remember. I started the game with a Gate Box as a unique item, and the second gate opened on Devil Reef. Fortunately, I was able to get into the first gate, Gate Box to Devil Reef and close it, but I had a major "duh" moment in not realizing that I could travel to Y'ha-nthlei EXCEPT from Devil Reef. So, I wound up spending four or five turns there waiting for my compatriot to come and summon me and I finally got out by drawing an encounter that allowed me to travel to any aquatic location. Fast forward a few turns and I have Call Friend as well as the Gate Box, so we decide that we need to start going to town on gates. We were up against Shudde M'ell, so while we were trying to frantically close gates, about four monster surges occur in a row. Since it was a two-player game, the monster limit is not all that high, so the terror track skyrockets. This leads us to the idea of sealing gates where we are seeing monster surges (Black Cave, Unvisited Isle and The Witch House). We get enough clue tokens each, and set out to seal these off. We seal off Black Cave and Unvisited Isle, and we got as far as where we were both about to seal a gate during the next turn, but there was one doom token left. It all game down to this one mythos card.

Sure enough, a gate opened on the Woods. Shudde M'ell, having turned to rubble all but two of his seven locations, left us with three turns to achieve 24 successes. I was blessed and had no weapons, so 1 die for me, and my friend had...I forget the name, but one handed unique item, exhaust to gain +5 to the next combat check, so he was getting ~6 dice. We did the math and realized that we mathematically were incapable of beating him, and our theory turned out to be true.

Also not necessarily an "unlucky" game, but definitely a head-in-hands moment for me.

Tbla said:

Hi Tbla!

And welcome to the Carnival

Innsmouth can be brutal. I think most of the people here who play Arkham consistently have a "Mythos 1 defeat" on their log, thanks to Innsmouth (and it's something everyone's proud of ::nodding:

Just a little note: a 4 investigator game has a gate limit of 7. So, at 6, Cthugha was still purring in his slumber!

jgt7771 said:

Not only was he Cursed; the game was also Jinxed ::laughter::

Julia said:

Oh?

Well what do you know? You're right. Thanks!!

The most annoying thing is that I can now remember that I knew this once and used to play according to it. But a while ago my brain must have short circuited and I began to think it was only 6. I could swear the game was getting harder with an unproportional number of awakenings due to open gates.

Tbla said:

Happy Birthday, Julia!!!

The Professor said:

Thanks Professor!

Oh man, I think it was Azathoth and a ton of unnecessarily bad rolls. We all died before he could even destroy the world. It was baaadddd.... but that could've also done something with sharing a few drinks while playing. Note to self, do not get plastered when the Old Ones attack.