I see this mentioned a lot here and I don't know what it means in regard to a game.

Whenever I say "dilution" I specifically mean "mechanics dilution."

For example: The King in Yellow expansion adds 27 cards, 6 of which are "The Next Act Begins," which triggers a key expansion mechanic.

When using only the King in Yellow expansion, you can expect to draw one "Next Act" card every 15.5 turns.

But say you add a couple more expansions: Dark Pharaoh and Dunwich Horror. These expansions add 54 card, and (obviously) none of them are "The Next Act Begins." So now, you can expect to draw one "Next Act" card every 24.5 turns.

The "Next Act" mechanic has been diluted, making it much more ineffective. So just imagine what happens when you add all seven expansions to the mix.

So "dilution" occurs when you use multiple expansions. The three key mechanics I focus on are King in Yellow's Next Act , and gates opening in Dunwich and Innsmouth . I like to use all expansions together, but I do not like how I see far less of these three mechanics then I should. So I have to use house rules to correct this imbalance. There are other minor sources of dilution, such as the inability to obtain Dark Pharaoh's Exhibit Items or to join Black Goat's Cult of the Thousand .

Some players also extend "dilution" to refer to expansion-specific theme. Imagine using Dark Pharaoh, King in Yellow, Innsmouth, and Black Goat together. Each expansion would add its own theme, but this would result in no single coherent theme for the whole game.

By far the best way that I've found to cope with the expansion/dilution issue is to keep all of the mythos decks separate and combine everything else. This makes it easy to modify which expansion(s) you're playing with, and at the start of each game I just come up with a dice-rolling method of determining which mythos deck I draw from depending on which expansion(s) I'm playing with and how "present" I want each to be. It's worked fantastically for me and is quite easy to manage. The only difficulty you might encounter is with the location cards for the base game, but so far I haven't had many issues with that either.

So reply to tibs: You want a card to come up more often so that it adds an element to the game that you like to see? So does it break the game if that card doesn't come up more often? Don't the additional components from the expansion add another element that keeps the game intact? Or did the designers miss the boat when they came up with expansionsnot correctly plan for integration of a single expansion or multiple expansions. And finally do with expect that Mistkontic Horror will address?

Thanks for your thoughts.

A good example of this is not only the Next Act cards, but also Innsmouth and Dunwich. Dunwich is even more suscepitnle to this, because if only 1, maybe 2 gates open over there the whole game, the Dunwich Horror will never awaken. Innsmouth Deep Ones Rising track isn't as important, because it can still trigger in other ways that don't involve a monster in a Vortex. The Next Act cards are the most obvious, and possibly the most glaring. Sure the card raises the terror level by 1 and makes the monsters move, but it doesn't make a gate open. The Mythos compensates for this by making you LOSE if you get to act III, or take heavy penalties (2 doom tokens, or remove 2 elder signs) to not get there in the first place.

Honestly, I'm more concerened about these two types of dilution than the "them-y" type dilution where you don't get Exhibit items or a Cult membership. I'm okay with these, so it makes them seem more special, and not receiving an item is less game-breaking, to me, than never getting to Act II, or the DUnwich Horror taking a permanent nappy-nap. And they also deal with the Mythos deck instead of encounters/items, so that can involve a singular solution (which Tibs has graciously given us, actually!) instead of doing the good ol' "pay attention to one expansion at a time.

I want types of cards to come up more often so that the danger associated with their mechanics stays intact. The whole point behind the "Next Act" mechanic is that you're supposed to play a risk-reward metagame: do you add two doom tokens to the doom track now, or hope that the next Act card doesn't come out? When enough Act cards come out, the investigators lose, so the consequence is as bad as possible. But two doom tokens makes the AO closer to awakening, which can also be bad.

When enough expansions are added, Act cards are very infrequent. There becomes no incentive to add doom tokens because the chances the next act will come out are slim. If you happen to lose by enough acts coming out, it was a fluke. But it would have been dumb to assume that were to happen, and added doom tokens anyway.

So to answer your questions:

1. The game isn't "broken" when certain cards don't come up, but the mechanic is completely destroyed. What's the point of using the Dunwich board when there's so low a chance of a Dunwich gate opening up? In a way, there is an exploit here: the investigators are given a "handicap" for using multiple expansion boards. But if Dunwich gates are so infrequent, they're pretty much getting a handicap for nothing.
2. No, boosting this particular cards does not diminish "other" mechanics. The three mechanics I mentioned are entirely Mythos deck-driven. Making those cards more frequent makes other expansion cards less frequent, but that's not a bad thing because the other expansions don't have mythos-driven mechanics. Besides, adding more expansions makes the other expansions less frequent anyway.
3. The answer is that the designers "missed the boat." The expansions generally were not designed with other expansions in mind. Hopefully the upcoming Miskatonic Horror expansion will address this, but I doubt it will.

In the meantime I've developed this anti-dilution variant to keep the mechanics of interest relevant.

Tibs said:

::Laughter::

So direct.

Avi_dreader said:

But so true... and that's why I'm not really excited by this expansion. It will be just more cards obv (but that is cool).

Like I said, unless you intend to play every game with all expansions it works out perfectly to just keep the mythos decks separate and use a roll to determine which to draw from. It's extremely clean and hassle free and allows the game to be played modularly with minimal effort. We just decide on a whim which expansion(s) we want to play with (which is rarely more than 2 due to space constraints) and break out the appropriate mythos decks.

If your desire is to play with every expansion every time you play, it's naturally going to dilute the presence of each one considerably - I don't really see how you can expect anything different...? I guess the best thing there is to manually configure a single mythos deck to feature each expansion in the exact percentages that are ideal for you. Everything else should work out fine. What's wrong with just doing that?

I tried doing that, but it's a pain to sort out the cards of interest, and then shuffle the remainder, and then draw from the remainder the number I need to combine with the "of interest" cards to make a working deck, and then to shuffle that resultant deck. And if I get "The Story Continues" I'd need to do it all over again.

No, I'd much rather deal with one big deck and use some kind of anti-dilution to make sure the "interest" cards are more frequent. I don't like to pick which expansions I want to use, because I don't want to sort anything out. I also like the idea that anything can happen, but I want anything within some limits.

Multiple decks doesn't work for me. "Build your own deck" doesn't work for me. Limiting the expansions used doesn't work for me. The link I posted earlier is the solution I've come up with after years of dealing with this problem.

I'm no where near as experienced as a lot of you, certainly not the fearsome dreader, but one simple solution I came up with to keep King in Yellow an active part of any Arkham game, no matter how diluted, is just that before drawing a mythos card, roll a single six sided die. On a 1, it counts as if you pulled a "the next act begins" card. Simple enough.

Einlanzer80 said:

By the way, I just posted a dilution fix in a new thread. One difference is that my fix doesn't use dice. As a result, it preserves the correct probabilities very precisely. I hope you check it out.

I am loving this discussion. Thanks to all you experts out there whose passion for the game benefits us noobies.

Dietch said:

I'm actually really optimistic about it! I mean, okay, maybe it won't be perfectly balanced, and yeah there are already reasonable concerns brewing about those Institutions, but everything else they've revealed about it (e.g. new Act cards, better Cult encounters, the Injury/Madness cards, and even the very existence of this expansion itself) suggests that they've really been paying attention to what we've been saying, they know what problems are out there, and they have some neat ideas about how to improve things.

Dietch said:

I'm excited. And if the cards turn out to be crap, I will be less excited ;')

There's never been an expansion I haven't enjoyed, even if I had to make some custom components to enjoy it.

HyeJinx1984 said:

That's a little over the top (although it would make a nice feature for a herald). At the very least, you should restrict it to whenever a new gate opens (not a huge difference, but it should cut down 2-6 rolls a game). Go make a Hastur herald for this variant :'D

subochre said:

If I weren't reading a book called Half Empty right now, I might find that remotely plausible ;'D

I do it like einlander and have for over a year. It's no pain whatsover since I never combine the mythos decks. The dice rolls very closely approximate that real thing as far as the expansions are concerned and in fact its betterfor up to 2 expansions.

Let's say you want to play with KIY and Dunwich Horror. If you played as playtested, each deck with come up approxiately 1/3rd of the time. That's how it comes up with you go 1-2: Base, 3-4 KIY and 5-6 Dunwich Horror. Both KIY and Dunwich Horror come up as often as playtested.

But let's say you really want to experience Dunwich Horror:

Base 1-2; Dunwich Horror 4-6.

Of course, the base cards come up less, but I've seen them too many times, I don't care.

There's only one location card that's a problem and its in Kingsport.