Dam said:

Yar. Let's go with that!

Dam is right. Kingsport is stank. I have it only because I'm a compulsive completionist. I wanted the GOOs, the investigators, the monsters, the non-specific location cards, etc. The board itself is terrible. The epic battle cards are nice enough, but even that's a topic for debate.

amikezor said:

We didn't believe our eyes, yeah. Reshuffled the rest of the deck several times. Didn't change a thing. We suspect a GOO wanted to annoy us. Random cards are random

Add Dunwich, manage decks beforehand, remove bloat. Roger that, thanks!

I'm also an AH player considering getting MoM. To tell the truth, I thought MoM was gonna be a pseudo replacement for AH, the latter having stretched itself quite a bit with the expansions. I've resolutely followed Dam's advice against KH and, although still missing a couple of small boxes, was fairly satisfied with my collection. As a result I had pretty much decided on picking MoM up... until I saw the price tag and stalled (£65 versus the £40 tag on base AH/Big box expansion). Since then, I've uncovered the upcoming Miskatonic Horror release and Dark Pharaoh re-release (not to mention imminent releases of tne new Mortal Kombat and Portal games...) and, I must say, my interest in actually purchasing MoM has waned considerably.

It's not just the price tag: I also worry about the supposed initial lack of depth and variety without (more costly) expansions. To give an idea, I hold the extremely dubious opinion that Last Night on Earth lacks scenario variety.

In a nutshell, it's £65 for an all new gaming experience which might be put aside for hibernation until expansions come along versus £60 (Miskatonic and Pharaoh) to add considerable depth to a game I still love and haven't seen (or mightn't ever see) all possible outcome.

Deek said:

Excuse my ignorance, I have only played AH once, and loved it, since I purchased but I have a couple of questions: first, in your opinion what is the best expansion and second what is "culling the deck"?

Still deciding whether or not to purchase MoM.

Greg M said:

Dunwich Horror.

Culling means you take out cards from the deck. My Mythos deck for example has 208 cards I think, out of which 20 is the max that get drawn each game. I like the variety this offers, but others prefer a more toned down deck, either removing cards that open gates in Arkham to focus gates more into DH/IH or sissies who take out Rumors .

Dam said:

you're kidding, right ?

what about removing the gates too, since they tend to speed up the game :-)

Dam said:

OOOOR, culling can also mean trimming down that bloated ass Mythos deck to guarantee a focused experience. We do NOT remove specific cards. What we do is create a much smaller deck that includes a small cross section of those available, ensuring both the expansion board and small box Mythos cards enter play on a regular basis.

I would hesitate to call our method culling, to be honest. That insinuates the exclusion of specific cards, as Dam suggests. We call it "prepping the deck".

With an all-in approach, we often found the expansion boards felt vacant, seeing very little action in terms of gates compared to Arkham (your mileage may vary). Investigators rarely felt pressed to travel to neighboring townships. This felt like a waste. Also, small box Mythos cards felt lost in the mix, diluting their individual themes. Rumor cards were also few and far between due to their relative rarity compared to the headline and environment cards. This was our experience. Again, YMMV.

So, with regard to the Mythos deck, we randomly dole out a specific number of base, small box and big box expansion cards, with base game cards being the most prominent followed by a somewhat even mix of small/big box (leaning more toward the big box). Within these groupings, we ensure there is a reasonable distribution of headline to environment to rumor (with headlines being the most common, environment not so much, only 2 rumor cards per 35 card deck; we have a specific ratio, but I cannot recall it off the top of my head). The ratio was created by looking at the base game + 1 small box + 1 big box, crunching the numbers across the various combinations and ending up with an average number for each card type within each category. It's ... complicated.

We do NOT cull specific gate cards, nor do we remove rumors or anything of the sort. We only know that a certain number of headline/environment/rumor cards are being added from each category (base, small, big); we do no know which cards exactly. This creates a random deck that, more often than not, results in a decent story that plays across the entire board and prominently features the specific theme of whichever small box is currently in the shuffle. The game feels less watered down and far more thematic.

To make a tired point: YMMV. We played all-in for a long while before we decided to start "preparing" the deck. It really is a matter of taste.

It should also be noted that we do occasionally have a game that's very Arkham-centric, as our deck is still exceedingly random. It includes almost twice as many cards as you will likely need for a game. Sometimes, that's just the way it plays out. Not all Mythos cards from DH or IH open gates in their respective towns, sometimes we end up with a run of big box Mythos cards opening gates in Arkham. Rumors are still rare, but they don't feel like winning the lottery (assuming a lottery jackpot of a swift kick in the nuts). You just never know. That's half the fun!

And yes, Dunwich Horror. That's the no-brainer, go-to choice for first expansion.

Interesting approach Deek. It's similar in some ways to a method for trimming (or prepping) the mythos deck that I posted here:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=114&efcid=1&efidt=456103

My method takes into account 4 dilutable elements: the Dunwich board, the Innsmouth board, Next Act Begins cards, and cards that involve Exhibit items. If you cared to drop me a line, I'd be interested in hearing the details of your approach. One thing I was wondering. I'm a little surprised that you control for the number of rumors in the mythos deck. In the base game, about 10% of the mythos cards are rumors. In the expansions, the percentage of rumor cards run as low as 7.4% (KiY) up to 13.6% (KH). Therefore, it seems like the probability of drawing mythos cards would hold fairly steady as you add expansions. Since rumors don't dilute with additional expansions, I wouldn't think you'd need to control for them.

It's not so much that's we're controlling them, it's moreso because our Mythos is only 35-ish cards. We do not play with any single deck intact; be it the base game, the small box or the big box expansion Mythos decks. In the interest of continuing to be totally off topic, the basic setup looks something like this:

H E R

AH 6 3 1

BB 5 3 ?

SB 4 2 ?

So AH (base game) randomly contributes 6 headlines and 3 environments, with similar numbers for the small and big boxes.

We then shuffler and draw the first card of the game and place it aside for use when the game begins.

THEN we randomly select our rumors, which we do after the first card draw to avoid drawing and discarding a rumor.

One rumor is selected from the base game, always. The "?" indicates what we call "Rolling for Rumor". We roll a d12 to determine if the second rumor is added from the SB or BB, on a result of 10, 11 or 12 (at which point the choice between the two is determined with a second dice roll). Any other result means the second rumor is randomly selected from the base game (the most common result). Whichever category (AH, BB or SB) is determined to supply the second rumor, the two remaining categories then contribute an additional headline card to balance the numbers.

There are additional caveats for the KiY expansion, wherein the number of AH headlines is reduced to 4 and the SB headlines increased to 6, with the additional two representing pre-selected "Next Act Begins!" The remaining Next Act cards are shuffled in with the rest of the KiY headlines, allowing for more card to be selected when the 4 remaining SB headlines are randomly drawn. This adds an edge to the game, because you know for certain there are at least two Next Act cards, but you're never sure if there is a third in the deck that will end the game.

This approach requires a lot of organization; not only keeping each Mythos deck separate, but also broken down into headlines, environments and rumors. You basically end up with nine decks from which to build a single 27 card deck (not 35, my mistake; a previous version of this system resulted in a 35 card deck).

I realize the numbers are not bang on accurate with regard to percentages of specific card types, but they're close enough to allow for a very balanced, condensed deck; one that we feel represents the intended distribution of specific card types to a reasonable degree.

So yeah. I probably should have followed your suggestion and PM'd you these details, avec, but I've rattled on at length about this; it would be odd to stop babbling before dishing out the actual nitty gritty. If anyone wishes to discuss the system further, or even suggest a way to improve it (always interested in that!), please drop me a private message. Expanding on this topic is a matter best left for the AH forum. I feel I've hijacked this poor thread more than enough, my apologies to the OP.

Hmm. I wonder now if simply shuffling the AH rumors together with the SB and BB rumors, then randomly selecting two after drawing the first card of the game, would result in a similar statistical distribution? It would certainly be a less convoluted way of selecting rumors, definitely more streamlined, no need for a dice roll. Plus, we then have a chance of pulling a BB + SB rumor in a game, or a very slim chance of a BB + BB or SB + SB. It would also add to the unpredictability, as the rumor category would be a total mystery.

Ah, progress. Why didn't I think of this before ...?

EDIT: Oh, that's right. 'Cause then I wouldn't be able to re-balance the deck with additional headline cards versus the newly added rumor cards. Hmm. I wonder if that's even necessary? Dropping that aspect would create a nice, round 25 card deck ... *continues tinkering*

Okay. NOW I'm done.

It's awesome to see the last two pages skew heavily toward Arkham, especially because I play both games. But to get back to Mansions, I've only played two games so far (as keeper both times), so I can't offer a strong summary just yet. I will say that the feeling of playing both games is actually quite similar due to the mythos -- many of the same characters and critters to fight, similar weapons and items, etc.

That said, the distinction for my friends who've played with us is that Mansions is much easier to get into and more fun overall to play. I don't have a regular group of players here in San Francisco, and though the folks I do cajole over to my place are down with Catan and other modern board games, they're not hardcore game nerds. I absolutely love Arkham, but I'm also aware of the fact that I'm mildly OCD and enjoy its excruciatingly deep rule set -- and the prospect of potentially losing to the dark forces.

Other people, they put a few hours into a game and they want a fairly strong chance of winning. My players found Mansions easier to get comfortable with because of the limited amount of things you can do each turn. So far, the two games of Mansions I've played have very much highlighted the balance between board-game opponent and DM that this game requires. In each case I've guided them along and hit them with some nasty stuff, but I never pulled out all the stops and beat on them the way I could. Consequently, they won each game just by the skin of their teeth, and I could tell that they were relishing their success. It reminded me of a few experiences I had playing Hero Quest way back in the day.

That said, Mansions actually represents a bit more effort on the part of the Keeper than even Arkham. With Arkham, even though it's cooperative, the player most familiar with the game (me, given that I own it) often serves as the mini-DM, keeping track of all the attendant systems (the doom track, the terror track, the monster limit(s), etc). With Mansions, it's the prep time that you can understimate in terms of how much it demands from you. I prepped our second run-through by putting all the room and clue cards in order the day beforehand, but I still spent probably 20 minutes assembling the board and laying out all the pieces when I arrived at my friend's house.

Add in another 10-15 minutes to choose characters and explain a bit about gameplay, and you have quite a bit of lead-in time before the game starts. That's perfectly fine, and I like my players to have a full sense of the options available to them. But it's clear that 1.) My friends really enjoy the combat. 2.) They hate the possibility of getting hit with mythos cards and injuries, but understands its necessity; 3.) Surprisingly, they love the puzzles; and 4.) For the keeper, prepping the deck is essential if you want to be efficient about getting started after, say, a long day of work. Also, cleanup is a *****.

Jack, the players are actually supposed to assemble the board while the keeper gets cards ready. Then if you have them start drawing investigators and deciding which cards to use and read the players intro it seems like you should be pretty close to done when they are... at least that has been my experience if I've pre-sorted the cards that will be needed. If you don't there is definitely some extra time for the players to grab a drink or get the pizza orded, but it gets better with practice.

As for cleanup... check out this video... keeping everything like this is magic: