Ever since we got Kingsport, our relationship with Dunwich has changed dramatically. The rate of gates in Dunwich has slowed down noticably, but with everything else going on that is not really a huge deal. It just never seems important to go to Dunwich to kill stuff with all the other things going on.

To make matter worse; the rifts from Kingsport pose a much greater threat than the Dunwhich Horror does, and there are three of them. So in the event that a rift is open and the Dunwich Horror has awakened it is going to be more important to close the rift than it is to fight the Horror.

I honestly find myself rooting for the Dunwich Horror when it wakes up just so it can show us that it isn't just taking up space. Does anyone else have these problems or is this a unique perspective? I have honestly considered asking the other players about houseruling the Horror so that it automatically adds a doom token when it moves without the need to roll. but i don't think my group would go for that

-halo

-I ment to post this on the general board. Sorry about that.

*chalks up another reason not to buy KH

Personally, although my group seems to like it easy peasy, (no idea why), i love a challenge. My friends complain and bellyache if they are not breezing through, using no strategy at all, no teamwork, doing whatever they want, and still have a good chance at winning at the end.

Many of the expansions have been made to be adaptable, some people do not like to be stressed out and feel they "have" to do something, so the game has been made in an attemt to give people a game that can be played and have fun by everyone, whether you like it easy or hard, there are people who want to spend their whole game browsing through location cards and shopping rather than using strategy and teamwork.

The problem with Dunwich is it was the first expansion that came out, when there was alot of fine tuning and working out the bugs. Most of the "difficulty" of that expansion was completely random and relied upon drawing the mythos cards that came from that expansion, and as you already pointed out, if you are adding kingsport cards to the deck, then it dilutes those few dunwich cards down even further, drastically increasing the chance of making dunwich completely useless, with there being no point to go to the dunwich board.

This, however, is a problem that plagues many Arkham Horror expansions, not just Dunwich. Try mixing in 4 expansions at once into the mythos deck, and see if the king in yellow horrifies you that much. See how often any one "horror" theme comes through. It would be like taking friday the thirteenth, nightmare on elm street, aliens, and the reanimator and mixing them all into one single movie that is 2 hours long. The resulting mess is probably going to be partial movie clips from all 4 movies, and wont make sense at all.

Now to the problem. The mechanics in kingsport dont rely on the kingsport mythos cards to spawn the rifts, any card can do that if it matches the pattern at the movement section of the mythos card. But as you correctly pointed out, while every card usually places a rift token, those Dunwich cards are rarely drawn, making Dunwich much less important, to the point of being forgettable.

Does this mean that the kingsport expansion will make Dunwich useless if it is bought? That depends on your group and whether you fall into the "easy peasy" category, or the "we want it hard" category.

Obvoiusly, the problem you stated means you didnt really feel all that "horrified" by Dunwich when kingsport was added, because of the above problems, and felt no need to go there, making it feel like "wow, we actually got a monster into a vortex this time Jim! What are the odds we go another 3 or 4 games before getting another?"

What we do is we make 2 different Mythos decks. We leave all the Mythos cards from Dunwich in one pile, and all the other Mythos cards in another pile. Then alternate between decks during the mythos phase, so that every other turn you will have effectively drawn one from each. This is not a home brewed method of doing the Mythos cards, it is one of the official ways they do it from Curse of the Dark Pharoh expansion, and it guarentees one card out of every two drawn will be an expansion Mythos card( in this case, Dunwich), and trust me at this point priorities will start getting re-arranged rather quickly. You will no longer see Dunwich as useless, and odds are you will have several investigators scrambling to Dunwich in order to do monster control, since there is no limit to the number of monsters that can be on the Dunwich board.

This will make the game much much harder though, so alternately you could create a separate Mythos deck for each expansion used, and alternate between the 3 or 4 mythos decks as you draw. This would add the Dunwich cards every 3 of 4 turns, and would give Dunwich an uneasy "feeling", rather than saturating investigators with fear of the Dunwich board, and either way should add at least some interaction with the Dunwich components.

This can be done with all the expansions, like the king in yellow, in order to make sure those expansions do not get diluted and you get the proper level on interaction.

Elric91 said:

Actually only 25 or the 36 Dunwich cards are expansion (Dunwich) portals. The other 11 are Arkham gate bursts! You're way will definitely bring Dunwich into play and create a harder game. If you want to keep the ratio more like the original Dunwich and base game only, every third card s/b Dunwich. (36 Dunwich and 67 Arkaham).

To Halo: If you have a rift out and the Dunwich Horror, the odds are exactly the same that a doom token will be generated by either force. It is much easier and productive to remove a rift however. Also the rift will also generate a monster.

mageith said:

Yes exactly: not only does a rift have the same odds as adding a doom token as the Dunwich Horror, but also rifts add monsters, while the Horror does not. Also, there can be up to 3 rifts in play at once! Imagine three Dunwich Horrors lending their abilities to the game, and their chances to appear are NEVER reduced, no matter how many expansions you add?

Rifts are a daunting risk. Certainly more so than the Dunwich Horror.

Tibs said:

Other factors. What brings the Dunwich Horror out is Dunwich Horror tokens which also cause the Terror Level to be raised. Ordinarily not a big deal, but we keep score. Another factor is monster surges. I've had up to a dozen monsters in Dunwich. So even the most minor gate should be closed/sealed if playing Dunwich.

I've had three rifts out before, when I incorrectly read one of the Kingsport Mythos cards. In this case, we went to close them. In the time it took to close them only one doom token was added.

We don't play the Kingsport board and Mythos cards much anymore, but not because it's difficult but because its boring and doesn't add much.

The secret danger of Kingsport: Kingsport adds a lot of monsters. Most of them are two blood tokens, so Kingsport increases the overall monster level.

In short, to answer the original posters observation, I'd recommend an artificial way to boost Dunwich's Mythos cards to appearing about 1/3rd of the time if you want Dunwich and/or the Horror to be a real factor. Also, there's the Whateley Prophecy but that still really only makes a difference if Dunwich's ratio is kept intact.

A follow up question: When you add the beginning Dunwich Horror token to the Dunwich track, do you raise the terror level also?

mageith said:

You don't. It's not the act of adding the Dunwich Horror track token that raises the terror level, it's the act of a monster moving into a vortex.

The vortex essentially does two things when it eats a monster: adds a DH token to the track AND raises the terror level by 1. Therefore, if the Dunwich Horror is already awake, monsters that move into the vortexes still raise the terror level.

Me and my girlfriend love Arkham Horror, but had definitely noticed the 'dilution' of the expansion threats. Our thought was that you could have a Games Master style figure, behind a screen, with each expansion mythos deck set out individually. He could have the top card of every expansion and base mythos deck out, and would choose which to enact every turn. This way you have someone who can choose to ramp up Dunwich, or to avoid using a rumour card when it will just detract from the game.

Of course, we often play with up to 8 players, so we have the 'spare' players to go around.