Wotcha

Just a quickun here, and im certain this has cropped up before, but i plan to get one of the big box expansions in a month or so and was just wondering which one to get.

My group could loosely be termed as 'gaming masochists' and not in the fact that we loke to sit in uncomfy chairs or beat each other with sticks during a game (though it has happened). We prefer a difficult game (ala BSG) and i have heard that Iinnsmouth is the puppy for this.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

B

Innsmouth has certainly made my games much harder. Plus Dunwich Horror is currently out of print..

You could always makes your games more difficult via house rules - and those are free of charge!

For example, have 2 monsters appear every time a gate opens. Going unconscious/insane results in 1 permanent stat loss etc etc etc

Yeah, of the big box expansions I'd say difficulty boost goes:

Innsmouth

Dunwhich

Kingsport

To me at least, Innsmouth is definitely the hardest expansion.

Sounds like you want Innsmouth. A tough board, tough AOs and a bunch of new monsters: just don't play Patrice!

Also do not disregard all the free material in the Fan Creations section of this forum or the files section of www.boardgamegeek.com Sure, you'll have to use your judgement as to what to use, but there's plenty there to keep you busy for some time.

In case you need something *tough* you could join Avi's custom league. Here you can find rules and comments to the scenarios, and here you have the Scenarios in Eon format. The League is definitely for advanced players, and even if having all expansions are required to play, maybe you can search for some good ideas to customize your games. Or you'll find a good excuse for buying the other expansions and playing it in the hardest way possible :-)

But again, as other said, Innsmouth is interesting to play ::nodding::

Or you could set your board on fire and try playing that way.

That does make the game extremely difficult. Unfortunately, it gets expensive quickly. Beating the game in the 2-3 minutes it takes the board to burn is very difficult, not even considering the severe pain and burns that come with attempting it. A variant to make it slightly easier would be to allow players one half second spray from a fire extinguisher with every seal, to keep the flames somewhat under control. For extra challenge, seed the board with mouse traps before lighting it on fire.

MustardTheTroops said:

This variant sounds awesome! I can't wait to try it!

If you really want a challenge you need to wire a car battery under table and set up concealed electrodes under random locations, using metal tokens for PC markers.

More seriously, yeah Innsmouth and yes be careful of Patrice, she's a kitten with a whip ready to make any AO her .......

valvorik said:

All these great new variants are coming out today!

Also, Patrice doesn't do *soooo* well against Yibb or Atlach... Still pretty well though...

yeah

Innsmouth is the toughest

also don't over look the difficulty level cards from the small box expansion, Black Goat. the most difficult one is the Ultimate Cosmic Evil.

I don't know anyone who takes the difficulty cards seriously.

But, that said, it doesn't take much effort to just look up that card and use its simple rules. So you don't really need the Black Goat expansion for that.

the difficulty cards are silly. if you really want the game harder there's house rules and fan custom made heralds and similar.. the difficulty cards don't really bring much to the table.

Yep. It seems like the author of these cards played Doom *a lot* before designing them

I think people would care more about the cards if people cared more about scoring the games. Does anyone even know the highest score that a team has gotten in Arkham Horror? I don't.

avec said:

Perfect score in scenario one of the AH league by a Japanese 8 investigator team is the highest I'm aware of ;') Of course, it was only the highest possible score when you only use base game components.

Taurmindo said:

Just a small piece of cardboard

I do actually use them and the score adjustments, but I agree you could use house rules.

However I paid for them, I like official components - so they hit the table.