At least, the first instance of it so far. By "That Game," I mean the one where Everything Goes Horribly Wrong.

We played our first game with the Kingsport board last weekend (liking it so far) and managed to be slaughtered. By Azathoth . Without even filling half the track. We had 1 seal and doom track...7 or maybe 8, I think, when we went down.

We've lost a few games before, but it's always been really close. This time, we lost by too many gates opening. O_O The main contributer was the "The Great Ritual" rumor card, which made multiple gates open on a turn after we completely and utterly failed in our attempt to stop it (due, admittedly, to a catastrophic error on one of my buddies' parts...he decided to try to take down some monsters too, before he stopped the rumor, when they were evasive monsters and I assume he could've let them be...and then he managed to fail a horror check when he had like 8 or 10 dice. O_O Since he was our only investigator with spells and all he had was spells, we ended up completely unable to pass the rumor in the time we had left.)

But really, a lot of stuff just went terribly wrong. Except for the two evasives, we basically only drew strong monsters. We managed to start with no combat bonus items of any kind. I screwed up and set Luke's speed slider really low since he started in an Other World, and was forced to move in tiny steps for several turns before I could get it back up to a reasonable speed. We hit several of the low-frequency gates in the same game. We were forced to spend clue tokens in an OW encounter or we'd lose them anyway, so we couldn't seal another gate.

Basically, every single encounter or mythos card we drew was Very Very Bad.

Yes, we had the rifts to manage too, and yes, we didn't really know how to do that properly yet so I'm sure we maybe dedicated more time to them than we needed to...but in this game, it wouldn't have mattered. O_O AH was out to humble us.

I'm quite glad we finally had That Game. I knew it had to be coming soon. I think next time before we start we're going to very nicely ask Arkham Horror if it can refrain from kicking our butts quite as massively. :-P

Edit: I would be remiss in not mentioning that we also were using a Guardian (Hypnos) and no Herald!

Sdrolion said:

That won't work... But human sacrifice might... Or so I've heard ;')

Sdrolion said:

Great story! Well...I mean...great ARKHAM story! Not really so great for your Investigators...or the world...all depends on your point-of-view I guess.

More importantly, it was a KINGSPORT game. Monster-choked streets, made even worse by your "unlucky" Cup draws, and a failed Great Ritual focused on the original 11 unstable locations. Nasty. Been there myself. Love Kingsport games. Hoping you will too.

jgt7771 said:

Agh! Jgt! What happened to your face?!

jgt7771 said:

I think my favorite moment was when it was like 5:30 and we all simultaneously realized, quite clearly, that we were going to easily be done by dinnertime. O_O (We normally head to dinner at 6:00.) We just all sat there in stunned disbelief at how very badly things had gone to that point. (The stunned disbelief continued for the rest of the night as we kept bringing the game up. O_O)

Avi_dreader said:

Obviously I was bitten by the Kingsport Werewolf.

(Of course that's not a Warg. Don't be silly.)

Sdrolion said:

I love those dinners:

“How did...”
“I don't know.”
“But...we...”
“I know.”
“I think it's still laughing at us...”
“Eat your food.”

I had one of those recently after Y'Golonac stacked the top of the Unique deck with Tomes. We all decided to play a fast Yig game for the rest of the night. (Good old Yig...can always be counted on for a whizzer of a game.)

Today I showed a new player King in Yellow. The terror level zipped to 8 and Hastur destroyed us. Not before enacting a 10-round "No One Can Help You Now."

Then we played a Black Goat game. Next thing we knew, too many gates were open and Shub ate us.

Best part is that I told him that the next expansions "only get worse."

Just had one of those games myself. Amanda Manages to get blessed in the first round and with Marry on the case as well, somehow Y'golonoc managed to turn those blessings against us as the two of them ran into a total of 5 encounters in the next 4 turns that they roll to find a tome, the blessings make it almost impossible for them not to and by that time it's not possible for enough gates to open for us to get a sealing victory.

Just chalk it up as a really really subtle victory lol. So subtle that the G.O.O didn't even realise someone was trying to take it on.

We played another Kingsport game this weekend and managed to pull out a victory. Less horrible card draws this time (though some terrible monster draws, especially as we were playing against Shub).

We did a much better job managing rifts...not sure if this is really the right tactic to use for them yet, but we actually basically just let them build until one of the tracks was at 3, and then sent 2 of the 4 investigators over to wipe that track out really fast. Then they could come on back to Arkham for a while. We kept that up and the only time a rift opened was when we got the Mythos card that makes it happen (and even then we closed it in two turns).

Might have just been us getting lucky, but that worked a lot better than one guy trying to keep it under control.

Veet said:

Ow. I haven't had the guts to try the headless reader-eater yet.

Sdrolion said:

Sometimes he's not that bad, if you do all your shopping in maybe one or two trips and rely on magic for your magical weapons, and get your clues from the Science Building. Of course. It's always still possible that his hand stacked the deck and you'll draw triple tomes, heh heh heh.

Avi_dreader said:

Love that science building. I rarely go anywhere else with my trophies. Especially late game: the science building is pretty vital once a lot of the clues are off the board.

Sdrolion said:

You love Tsathoggua, don't you ?

Dam said:

Don't we all ;'D

He's in Dunwich, so I don't have him yet.

Still hoping for that expansion to come back soon.

Shutting down Science Building for the entire game always cramps my style in Tsat games. Luckily it has one of the longest doom track and otherwise very little game effect.