Dam said:

Yeah, we hate them. We never want to play against them. If we play random ancient one, we pull those 2 (or 1 currently, don't have Yibb yet) out of the pile before choosing randomly.

Lol, worst kind of cherry-pickers, "boohoo, that GOO is too tough, let's not play against it" .

This quote from BGG, originally referring to Middle-Earth Quest works well here (was in reference to another pick-your-hero crew, who only uses one of the heroes in the game, because they think she is the best one):

"Maybe you could point out to these egomaniacs that their reputation would be all the more spectacular if they could show that they can win with any hero."

Just change "any hero" to "any investigator(s) against any GOO".

There is no such thing as too strong an ancient one unless it's a clue-eater. Anything else can be slaughtered easily with enough clues and the Fight skill. 3 bonus dice each clue is the ultimate sight my group is always looking forward to see.

I'm trying to figure out if either one of you is kidding, just to goad the other one's obvious opinion. If only we could harness a quantifiable energy from the eternal back-and-forth between Dam and Knuckles Eki, we could perfect a perpetual reactor and solve a lot of global problems.

While I might not appreciate how "Clue-Shotgunners" might play the game, changing the manual at this point is just bullying by a group of grognards who have dissected Arkham to bits, and now miss the challenge they once had. If this "Clues = Seals" rule recovers that for you, then go for it. But your loss of difficulty does not equal mine, or many others. By the same token, Knuckles Eki's alleged "abuse" of the rules does not mirror anything that happens in my games, or many others. The outlying data does not dictate where the curve lies. And Kevin's rule, though nifty, has no business being in my rulebook.

I see the stat submission page has notes for Kevin's clue-seal final combat rule and an anti-clue-shotgun rule. I always thought they were the same thing. What is the latter?

If you're looking at the HTML results, I added the comment three separate times (because I was having difficulties) without knowing that comments show up as footnotes. I could not figure out how to them.

But yes, they are the same thing.

If you have not yet seen this result thread, it has frozen headers so you can scroll down and still see the categories.

So you DID rally this way of doing stats, Tibs ! I'm glad I still don't understand why there are so many games on the first page if these are the most recent games ?

Hypnos helped Roland sooooo much killing Nyarla last time in our game. Or... was it the flame thrower he was holding ? I don't know. But hey : seeing 26 dice (yep, you read well) thrown at the same time by an invest, to launch burning flames to the not-to-be-named's awful face, man, it gives you incredible shivers. 26 dice, man. The doom tokens went like "pop ! pop ! pop !" all at once.

Oh, and : hi all

You'd actually end up getting a lot more attack dice by just saving the clues to defend against Nyarla's attack.

Yes, spending clue tokens to get attack dice against Nyarlathotep is simply silly. Unless you naturally have none (say a max fight score of 3 and no weapons). Even if you naturally have 1 dice, you should never spend a clue token to increase it.

Oh and regarding the clue-seals rule. I'm not convinced by any argument that says the game is fine as written and shouldn't be changed. If a cooperative game has a highly exploitative loophole that makes it easy, that's a flaw in the game design. And there is no doubt that pretty much all the base-game GOOs (except Azathoth, obviously, and mabye Cthulhu) are trivially easy to beat by gearing up for final combat. Nyarlathotep is a particularly silly joke. Epic Battle cards, alas, do not change this at all.

Some of the expansion GOOs are different. The clue-eaters are particularly nasty.

Sorry if I disagree and think it is not silly to remove 8 doom tokens in ONE dice throw with ONE invest we won, by the way with no death

I'm sure you did, but if you do the maths, you'll see you couldn't possibly have done worse by saving them to defend.

Granted, it would have taken longer: if your goal was to finish quickly, I can sort of see the reason. But from a strategic point of view, it was definitely not a good move.

YellowPebble said:

On the other hand, if Hem was using Epic Combat, then it it's not necessarily a cut-and-dried decision, at least with respect to one specific Sinister Plot card.... mwa ha ha...

Tibs said:

On the third tentacle, 26 dice almost guarantees seal/clue-variant was not in effect.

Yeah, but I wasn't going to dredge that up again. I was referring to the plot card where everyone drops down to one clue.

Tibs said:

YellowPebble said:

Yes... (but who said I DID think strategy was something clever and plausible for simple humain beings in a crazy universe with gigantic and horrible gods ?)

Dam said:

and yes... (never liked that last one)

Tibs said:

...and yes ! Wow, Tibs, amazing you thought about that one, you are precisely right it did come, right after the move I mentionned. This only one card, though (it had no time to attack after that

Cheers everyone. (PS edit : jhaelen, no luck eh ? better gather 13 clues like me ahah me crazy duck)

YellowPebble said:

Yog-Sothoh?

GrooveChamp said:

*Shudder*

Hmm, looks like I just made a duplicate game report. Please delete!

It's been my third attempt at beating the Summer League 2008 Scenario No. 9 vs. Cthulhu.

No luck thus far - that one's tough

Yog-Sothoth is probably the third-hardest after Azathoth and Cthulhu, but scarcely difficult, at least not if you gear up for fighting him (as opposed to actually playing to seal). You just need to spend your whole time closing gates (preferably ones with easy modifiers, thanks to his mildly-nasty in-play ability), and make sure you have a good physical weapon.

Nyarlahotep, incidentally, is just stupidly weak. (He does have a couple of nasty sinister plot cards (Join Me! is also quite bad if you have only two investigators), but I don't have Kingsport, so I wasn't accounting for that.)

On the other hand, good luck beating Tsathogua (I'm sure I'm not spelling that quite right, but you know the one I mean) no matter how you play. In fact, very few of the AOs printed after the base game are at all easy. Glaaki, mabye, if the terror track has behaved itself. Or Bokrug, if you deliberately play to beat him in combat (which is itself a reasonable challenge).

It gets very difficult to beat Yog in a large game. More players, same amount of gate trophies.

Here's something I always wondered though. You have all these people saying final combat is too easy with gearing up and all these dozens of rules for tweaking it, but simply banning clues from being used in final combat is so much simpler and balancing. That right there would force people to try and seal up to the very end as well as giving much needed teeth to the skill check ancient ones. Why does only Tsath have this feature (especially considering he doesn't NEED it)?

GrooveChamp said:

Yibb-Tstll also makes you toss your cookies at the start of final combat.

And I get the impression that people don't want to struggle with the close/seal win for too long, when it looks doubtful, they just prefer a mass dice rolling finale.

Many of the AOs in the base game would be too easy even if you couldn't spend clues. Nyarlathotep certainly would. Though he'd be a lot nastier if he ate all your clues before combat!

It is odd that Tsathaoggua has the clue-eating ability when he'd be pretty devastating even without it, while other, much weaker AOs, don't.

Yes, I will say that I generally play with two investigators, so I'm probably underestimating Yog-Sothoth with a large group.