Hi all,

I recently bought the Core Set, and played a few matches with a friend of mine. They went......OK I suppose. There seemed to be some issues with characters with terror icons just wiping out everyone, so it led to a lot of unchallenged stories. The CCG'er in me tells me that you probably need some expansions to get a true feel for the game, is that about right?

If so, what packs would you suggest for two people to use? We would probably split up the factions and make decks out of the same card pools for now.

Thanks for any input!

badash56 said:

It should work pretty well with just the core set. What factions were each of you playing? Also, were you aware that characters with the Terror icon as well as characters with Willpower cannot go insane? If you missed that then you'd probably see a lot more insanity than usual. In any event, an insane character isn't "wiped out", they're merely out of the action for a while.

If you added anything to the Core set, I would (and did - since I just started recently) get the Secrets of Arkham set first. After that, the packs from the Yuggoth Contract cycle seem to be generally well regarded. But you should be able to play just fine with only the Core set so first I want to see if we can figure out if something was being overlooked or maybe you just had a really bad faction mix or bad draw or whatever.

dboeren said:

Thanks for the reply. We were aware about the insanity rules (terror icons and willpower do not go insane). The trouble we were having was when one side had characters out with a few terror icons. If the other side didn't get anything to go against it, it seemed almost pointless to even commit to a story. Here are the deck match ups we used:

• Cthulhu/Hastur vs Agents/Miskatonic
• Shub/Yog vs Hastur/Synd.
• Hastur/Agents vs Shub/Miskatonic

The best matchup was the last one (Hastur/Agent vs Shub/Misk). One part that felt odd to me, was that in not one game did we ever make it to the end of a story with each side still having characters committed. We either went insane or died before the last two icon struggles, and then it was unchallenged. Does that sound right?

Oddness aside, we both liked the game. It just felt like during the icon struggles after the terror and icon phase, there wasn't much left to do.

Was it just a bad couple draws?

badash56 said:

Also, normally, you'd compare your characters to your opponent's and only commit characters if you are sure to win the story, given the information available to you. There's no point to commit characters if you know you're going to lose the story!

Well, when you buy some asylum packs and you build a non-terror deck (agency/misk/synd/st) you will often use characters with willpower to deal with terror struggles or maybe even characters that benefit from going insane (like mad genius or student archaeologist, both from core set).

But most importantly I think you must not be afraid to commit to a story and pay the price to let one of your characters go insane but be rewarded with wining the combat struggle and dealing out a wound and/or be rewarded with succes tokens for investigation and skill struggles. Your insane character stays around but takes his time to recover. The character you wound when winning a combat struggle most often has to leave play.

There are also enough cards in the core set to prevent your character from going insane or let them get restored quickly. The most important are:

• Binding - remove terror icons from a character
• dr carson treatment - restore up to 2 characters
• Alhazred Lamp, character gains terror icon
• Celano fragments, uncommited character with a terror icon
• Paul Lemond, pay 1 and choose an opponents character with terror icons
• Peeler in combination with Alhazered Lamp for example = Two characters protected
• Professor Albert Wilmarth (bit expensive)
• Tcho-Tcho talisman - give character terror icons
• Inside information - remove terror struggle
• Arkham Asylum - restore charaters

I recall when I first got the game (through the LCG Core Set) and played, I thought Terror was the big issue with the game. It took several games (and some expansions) to get the feel of it and understand that terror is not the most dominant aspect of the game, but rather it is balanced. Consider how powerful investigation is. And Arcane. And Combat. And Skill....

I think just more games under your belt will change your thoughts. And expansions, of course!