When I first read about the alternate gates on the MH mythos cards I began to wonder about how far this would go toward addressing the dilution problem when using DH and/or IH with other expansions. Now that I have the game and have crunched the numbers I can say that overall things look very good.

For those who don't want to read the details, here's the summary:
if you want the likelihood of gates opening in Dunwich and/or Innsmouth to be no worse than what happens when you play with the base game and just DH and/or IH then:

1. Play with MH (doh!)
2. Add in DH and/or IH
3. Add no more than two of the remaining expansions.

That's it - there is no need to bother with any of the special anti dilution rules.

Now for the details.
The common complaint about dilution is that when you add on expansions to the game in addition to DH and/or IH, then the likelihood of gates appearing in Dunwich / Innsmouth locations start to plummet. In the case of Dunwich this means the chance of the Dunwich Horror waking up (not that great to begin with) goes down to practically nothing. Fore instance, if you add in both KH and a small expansion (say KiY) when using the DH, the chance of a gate opening in Dunwich goes from one gate in four down to roughly one gate in six!

So the question is, what does MH do for us? There are lots of combinations that could be considered, however for the purposes of number crunching, it all comes down to the following

• CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, and LatT mythos cards only open gates in Arkham. Also, they each have roughly the same number of mythos cards that open gates (18 cards for three of the expansions).
• DH and IH mythos can open gates outside Arkham
• MH mythos can open gates anywhere depending on what expansions are in play.

So, I'm going to focus on what happens when we start with DH and/or IH and add in expansions from the first group (CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, LatT).

DH only
When just the base game, 25% of the gates appear in a Dunwich location - so 25% is the "non diluted" likelihood. Before looking at adding in expansions, it's worth noting that adding just MH changes this number: now 29% of the gates will appear in Dunwich locations (yeah!)

DH plus one from (CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, LaTT)
Using MH: 26% of the gates appear in Dunwich locations (without MH: 21%).

DH plus two from (CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, LatT)
Using MH: 23% of the gates appear in Dunwich locations (without MH: 18%)
Note: this is below the non diluted %, but I'd consider it close enough to use (especially if one of the expansions added is KH).

IH only
When just with the base game, 33% of the gates appear in an Innsmouth location. Adding just MH changes this number: now 40% of the gates will appear in Innsmouth locations (ouch!)

IH plus one from (CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, LatT)
With MH: 35% of the gates appear in Innsmouth locations (without MH: 28%)

IH plus two from (CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, LatT)
WIth MH: 32% of the gates appear in Innsmouth locations (without MH: 24%)
Note: just a hair under the non diluted %, however if one of the expansions is KH, then I'd go with this.

DH and IH
With just the base game, 43% of the gates appear in locations outside of Arkham (19% in Dunwich, 24% in Innmsouth). Again, adding just MH changes things: now 55% of the gates appearing in locations outside of Arkham (23% in Dunwich, 32% in Innsmouth).

DH, IH and one from (CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, LatT)
With MH: 50% of the gates appear in locations outside Arkham (21% in Dunwich, 29% in Innsmouth) - without HM this drops to 38% (16% in Dunwich, 22% in Innsmouth)

DH, IH and two from (CotDP, KiY, KH, BGotW, LatT)
With MH: 45% of the gates appear outside Arkham (19% in Dunwich, 26% in Innsmouth) - without MH this drops to 34% (15% in Dunwich, 19% in Innsmouth)

All in all, I think FFG did a great job. You can start with DH and/or IH, add in one small box if you want, then add in KH as well and gates will appear in locations as if you were using just the original game with DH and/or IH and no other expansions. And, for those who think that Dunwich and/or Innsmouth don't get enough gates, well then just add MH and no other expansions and the towns will get more busy than they did before.

This is actually really interesting! :'D

Avi_dreader <---- Arkham Nerd.

Yes, awesome, thanks. I've been really curious about how the probabilities work out exactly (but far too lazy to count the mythos cards myself )

By the way, you should probably post this in the reference section.

Avi_dreader said:

Done - I tend to forget about that forum.

Glad to know someone else appreciates this. Next up is updating the encounter sheet I have posted on BGG. I'll likely need to rework that from the ground up due to MH's use of multiple expansions on a single card.

Played my first all-expansion game tonight. The following things were of note:

• An investigator took advantage of the ancient whispers and got an apparently highly sought-after item: the Book of the Dead (This caused her to be Harried). No problems with Exhibit dilution anymore.
• Act II came out, entirely via the new Act card mechanics. Good show. Dilution has been solved here.
• Three gates opened in Dunwich and eventually the Horror awoke.
• A rift eventually opened, but Kingsport was never in danger of dilution anyway.
• No gates opened in Innsmouth, which was a bummer. But this was only one game. Besides, an investigator having an encounter in Kingsport was forced to draw one Innsmouth Look card (guess which one it was? Amanda had just halted her personal story from failing by closing one R'lyeh token, only to go to Kingsport and somehow fail anyway!)

It is also worth mentioning that I cannot look at the Reckoning deck now without mentally saying "ricedwlit."

Tibs said:

Tibs said:

Then it seems my work here is done.

Thanks for this - one thing Ive noticed is that Gate bursts are way up in the MH+KH+BG combo I am trying out here. With this mythos deck - which is huge - I know I must plan for 7 or even 8 seals as there has been a burst every single game (3 so far). My last had THREE!

Whats with Lurker?

dj2.0 said:

What do you mean?

I mean the above references to the Reckoning deck, and also, how has MH impacted lurker? Does it have teeth now?

dj2.0 said:

It's because Ricedwilt's avatar is the pic on the backside of the Reckoning cards.

@ricedwlit: Can you provide the actual raw numbers of cards in MH? I can't get the math to add up with your %s. There are 43 mythos cards in MH, and 36 have the double-gate (some Innsmouth, some Dunwich, but I don't know the split; the other 7 are non-gates). Anyway, trying to back into your numbers, I can't figure out the split. If I get 29% DH gates when playing AH+DH+MH, that implies only 36% IH gates when playing AH+IH+MH (17 DH dual-gates, 19 IH dual-gates). To get to 40% IH gates, the split would have to be 11 DH, 25 IH. So something seems awry, but I'm not sure where.

I thought I remember reading that 20 were Innsmouth and 16 were Dunwich.

Tibs said:

If so, that's 37% and 28% if used alone with MH (and not 40% and 29%). Not a huge deal, but enough that I wondered what base #s the OP was working with.

At any rate, my motive for asking is that I play "all in". Setup already takes too long, and extra sorting in or out of cards, or scanning card effects to see if it's part of the "selected" expansion or two (you can't just look at which set it comes from), is not appealing. I'm modifying my "Balanced Dilution" variant to keep up, and wondered what the numbers were. I spaced out counting before mixing the new MH cards in! Grr. So I'm being lazy, but also I'm at work and can't count them.

BTW, first game with MH (played yesterday, by the book, no variants) was too diluted, as I'd feared. I like the dual-gate idea, but it's just not there for an "all in" game. I think it's again predicated on the idea that people will select a "focused" game, as the OP here suggests. I respect that POV, but I just dread the pre-sorting. Shuffling is a bad enough time sink with decks this large.

My off-the-cuff variant is: if you draw an AH gate or a non-gate, then if the last mythos card was an AH gate, draw and apply a new card. Gives an output of 49% AH, 18% DH, 24% IH, and 9% non-gates (a 4% and 6% improvement over vanilla MH).

By my calculations, using all expansions:

Dunwich gate: 14%
Innsmouth gate: 18%

The original percentages are 25% and 32%, which is very close to double. So playing with a "draw one, and draw again if it's not Dunwich or Innsmouth" rule would work very well. Act cards are no longer a concern.

dj2.0 said:

Well... Kind of... Some of the reckonings can nail you even when you don't have power. So, that's a good thing. It's still a guardian though ;')

Tibs said:

Yes, the Act card fix is great. But using what you describe above results in only 39% activity in Arkham itself (24% DH, 30% IH), which I find too low. Only so many ways to split the pie, but "in isolation" Arkham averages 70% of the action, and I think the game feels weird when most of the action moves away from Arkham itself. So I shoot for about half in Arkham, and then everything else. Matter of taste, of course.

My next biggest issue (probably a bigger one, really) is figuring out a better way to handle the scaling of the game when you play "all in" with low numbers of players/investigators. There's just too much space and too few actions per mythos phase. But that's a big threadjack, so I won't go there....

Well, the way I see it, 39% ain't too bad. You're using four towns, so it's fitting that you'd have to be forced to go out to all of them. Not to mention, you've got three towns with opening gates, so at least Arkham still scores higher than 33%.

In the end, it really was the Three Acts I was worried about. So it's nice that that never has to be an issue ever again.

dj2.0 said:

I would say it absolutely does now. Some of the new Reckoning cards are mean. Some of my favorites:

Each investigator with a Blood/Soul Pact is devoured. The new investigator chosen to replace him starts with a Blood/Soul pact and 3 Power tokens in addition to his other fixed possessions.

Each investigator with a Bound Ally must discard all of his money and items.

Each investigator with a Blood/Soul Pact gains 1 Power for each point of Stamina/Sanity he currently has. He then reduces his maximum Stamina/Sanity by 2.

A gate opens and a monster appears in each unstable location containing an investigator with 1 or more Dark Pacts (if there is not already a gate in that location).

waddball said:

::Laughter:: I don't think anyone's ever been prosecuted for a threadjack here, but go ahead and open it up as a new subject?

Musha Shukou said:

I haven't played with Lurker for a while, remind me again if this is legally exploitable provided you don't take the pacts until the turn you're going to use them (i.e. for sealing gates 4, 5, and 6)?

waddball said:

It's important to note that DH included mythos cards with gates that appear in Arkham (this was the first appearance of gate bursts).

The math in all it's gory details:
MH has 43 mythos cards split as follows:

• 21 dual gate, first gate is Innsmouth
• 15 dual gate, first gate is Dunwich
• 7 no gates at all.

For AH + MH + DH

• Arkham Gate: 66 (base) + 21 (MH: first gate in Innsmouth) + 11 (DH: Arkham gate bursts) = 98
• Dunwich Gate 0 (base) + 15 (MH: first gate in Dunwich) + 25 (DH) = 40
• Arkham gates = 98/138 = 71%
• Dunwich gates = 40/138 = 29%

For AH + MH + IH

• Arkham Gate: 66 (base) + 15 (MH: first gate in Dunwich) + 0 (IH has NO Arkham gates) = 81
• Innsmouth Gate: 0 (base) + 21 (MH: first gate in Innsmouth) + 33 (IH) = 54.
• Arkham Gates = 81/135 = 60%
• Innsmouth Gates = 54/135 = 40%

Avi_dreader said:

Yeah, the lurker still needs some modifications, but likely not as many. Given that the new reckonings are so bad, we really need to just make sure that more get drawn. I was thinking of just going with:

- draw and resolve a reckoning immediately after getting power from exhausting a pact and before spending any of the power.

- power cannot be spent to block sanity/stamina loss from reckonings

- draw and resolve two reckonings whenever a gate is blocked from opening.

Thats it - you can pool your power, you can spend when exhausted, etc. Problem is, you may not live to spend it!

ricedwlit said:

Are you saying draw two reckonings if you gain power in a turn, and again if you try to spend it? That might be so harsh it'd discourage using power at all.