I know it says 2-5 players, but I may have a group of 8! That's one investigator per player if I'm correct. Does the game still work or is 5 TOTAL players still pushing it. There would be 8 investigators and me, the keeper. Any experience with this out there? Let me down easy if you have to. haha. Thanks!

GalaxyUC said:

I have experience of managing oversized investigator group.

I'll tell you what:

The game with more than 4 investigators is possible, BUT you'll need to house rule it hard if you wan't it to be balanced and worthy.

Some tips, that helped me:

1) Elimination rule. Dead investigator is not replaced with the new one.

2) Limit inventory. It's innaceptable for someone to grab all the stuff lying around leaving others with nothing. This rule will force players to communicate and play more team-oriented.

Im using next rule for this: Maximum inventory size is 4(you can't have more than 4 items at once). If you have more than 3 items, you can't use Run action.

Spells, clues and allies does not count as items, starting items still count. In the investigator trading step each investigator may drop 1 of his items if he wants.

3) Adjust the board. If you're playing one of the small scenarios(take 1 and 2 for example), you'll need to add unused board piece to the existing board and fill it with random unused exploration/lock/obstacle cards to expand investigators investigating time. Remember, don't randomly add board piece, try to make it look natural(for example, in second sceanrio I added the entrance of the monastery with some outside buliding for investigators to explore, they also started outside of the monastery).

4) Feel free to experiment with the Keeper Action deck and board tokens like Altar if you need them for those cards. I doub't your gaming group will enjoy an empty mansion without any physical challenge. Feel free to put some maniac'n'zombies there and there.

5) Don't use variant which makes you prevent placing time token on the event deck on a roll of 1 or 2. Try placing one additional time token on this deck on a roll of 9 or 10 instead.

6) Since there is a lot of investigators, you'll need expanded Mythos and Trauma hand size. Do as you want.

7) Threat gain. 8 is too much. Try something between 4 and 6.

I like those house rules you came up with. You DEFINITELY have to lower the threat gain if you're going to try this! I tried an 8-player game once using scenario 2, and in the end none of my players were very happy as before long they were just completely overrun with Shoggoths, Cultists & Hounds. (It didn't help that went the complete wrong direction to get the first clue, of course...)

Instead of lowering threat gain you may limit amount of monsters can spawned per turn or/and limit maximum amount of monsters on the board per game.

Like maximum 9 points worth of monsters, where humanoids are worth 1 point, beasts are worth 2 points and elrdich are worth 3 points.