Walk said:

Yeah, it's a perfect introduction to the enchanted world of Guardians...

Trololo: the Lurker has *many* flaws. If you read carefully the rules, you'll find tons of ways to beat the game thanks to his (its) power! I personally won a couple of games thanks to this. What a said thing he is... if you look in the custom herald thread, you'll notice thousands of Heralds trying to fix the problems he has...

The only flaw I found about him yet is he+Call the Ancient One combo.

By the way, is there any easier-to-beat AO than Yig?

That depends on how long you spend preparing for the battle with said AO. But if you spend any time preparing at all...Nyarlathotep.

Hasturs pretty easy as long as the Terror Level is low.

We just defeated Shub-Niggurath! Thats was awesome!

Very close call. We struggled to win by sealing gates but we realized we won't do this while her track reached 10 and we had only 2 elder signs on the board and there was too much opened gates and too few available gate throphies, so game turned into crazy equipment and monster hunt.

There was six of us, last one didn't managed to get any monster trophies during the entire game so he selled his only gate thropy, bought cursed shpere and gave it to one of us to make use of him before he gets devoured.

We spent all our gate trophies to get all blessing we can. We had a sister mary who got blessed automatically when two others got it.

Most of us got devoured when sneak modifer dropped under our sneak rating, but here how it was in the end:

One remaining Trish(all others were devoured to this point) were facing Shub-Niggurath with 5 remaining successes to kill(one last doom token with 1 success already dealt by already devoured sister Mary). Her combat roll dealt only 4 successes, we were so frustrated, but then we realized she had 4 clue tokens. She immediately spent them to roll 4 additional dice, and only one of them was success. One last success to defeat Shub-Niggurath, like in old good movies.

I wonder what d happened to us if we used Black Goat of the Woods herald.

By the way, our game score was 3 points

One of my favorite moments in an Arkham game is when you suddenly realize that there's simply no way you're going to pull off a sealing win and decide to start preparing for final battle. There's a sort of energy around the table, partly because the Ancient One is most likely quite close to awakening and partly just because of the feeling of grim determination that seems to accompany it. Of course, whenever my group does this, we invariably end up getting stomped on by the AO anyway, but...

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

It has to do with the phase order and when you can get power and spend power...

Avi_dreader said:

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

Think about gaining power - spending power / the way you can spend power... something that has to do with gate sealing and no clues available...

Julia said:

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

Let's say you are about to return to Arkham with two clues and a Blood Pact

Upkeep: exhaust a Blood pact (for instance), spend let's say three Stamina and generate the three missing clue tokens

Movement: back to Arkham

Encounters: seal the gate with 3 power + 2 clues

No reckoning

Julia said:

Heh... Except I'd try to get 5 power and hold on to the 2 clues if possible ;'D

Julia said:

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

Yeah, and so? The benefit is by far greater than the detriment. Especially if you focus on doing this for the last couple of seals needed to win the game. With three seals down, you can enter three OWs with three different investigators and go for a sealing victory even without clues

Julia said:

I don't know from variants, but the Miskatonic expansion adds some really nasty Reckoning cards.

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

In the heralds thread of the fan creation section.

I also have two heralds that were designed to fix Lurker. I actually just posted one a few minutes ago ;'D You could extract the parts of them [not just mine, the variants in general] you like (particularly the power penalization bits, that nevertheless basically require gaining power) if you don't want to use the whole thing.

Testing Lurker at the Threshold tonight with the Innsmouth board and stuff.

So, the nemesis we got was Bokrug, which turned the game into living hell. Basic closing'n'sealing gates penalty were -2(-1 from one being of Ib and -1 from Lurker) and others were crushed with it(imagine closing the R'lyeh or the double R'lyeh'n'Abyss gate). I was Akachi so that one didn't hit me THAT hard, but it still was notable.

Others were afraid to cooperate with Lurker while I struggled in attempt to abuse him as Julia described. It seems game was against Lurker abusement, becaue I got lost in time and space twice before I got my hand on first gate trophy. And it was the only one I managed to seal with help of a Lurker. Later in the game I made another pact with him, bounding an Ally to turn Power into money.

Long stroy short, Bokrug awakened with only 2 elder signs on the board. I failed in abusing the Lurker.

We still managed to defeat him in final battle somehow(though I boosted his health with my Bound Ally pact, we removed 3 of 4 Beings from him before the battle) and I delivered the finishing blow, removing last doom token from him in his last turn before devouring all of us.

Win ratio is 4:0 atm. I think, we are very lucky.

By the way, FInn Edwards starts with the unpaid Bank Loan and has losing items immunity.

What happens when he rolls 1-3 on his Bank Loan and has no money to pay?

Finn then loses nothing but cannot gain another bank loan. Essentially there is no need to ever roll, he can just never gain another loan.I only roll when I intend to pay it off and get another, which is never.

Bokrug is very tough with Lurkers gate penalty, that was why you had trouble exploiting Lurker, that and the game saw you coming. The exploit is not hard to pull off most of the time and as Julia said if you time it right i.e. for the very end, then you minimise your risk.

Thought I'd post this here because this was where I had originally mentioned the plan: on Monday, I played a game of Arkham without using the traditional monster cup (or box lid, as the case may be). Instead, I arranged the monsters in rows of ten and used polyhedral dice to randomly select one every time I needed to draw. And...it worked. Rather better than I expected it to, in fact. Certainly, it takes longer to draw monsters, but it doesn't take as long to put monsters back in the cup (I generally mix the monsters whenever I do this). I don't know whether these two cancel each other out, but I will definitely be using this technique in the future. There's somethhing very refreshing about knowing that a process is fully randomized (it also means people can't blame the mixer for continually drawing Colours). There were only two real issues. One was that I would occasionally get momentarily confused about which dice to roll and what they meant, which was to be expected and will hopefully no longer be an issue once I get used to it. The other was monster surges, which take a long time, although I didn't really find this to be an issue. Of course, the fact that there was only one monster surge might have had something to do with that....

Just lost a game against Azathoth+Tattered King Herald combo. That was our first loss.

I also figured Tommy Muldoon + The Messenger Ally + The Chosen One cult encounter combo would be OP.

Also, had anyone won in final battle against Quachil Uttaus?

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

According to the Arkham Horror Statistics Report, 97% of investigators who fought Quacchil disintegrated into ash. So yeah, he is practically impossible to defeat in Final Combat.

I can see one way - abuse Lurker's aid to cast Call the Ancient One at maximum difficulty and awake him with 1 doom token.

What digs me most of all is that we lost even though I randomed an Elder Sign as my starting possession and we defeated that doom token removing monster and still lost.