Though I’ve become very good at the basic set, the group I occasionally play with still gets easily bogged down with rules and recordkeeping. One simple change we have made that speeds things up is keeping a steady, unchanging party turn order. We make one person the full time party leader / scapegoat / hero / first player. Keeping the same order throughout really helps newer people focus on other aspects of the game.

We also do Arkham encounters and Other World encounters at the same time. We do them in party order. We go around the investigators in order. If they are in an Arkham location they get an Arkham encounter, if in the streets, no encounter and if in another world, an otherworld encounter.

So far I have found no real problem with the way they work out in games. I’m sure there may be some specific circumstances where they may mess things up, but we have not encountered it.

Yes, there are definitely consequences. Notably when one character moves first when it would be better if another moved first and got a monster out of the first moving person's path. Or for trading items.

If it's working out better, that's good. You may even consider doing the movement phase in whatever order you like, to maximize strategies involving trading items and such. Though there are some Mythos effects that affect only the 1st player (such as the curse one), it can get annoying when they ALL happen to that player. Or when that player always has the last say in player conflicts.

I've played it with Arkham and OW encounters in player order but didn't like it. What do you do when your Arkham encounter opens a gate and you're sucked through?

Ya do teh Arkham encounter... because you were in Arkham.. then you get an OW encounter.. because you would by the rules.

Ya Tibs... thats why we call the designated first character the hero / scapegoat... He gets to make the decisions, but all the odd stuff happnes to him as well.

Negalith said:

We have melded the entire turn for several months now and only occassionally run into a problem. We think its saved nearly an hour per game.

Unchanging turn order we never tried. Sometimes its better if one player goes before another player, but even with changing turn order, it seems like its always the wrong one up anyway. People still get confused with the changing turn order. It seems like its a long time between turns after you pass the First Player token. We had a player last week who ALWAYS wanted to read another Mythos phase when she was pass the First Player token was passed to her, even though one had just been read.

Unfortuneately the game has lots of fidgety rules. So what you are doing probably won't have an effect in the long run and well, that's Lovecraftian anyway. Nothing we do will really have an effect in the longrun.

Any other noobile adjustments?

As for house rules -- not necessarily noob rules, either.

We always play two players, one investigator each. With this set-up, the players can easily become overwhelmed.

We have a few house rules that move the game along much better. When I have mentioned these here in the past, a few other players have been very critical, saying we make the game too "easy." Without these rules, the thing moves as slowly as a glacier, and we start to get overwhelmed. It's all about fun, and it's little fun to be totally snowed by almost insuperable odds . . . . .

We have several rules that speed the game up. For instance, when we move across a street with a monster, we can fight the monster, resolve the issue, and then go on to use the remaining movement points we happen to have.

When we complete the second side of an Outer World, we move immediately back to the source square to complete the OW action. This saves one turn. It still takes several turns to do the OW loop, but just one fewer.

With two players, we reach a point where we are at or near the gate limit -- say, about six open gates. Then by mutual agreement we cease obeying the gate instruction on the lower left of the mythos card until we have whittled the open gates down to about three. Then we resume. This makes sense because sometimes it is almost impossible to close gates fast enough to continue in the game -- esp. if your cards tend to break against you.

When using the rift feature, we play until two rifts have opened, then just stop on rifts for the remainder of the game. Often we never reach this point -- possibly having opened just one rift -- or none -- as play happense to go.

I could go on, but this gives some idea.

The game has a way of bogging down, or overwhelming two players -- esp. when they are only playing one investigator each.

We house rule that a random investigator gets the

Healing Stone,

don't have a Mythos card until the 3rd turn (allows use to trade items and explore Arkham), and the

cost so Seal Gates is only 3 Clue Tokens and

the AO only awakens if it's doom track fills up

(any investigator may discard a Gate Trophy or 5 tuffness of Monter trophies while at the Church to remove a Doom Token)

and each investigator gets two movement and AH encounters a turn...

etc, etc...

We not longer call it Arkham Horror but

Hello Kitty Island Adventure...

I do NONE OF THESE!!!...if your going to do anything make it harder

A few house rules my group does.

1) We all do our upkeeps at the same time instead of waiting for one person to do something, etc. It helps speed things along.

2) If you choose to heal 1 piece of stamina or sanity at the Hospital or Asylum, you get an encounter too.

Those are the only house rules we really use that modify the game. One thing we do that doesn't modify the game: When we are in final combat, we put all the items, clue, etc. that are discarded to defeat the GOO in a pile on the GOO's sheet to represent everything that was spent. If an investigator dies their piece and all possessions go into the pile.

We are using two house rules:

1) The first mythos card has to open a gate. No Double-Doom, no Act. no Strange Sightings or Intermission. There has to be a gate open at the start of the first turn.

2) On a monster surge, we first draw the required number of monsters, then divide them among the gate. This goes back to me misreading the rules on the first few games and somehow it stuck with us. I am currently considering changing this as it makes Dunwich to passive; you can always put those monsters on Dunwich gates that don't move into Vortices.

Morgaln said:

Err, how? All gates in Dunwich lead to a vortex within 3 movement.

thorgrim said:

Not for yellow, blue, or green monsters. I believe Morgaln draws all his required monsters into a pile, then consciously chooses which monster goes to which gate. (Which is wrong, but Morgaln knows this, hence the "stuck with us" clause.) When placing monsters this way, it is far too easy to load up Dunwich with monsters that will never reach a vortex no matter how many Mythos cards you draw. (Dark Druid might help.)

jgt7771 said:

Thanks jgt7771, that's exactly what I meant.

Negalith said:

After doing some thinking, this change can probably make the game much easier. In fact, this change is almost good enought enough to be an investigator special skill.

One of the things the movement order does is allow earlier moving characters to help or clear the way of monsters for others. If we always know who the first player is, and that player has the capability of killing monsters, then this can potentially result is much easier movement for the rest of the team.

Point Man (or person): This investigator may always choose to Move first. In fact, it is a skill we made up when we first started playing the game and we thought the game was too tough. (Of course, this will be even more confusing that your house rule, since this player will often be moving out of order.)

So part of it depends on how you choose your permanent first player and what type investigator s/he is playing or the type s/he usually plays (if you have choices).