so, i'm awaiting the lurker expansion to be sent to me.. so i have a question about the lurker gates;

you who have the expansion and have had time to play with them alone, mixed or with old gates - which way is the preferable way? what's the best way to use the gates, is it to just replace the old ones, is that the most fun way?

the big negative side i can see is that my behavior of getting five clues and standing on woods to dare a gate to open with Mark Harrigan is a tad risky with the devouring gate..

I play with the mixed gates.

Have two stacks - regular and lurker gates. Whenever there is surge or elder sign opening - I place one from lurker stack to the top of regular stack.

I draw gates only from regular stack.

Definitely go with the new gates. Sure, they're harder, but they are more fun and interesting. And hey, you'll never be involuntarily sucked into R'lyeh again. On a purely mechanical note, you need something to balance out the advantage given by Relationships.

As a general rule, I play with mixed gates, unsing all the base game gates plus a random half of the Lurker gates. In this way I have to usual stuff, plus some unpredctable event sometimes. I don't like the Devouring gate too. It transforms tactics into a russian roulette, and it's not something I like at all, so generally I pray the Devouring gate is always in the 50% of the Lurker gates I don't use

Julia said:

What do you do with gate bursts? Open a Lurker gate?

This is an interesting idea you have.

I don't think I care for mixing the stacks. There is supposed to be a risk of the Ancient One awakening if a gate is supposed to open and there are no more gate tokens to use. Having a larger supply of gate tokens negates this risk. Using only the Lurker gates makes this risk a bit higher as it has less gates. I always only use the Lurker gates and have never been devoured by the devouring gate.

Tibs said:

Gate markers (I think the question was for me, in case it was not, sorry) are shuffled all together to form just one stack, and I keep on drawing them in order, so gate bursts and normal openings are treated the same. The main problem is that by looking the back of the markers you know if the next one is from the Lurker or not. I think I'll implement a gate cup, so you don't see what's next until it's the moment to put in on the board. But anyway, even if knowing which set the next gate belongs to, it's far too umpredictable to be abused. I think

Julia: Remember that you're supposed to place spent gate trophies (or the closed Endless gate) on the bottom of the pile, so you couldn't just put them back in the cup. Although I suppose you could just put them in a separate stack.

And, believe it or not, I actually like being devoured. Well, okay, it's not always great tactically, but one of my favorite elements in board games is random crazy events, and there's nothing crazier or more random than instant death.

good points here. we usually play with the house rule with un-flipped gate markers (making it harder but not russian roulette-harder), and we only play with visible gates when someone has the gate box or have become the captain of the white ship. we'll have to use visible gates to get the most from the lurker gates..

Musha Shukou said:

I tend to disagree. I think, declaring that running out of gates or monsters awakens the Ancient One was just an easy answer of FFG to someone asking, what happens, if one of these supplies emptied. Given the fact, that both events together occurred 3 times (which may have been intentional) in about 7000 games according to Tibs’s statistics, I cannot blame them. The only time we ever came even remotely close to this was a Tsathoggua game with Lurker gates only. Also, analogously, you would have to argue, that there is supposed to be a risk of the Ancient One awakening due to an empty monster cup, …

Wrzlprmft said:

Welllll... Then again, if they hadn't made that rule, you might've seen it happening more often (as running out the monster cup would have been a valid strategy).

Musha Shukou said:

Yes Musha, you're right. Adding some more gates lowers the risk of the AO to be awakened by running out of markers. But I don't think it's a major issue: generally speaking I hardly ever reach half of the markers stack in my games (games that last 11 to 13 Mythos, on average), so there is no real danger. But I suppose you can simply count the number of gates normally available in a game and count the trophies kept by the investigators and check

Walk said:

Yep, I know. But as you said, just put them elsewhere and when there is nothing else in the bag, start drawing from the new stack should work. Even if it's very rare that some trophies return in the game as gates.

Walk said:

This is completely unrelated so forgive me, but ohh man do you need to play Galaxy Truckers in that case! Never has watching your space ship split in two by a stray meteor been so much fun.

Tibs said:

Very interesting.

Avi_dreader said:

Cue evil chuckling.

Walk said:

I don't chuckle... I incinerate people. ::Glare::

Avi_dreader said:

Sorry, projection....