So you've got five Clue Tokens, your sitting in the second part of the Plateau of Leng, one seal away from Victory, nervously biting your nails. You draw the Encounter and.... "You wander through the frozen wastes. No Encounter."

Welp. Guess that game is won.

Ever had that happen to you? Don't you wish Closing Gates could be a little more exciting? Well, heres this idea for your consideration.

Separate all the "Single Encounter" Other World cards at the beginning of the game. You know the ones - they have one huge Encounter for one Other World, and the Other text reads "Discard and Draw Again". For good measure, also grab the Dual Color encounters from Curse of the Dark Pharoah. Shuffle them up - if you have all the expansions like I do, you should have a good sized stack. Simply implement this rule:

If you are in the Second Area of an Other World with either 5 Clue Tokens or an Elder Sign, draw your encounter from the Epic Other Worlds deck instead.

This will make more use of these Single Encounter cards (because how often do you really get to have them? Not often!) and make those sealing Encounters a little more tense (and a bit more difficult!)

Now, what about "Another Dimension"? You may either choose not to apply this rule to Another Dimension, make all of its Epic Encounters "A Monster Appears", or seek out a few cards with a large "Other" text (I recommend finding ones where one of the two top Encounters reads "A Monster Appears") and continue as normal.

How does this variant sound to people?

This idea was actually born of space issues. The boxes I use to hold my Encounters come in two sizes, and the Other Worlds cards just barely didn't fit into one large box (by about 50 cards or so). At the same time, the box needed to hold half the Arkham Location Encounters (divided by street area) was a bit too big. But by separating out the Epic Other World Encounter cards, I could condense and simplify my space by quite a bit - quite important with the new Arkham Suitcase I'm working on. Plus, I think the idea is fairly cool too!

I'm all for making other world encounters more exciting. However, those long encounters aren't really all that difficult. Some of them are, I guess. But usually they're more interesting than challenging.

It would have been nice if the OW encounters in general had been really scary and vicious. I'm working on a variant where you draw and resolve three encounters in a single turn (not two encounters over two turns). Only one of the three encounters can be "safe." You have a -1 penalty to all checks and all Sanity and Stamina damage is increased by one. It's worked well so far, but I'm always interested hearing ideas for punching up the other worlds.

avec said:

That's actually perfectly fine by me. Anything beats a boring "Monster Appears" or "You lose 1 Stamina Just Because" or my second personal favorite encounter ever "You find 5$ laying here with no explanation whatsoever". (My favorite is the one at the bank of Arkham with the lady counting the pennies). Some of them are difficult, but virtually all of them require you to make choices, which should increase the tension and strategizing, and all of them are interesting.

Here's an idea I had, what if the Ancient One, sensing its window of opportunity waning is spurred into action? Instead of drawing an encounter card, the Ancient One locates and ambushes the investigator in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the seal. This would trigger a final battle sequence in the same format as the dual-coloured cards.

This would only trigger if by the second encounter you had the minimum number of clues required for the final seal and/or an elder sign of some description. It'd be kinda neat to know that your actions have gotten noticed and, more dramatically, under the skin of the Ancient One and with definitely give the final seal a sense of import.

Treguard said:

Master Fwiffo said:

I like both these ideas, but in both cases I have the same reservation. I think they could get repetitive. If you draw from a small encounters deck each time you are ready to seal the last seal, I wonder if before long you'd start seeing the same encounters over and over again. This is especially true if the last encounter makes you delayed or lost in time and space. One or two turns later, you'd be back ready to seal the gate, and you'd be drawing from a deck of only four or so cards. There's a good chance you'd get the same encounter again, which would be weird.

The problem is even more pronounced if you fight the Ancient One as your last encounter. In that case, it's pretty likely that you'll end up LITAS. Which means that you or someone else would have to fight him again. It might take three or four tries before you defeat him, especially if you're dealing with a nasty one like Quachil. And the more times you fail, the greater the chance that he'll wake up and you'll have to fight him for real.

I could be wrong. It would be interesting to playtest these variants and see what happens.

Avec, I had your very same impressions. It could be nice fightning the AO in a single combat more often, but I'd go with this variant (Eihort based): whenever attempting to close a gate, roll a die. If the number rolled is less than the number of ES on the board, then you have to fight the AO before attempting to close the gate. In case of fight, regardless of the result, you're allowed to spend an Elder Sign to seal the gate.

This would imply some strategy (keeping ES for when the odds will be against you) and variety. And possibly, you could fight different AOs, linking them to the different OWs (if you close a R'lyeh gate, you can fight Cthulhu, Carcosa goes with Hastur, and so on)

Julia said:

Julia, the implication there is that over the course of a game where you've managed to lay down 5 seals, you would have to fight nearly half the time.

How about rolling two dice, and if both are less than the number of seals, you have to fight. Or if this continues to be too frequent, you could sum the two dice or roll three dice.

The fighting-the-AO idea is interesting, but...I don't know. Generally, you're going to have to choose between fighting the AO and sealing to win the game, and if you have to fight the AO anyway, what's the point of choosing sealing? And certain AOs are essentially impossible to beat (or literally; what would happen against Azathoth?).

Walk: That's why I linked gates to AOs, regardless of the AO you're actually facing (but maybe it wasn't that clear in my previous post)

Tibs: good point on the two dice (I still don't feel the need for changing the things, but the two dice can be a good solution)

Julia: Sorry, I didn't indicate that I was responding to the initial idea.

Walk said:

Uops! I'm sorry too I didn't get it!