When you place a portal on the board, do you place it with the stats on display so that everyone knows which dimention it links too and what symbol/Difficulty it is, or stat side down so that you do not know anything about it until you enter it?

I always assumed the latter, as otherwise it seems odd that they have a Blank Side, but it dosent seem to be addressed in the rules.

The official rules say to lay them face up. But there is an variant from the desingners to lay portals face down. It would be a bit more of mystery if you choose to play this way and may be a bit harder to compete the game.

The base rules state to place it on the board stats-side up, but one of Richard Launius' house rules is to place the gate marker stats-side down until an investigator gets there. I think both have merit, stats-side up means you can come out of multiple gates if more than one gate leads to the same OW, plus it helps new players out a little knowing what they are getting themselves into, but stats-side down gives more tension and stops players picking a gate to explore purely because it will get them to the other end of the board.

As for why the markers have a common back, I guess it is because A) there is no more data that needs to be on them, and/or b) it is so you don't know what the next marker will be in the stack, and thus say something like this: "Ok, the next gate is to R'lyeh, so player C is gonna wait and jump through that one when it opens because they have the best Fight or Lore to offset the -2 modifier, while player A & B can jump through the two gates to the Dreamlands already open because they have lower Fight and Lore.

Me personally, I use a bag for my gate tokens, much like my monster "cup". It stops a fairly stagnant order forming when you draw from the top and spend to the bottom.

I thought the "Place face down variant" rules said that investigators don't get pulled through a gate less they want to (or it opens an them). You know, face down till someone explores it then you know what it is.

I think all two variants are good,but i prefer face down-it add more tension to the game

I don't play the face down variant for 2 reasons:

a) gates don't suck you in anymore.

b) White ship become useless. Cause you donno if you can actually come out any gates.

With face-down gates it becomes difficult to resolve some Mythos cards, such as "Another Time, Another Place" which makes all gates leading to Another Dimension or Another Time release an additional monster into their location.

But we've still played with that variant occasionally. With the gates still sucking you in whether you wanted it or not.

thorgrim said:

Huh? Even without using Dunwhich and Kingsport, there are 16 gate markers. Every time a gate marker is placed on the board, you add a Doom Token. There isn't a single GOO that has a Doom Track of 16. Azathoth is only 14. How are discarded doom tokens ever coming up for you?

-Frank

Use all four elder signs and that's 17 gates that can be placed without waking Azathoth. Throw in CotDP's parchments of the Elder Sign and a few successes in the South Church encounter that removes a doom token, and you could even run out of gate tokens on a shorter-track GOO.

Kingsport has an ally that removes one doom token and an extra elder sign, but also four more gate tokens, so it's probably not that much use to add it, on the other hand with all these elder signs and parchments you'll need some thing to remove seals - Act 2 of King in Yellow is probably the most reliable, but Black Goat adds some gate bursts without adding extra gate tokens, and the Good Work Undone rumour in the base game would work if it came up at the right time.

It's stunningly unlikely that you'd get to the bottom of the pile in normal play, but it can - just about - be done. Might make an interesting challenge game: lose by running out of gate markers.

Frank said:

Just no-one remembers to "shuffle" the gate markers between games, so it is always the same order. If we use a bag, they are always mixed up with no potential for an order.

thorgrim said:

Weird, shuffling the gate markers is the first thing I do after spreading the boards. Take out 2 piles of 10 gate markers and spread them, shuffle, repile. The repiling usually happens in some bizarre, arbitrary manner, like start at one end, take the markers that are "sticking" out of the group in a clockwise manner, then double-back counterclockwise, etc.

StarBurn said:

Also "The Light of Reason" and "For the Greater Good" become (even more) impossible to complete.

In our games, we always play with the gates face-down. We feel it adds more drama this way. As for some events being difficult to resolve this way, we play them by ear as they come up. "Another Time, Another Place" came up once, in fact, and we agreed to flip all the gates to find if we had any (which we had one for the Dreamlands), and then shuffled the others into the pile and replaced them facedown. We haven't had any other problems with Mythos cards so far, and nobody has even tried to become captain of the White Ship.

I always get the white ship, especialy when playing the dreamer.

We prefer to play with the gates face down for the extra drama. I can see the concerns with regards to Captain of the White Ship et al, but we just deal with those on an ad hoc basis (much like Halveric suggested). Oh, and we say that investigators can get drawn through a gate if one opens on them but we don't force them to travel through a gate if they enter a location with one already open on it.

Wait. Don't people who play face-down Gates turn them face-up once someone goes through? Wouldn't that make the White Ship slightly less useless?

Plus, it's not too hard to play the odds with the White Ship once a trophy or three have been collected. Player A has a R'lyeh trophy, player B has an Abyss trophy and a R'lyeh trophy, player C has a Celeano trophy, and there are 5 gates out, odds are (using the base game map only) one of those 5 are going to be a Dreamlands gate, and you can do as previously stated for Another Time, Another Place; that is to check all gates when you return, and those that don't match and that you don't exit from are reshuffled and replaced face-down.

even if people do reveal traveling the gate traveling trough it, it still limits the ship making it not worth the full cost of 2 gates (1 gate, 5 toughness/ 10 toughness).

Apart from the League games we've always played gates face-down, but they are turned over once you are drawn in, which happens normally when you've entered the location. The only item we regularly have that feels an effect is the Gate Box, as no one has every tried to get the White Ship yet.