Played this with 3 friends yesterday. The cumulative +1 and +1 on closing gates plus moving gate fun, plus a rumour, plus gates opening on 2 characters in first two turns - we lost due to hitting gate limit and only 2 of us having gates (so not being devoured immediately) and it going downhill from there.

Not a combo I would recommend. Don't know if others have found it easier.

Rob

This is one of the combos used in Tibs' introductory scenarios.

http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/69008/introductory-and-expansion-scenarios

See chapter 8.

Minor spoilers for those who would read the novel, but the Lurker at the Threshold is Yog-Sothoth. It's no coincidence that he would be worst when played with Yog.

Here's a different type of spoiler: the expansion and the novel have little to do with one another.

I just played this combo. My group is in the middle of a long stretch of using the Lurker as a herald, and we had a 1 in 6 chance of drawing Yog this time.

We managed to get 3 seals down, and we had 3 people in other worlds ready to come out when the final doom token was added.

Final battle went better than expected, but we still lost while Yog had 5 doom tokens still on his sheet.

It is easy, you just have to be a bit smarter about using the Lurker's power (and perhaps taking a couple bound allies to boost your capacity for gate checks). It's also good to carry a few extra clue tokens just for the purpose of passing gate closing checks. Given all that, it's still fairly (and by fairly, I mean *very*) easy to get a win against this combo due to the exploitability of the Lurker herald... "Herald." Do you understand why Lurker is essentially a guardian?

Avi_dreader said:

That's fine until the Debt Comes Due at a bad time, like I had happen last night. :-p

We thought we were doing alright, time-wise, but Debt Comes Due was drawn one turn, and an "add two doom tokens" mythos was drawn the next, advancing the track much further than we could handle. It was 5 doom tokens in 2 turns. :-/

jack21222 said:

Riiiight, but this to me indicates that you are not exploiting the herald properly, because you should *never* have any power when a reckoning is drawn. You should always gain it at the beginning of a turn and spend it by the end of a turn. That way reckonings can barely penalize you.

To build on Avi's response, that exploit alone is why most of the house rules suggested for the Lurker include something along the lines of "You can't spend power on the turn you gain it".

Avi_dreader said:

You're probably right. The player was going to be rolling 2 dice (needing two successes) trying to close a gate, and would have 3 extra power/clue tokens beyond what it takes to seal to spend on extra dice. He was hoping to get at least one success on the roll, and spend the extra power to hopefully gain another. He rolled 0 successes out of the two, so he decided to hold on until next turn, where he hoped to roll at least one success.

None of us have read the reckoning cards in advance (part of the fun of playing the lurker herald, imo), so we didn't know exactly how bad things could get. :-p