A lot of times players question how I play with "all expansions" if I don't use any of the boards, yet I still consider myself to "use" an expansion if I take some or a large majority of portions from it. Most of the time however, I end up playing recently with the main game, all mini box expansions and at least 1 other board expansion.

Recently this past weekend we played with that setup and the Dunwich board, as well as personal stories and epic battle cards. Ended up getting 3 consecutive victories with 4 investigators each round, 2 combats and 1 seals. All investigators were random as well as the AO. Was a nice evening; got to see Sister Mary become our fighter which I haven't seen in quite sometime. Bob got 5 different blessings in one round, but his "Greed" condition cost him 4 of them...I really don't know why he kept finding random bills and precious gems lying around.

VinceT said:

On a side note, this is why I am looking forward to the deck boxes coming out in a week or two.

avec said:

If you're playing with the Dunwich board, but not the Innsmouth board, use this build:

The Story Continues
Old Debts Come Due
24 randomly selected Dunwich location cards
72 randomly selected Arkham location cards
5 randomly selected other cards (cards that don't have gates on them)

As I'm sure you've observed, the locations are partitioned into 6 categories based on what we might call activity level (low/med/high; associated with how frequently gates appear in an unmolested mythos deck) and whether they're in Arkham or on an expansion board. Each category has its own associated probability, and so locations in that category see gates with that level of frequency. In that sense, the set of mythos cards is already fairly well balanced. In fact, the numbers are so nice I believe that if the Arkham investigators got hold of this information, they'd probably invent intelligent design decades ahead of time what with their 1920s predilection toward pseudoscience.

With this information (and as sadomasochistic gods of this cardboard world), if we want Dunwich and Innsmouth to see more activity, we could just pitch out certain subsets of Mythos cards that open gates at locations in Arkham instead of going random with it. For each of the Unvisited Isle, The Witch House, Independence Square, and the Woods, pitch out 5 Mythos cards that open gates in those locations. At this point, every "high activity" location (on any board) has the same chance of opening when a Mythos card opens a gate. If we go further and for each of the Unnamable, Black Cave, and Graveyard, pitch out 5 mythos cards that open gates in those locations, then every "medium activity" location (on any board) has the same chance of opening when a Mythos card opens a gate. To go further yet, for each of Historical Society, STL, Witch House, and Science Bldg, pitch out 3 cards that open gates in those locations, and then every "low activity" location (on any board) has only the same chance of seeing a gate if a Mythos card opens a gate. This doesn't make Dunwich or Innsmouth as active as either town when playing with just AH+DH or AH+IH mythos cards, but it has the emotionally satisfying property that low/med/high activity locations each have exactly 1 associated gate probability. Plus we can toss in all the non-gate mythos cards without disrupting anything since this deck size is already large enough to appease a card-floppin' size queen.

Hopefully that clarifies what I mean by "solving the dilution problem."

With your solution, I feel further steps might optimize Dunwich activity. It seems like you'd want to avoid a completely random selection of Mythos cards that open gates in Dunwich locations - partly because a solid half of them (20) open at Wizard's Hill. Each of Cold Spring Glen, Whateley Farm, and Devil's Hopyard have only 3 Mythos cards that open gates in those locations. In your 24-Dunwich deck, including those 9 cards and then randomly adding the rest should make Dunwich the Mayberry-with-Tentacle-Monsters that everyone loves. How does this strike you?

P.S. Any topic that motivates the use of programming or spreadsheets is automatically fun.

P.P.S. This board uses some wonky-ass quote tags. I have no idea why it decided to put everything inside of a single text balloon. Editing seems to change nothing.

Oh man. Playing with Kingsport and Innsmouth those I play with and I usually keep a fairly good balance, but it is a challenge and does seem to make the game longer. Honestly Id rather play one expansion at a time but since my game was mixed up to where you have to play with all three. Sometimes you just have to figure if you want to deal with the rifts or not.