Now that I have these four or five boxes of Arkham Horror here in front me, I wonder how I can still add as many expansions as possible to the game while not watering them down. Is this even possible?

What I really disliked the last time we played was the barren Dunwich. Almost nothing happened there - the main action was all in Arkham. Now with Kingsport, this is an even bigger problem.

How do you handle this? Do you play only with a small number of expansions to explicitly set the focus? Do you have any house rules?

we don't play with more than two boards and one extra non board expansion, both randomly chosen, or it gets a bit big and crazy. It keeps it fresh if you mix it up.

i use 2 mythos card stacks. one with all the cards with locations on the arkham board and one with all the other cards (dunwitch locations and other 'special' cards). i set aside a die and raise the value by one after i resolve an arkham mythos card. before i draw a new mythos card i roll a die and check if the result is lower that the die, if yes i draw from the 'dunwitch/special' deck and reset the die to 1. that way every so often a gate will open up in dun and the 'act cards' (from KiY) see more play. sometimes little goes on in dunwitch sometimes the board sees a lot of action (if i roll low), but there are no games where dunwitch can be completely ignored.

We brew up our local Arkham Horror Dish like this:

Add Base Set

Add One Injury and Madness for flavour

Add Final Battle Cards for Bite

Add One Board Expansion For More Dread

Add One Card Expansion For More Madness

Add all Allies, shuffle and take 11 for Fine Taste

Add all Monsters to the Cup 'cept for Spawns and Masks and whatnot for Diversity of Mayhem

Pick GOO according to taste

et voilá Arkham Dish of the Week

moekel said:

I likes your Arkham.

You could play with one big and one small expansion. For best effect as most say.

Most came up with house rules to remove x nr of cards from this expansion, mix em like that, put em like this, etc. I'm not a fan of these methods so, others might explain them later.

I like to mix the hole batch, I feel like im not using its potential if I don't mix em all, even if there is a slimmer chance for action on other boards, It's almost too fun to see when a game runs out of control. Generaly with 4 investigators and all expansions, 1 stays in kings port to handle rifts, so that lets 3 more in arkham, at the slightest chance that dunwich shows a little to much activity, that spreads us more thin.

You can either have some really insane games, and have no idea where to run or hide...or you could end up with pretty much no activty.

StarBurn said:

i olny use the kingsport board if we play with a very large group (6-8) as i feel it shines with many players. beeing stuck on 'rift duty' while everyone is doing something that 'feels' much nore usefull is boring and unsatisfactory. but with many players there are always one or two that gear up and use the relative safety of kingsport to regenerate their investigator (while keeping the rifts in check).

We have a hard time of getting over 4, actually never played an over 4 investigator game, but that is where the game presumebly shines. I tend to disaggre since more people more fun IMO, but then people tend to prove me wrong. More people means more chances of one of them getting bored, or getting upset cause his unlucky, which spoils my mood and the hole game for me as well.

I prefer to play only one expansion at a time -- for now.

Anyway, for Dunwich, here's a Scenario to get more of those Dunwich gates in play. Essentially, you keep the ratio of DH cards to all other cards the same as you would DH to the base game set:

boardgamegeek.com/image/354641

The way I see it, the only thing that really becomes a problems with multiple expansions is the Mythos cards and the complete inactiviy at Dunwich and the absurd unlikelihood that "And the Story Continues..." (for the purpose of the beloved of Bast). I've seen people solve this by adding cards in proper porportions. It seemed like a good solution.

But things like monsters, items, and yes even spells I never seperate per expansion (except for the scenarios). I don't think its really necessary to seperate them. You'll find people that "trim" the spell deck but I don't see much purpose in this. Sure, a lot of the spells from Dark Pharoah really suck, but thats something you just have to deal with. All spells don't have to be combat spells. Plus I think that KH and BGotW added more combat spells to create a better balance in the deck.

I always play with Madnesses, Injuries, and Epic Combat regardless of the other expansions I include.

I think that the problem of watering down can be overcome if FFG continues to introduce threat mechanics such as that of the RIfts in Kingsport Horror where their advancement is not dependent on drawing specific cards. Any Mythos card could potentially advance the Rift track.

Also, certain aspects of an expansion can be used without having to include the entire expansion. Guardians and Heralds can be used independant of their original expansions. Madness and Injury cards are a very popular inclusion among my gaming group, even if the Dunwich Horror expansion is not being used.

Lastly, we prefer not to play with all the expansions at once. Aside from possible watering down of the individal expansions, it leads to rather extreme sized deck of cards which are hard to shuffle. Furthermore, the inclusion or exclusion of certain rules, cards, or boards during any of our game sessions means that our games tend to be more varied, which has been a major contributing factor to keeping Arkham Horror something that everyone looks forward to playing week after week.

It seems that whenever FFG is planning to sell us their (last?) big expansion they could help things a bit by adding cards (mythos) that effect older expansions, such as the Dunwhich Horror board.

Deal out 100 Mythos cards. Shuffle them. Play with that Mythos pile as your deck.

There are 28 Mythos cards that will open a gate or otherwise put monsters into Dunwhich. If you put all of them into the 100 card pile, then monsters will appear in Dunwich 28% of the time. If you put in 20 cards from King in Yellow, then you'll get KiY events 20% of the time and so forth. In general, I find that it is easiest to restrict cards from the basic set to bring it down to 100. Cards from Kingsport and Dark Pharaoh ae still opening things in Arkham, so the main city is in no way being ignored even if a basic card comes up 30% of the time or less.

Bonus points of course is to deal out the cards into the combined Mythos deck face down, so that you don't know what the options are going to be. Nothing takes the expense away like knowing for a fact that a particular enbironment is or is not in the deck.

-Frank

I'm running AH+DH+DP+KiY+BG, either 4 investigators solo or 2+2 with a friend. On average, 2-3 gates pop up in Dunwich, which isn't really down more than maybe 1 gate from the time I was running AH+DH+DP. DP, for all the dislike people have towards it, shines especially in the OW encounters, making them a lot harder.

We once tried to play with all expansions, but it didn't worked out. Best sollution is one small and one big add-on, so game is not watered down. also, Kingsport and Dunwich don't play well with each oter, as they have different themes (dreamlands and terryfic horror of Mythos).

Hi, im playing with friends using all expansions :] its not so difficult to play with all the rules but it makes game rly long (like 8 hours for example). But if anybody want to play with less boards/cards just take and play one of the scenarios. The're alwaeys bringing fresh air into AH play for me

Mike said:

First, what expansions were you including? I find that with only the basic game, Dunwich and Kingsport in the mix there is still plenty of activity in Dunwich. I don't use any of the smaller expansions because, like you, I want to avoid Dunwich dilutaion. I also don't use BGotW because I find it to be a substandard expansion in general, and I don't use KiY because the gate distribution on the Myythos cards makes the game much too easy (not to mention the Press Passes and Arcane Insight!).

If theme is your primary concern, then don't use more than one small (card-based) expansion at a time. If you insist on using all expansions, then you either have to deal with the dilution, noting that while individual themes are sparse, the overall game is still chock full of flavor; or you can adopt some of the suggestions about applying the mythos deck. I use all the expansions, and the only three things I lament are:

The Next Act Begins
Dunwich activity
The Ally deck

Two of these three things are Mythos deck based, and the last one is just a result of using all the expansions. Both are easy to fix with simple house rules.

Dam said:

Sounds like you need to get Kingsport and add it in there ;-)

In fact we had an AH+DH+DP+KiY+BG+KH game last weekend.

We had about 21 Mythos cards, of course we also had Arcane Insight which helped out a lot.

It was also vs. Ithaqua, so 11 doom track. Things were going well toward a seal victory, but then we got one of those wonderful KH Rumors, where you discard monster trophies and everyone gets Blessed and a Retainer. This was pretty early, so we barely had enough to pass, but by this time we also had monsters running around in the streets in Kingsport due to a Mythos card. I managed to kill one and go insane by the other which put me back at the asylum with my monster trophies in order to kill the rumor.

We were also slowing things down with Arcane Insight, and we also managed to seal four gates (thanks to the Mythos card that allows you to seal for two less clues), but time was running out. I ran up to Dunwich, in order to collect the clues, but being I was the Doctor, I couldn't get very far yet, so I stopped for fun at Darke's carnival, where I managed to dump my bless for Darke's blessing. We ended up with two monsters in the streets right outside of Darke's Carnival which I was hoping to kill, but then we forgot about the Hunting Horror which jumped me there. After killing it, the next card the next act begins which caused every monster to move, causing the two monsters to jump into vortex, and the terror level to increase by one. So a terror level of three, no big deal except we were playing with the King in Yellow Herald, meaning we either had to fight Ithaqua then or bring out three blights. Ma took away the allies, and the Asylum and the Hospital were a bit trickier to use, but it could have been worse. I was collecting clues, but Arcane Insight was starting to work against us as the next three Mythos cards were all gates opening in Dunwich. We figured we were going to have to fight Ithaqua at this point, so I ended up striking a deal with the Black Man on Wizard's Hill and only got the skill (since no Allies anymore), but the skill was Martial Arts, and against Ithaqua it's a guaranteed +4 which you can't always count on....

But yes, we had three Dunwich gates in a row. Luckily two were in Wizard's Hill, so it wouldn't cause Ithaqua to come out just yet, and we could try to get a few more weapons or something to try to keep during the fight. One of the Wizard's Hill gates DID open a vortex there though. By this time Kate (who was casting Arcane Insight with +1 lore and a blessing) was out of sanity and lost her blessing so we had no help with what was coming after those three gates. So what was the next Mythos card after the three Dunwich gates, yet ANOTHER Dunwich gate at Whateley farm.

So we had to fight. Luckily Ithaqua isn't that hard and we ended up keeping a few weapons (three) to pass around to Kate, Gloria, and the Musician (who I hate the most), while I stayed with my martial arts skill.

Long story short, 3 Kingsport cards, and 5 Dunwich cards and The Next Act Begins (out of 21) using every expansion mixed.

I still don't know where this so-called "dilution" problem comes in. ;-)

The dilution problem comes in when games actually tend toward their statistical averages, unlike your games. But one Next Act card in a game is a prime example of dilution.

john, you should submit your games to the stats site! It's been too long. I only have six results, and they haven't been since Flainez ran the site—I haven't seen any since I made the new form

Oh I should try to remember what they were!

Unfortunately I haven't been playing nearly as much as I used to.

Too much real life interfering with game time!

Submit here

View here

Stats reports twice a month.

Good luck, lifehaver!