And we won both times. The first game, four Investigators, took six hours. It got smoother as we went along, and my guys grasped the mechanics pretty quickly. The second game, with six Investigators, took three. I didn't run an Investigator, I just called out the mechanics and shuffled.

I don't think we did anything egregiously wrong, and I've found some things that do need to be tweaked for next time. I think we hit on some simple strategies that paid off. People chose jobs of Monster Killers or Gate Closers, and actually didn't get in the way of each other--nobody took clues if they weren't near five, left them for the Investigators that had plenty. People with money high-tailed it to the Curiosilty Shoppe. Both games had a deputy running pell mell dispensing hard justice. Without knowing the percentages (brought up by Full Doom Track a few days ago) we'd sealed the right gates early, and that counted a lot in our favor. We never had a rumor that made us groan. The Professor would just eat a horror roll like it was a side item with his Chinese at the food court.

I think my favorite part was the Professor, fully deputised and swinging a sword, waltzing out repeatedly to take down the Horrible Experiment stack at Miskatonic University.

The first game felt like an achievement, considering the reputation the game has. We had Azathoth so I didn't have to learn Final Battle stuff yet. The second game, everyone agreed that the cards were kind. Ithaqua was AO, but a couple of times we had police sweeps and at times, literally no monsters on the board. I forgot to release two monsters per gate, but they'd have been picked up by the Mythos cards.

I do have some questions: I've hurt my brain looking at dates on documents and links, because I've seen both ways of this. Do Blessings have an upkeep roll? I'm assuming Cursed would have the same answer.

I reshuffled everything, everytime. Was there anything I should've NOT reshuffled? I read somehwere about Unique Items going to the bottom of the deck and that implies to me NOT shuffling that stack.

Online, I've found Tibs's Unofficial Changes and I like the idea of going to eight sealed gates. If we win a third time against an AO that really changes the game (Cthulhu, Hastur), I may do that. I can't get an expansion yet, but I found someone's mods to bring gate burts, etc. into the core game. So I may look into that as well. Right now, by hitting the right strategies, my palyers don't think the game is easy, but they do think it's straightforward.

CrusherJoe said:

Yes, both Blessing and Curse have an upkeep roll. Like it says on the card, every upkeep phase you roll a die for the Blessing / Curse. If you roll a 1, the Blessing / Curse is discarded. You do, however, not roll a die for a Blessing / Curse in the first upkeep phase after you get the Blessing / Curse.

CrusherJoe said:

The Investigator Cards (Common Items, Unique Items, etc.) should not be reshuffled. Instead, any discards go to the bottom of the appropriate deck. The same goes for Gate Cards and Mythos Cards.

Sounds like Eiterorm everything correctly there.

Blessings and Curses can be 'gotten rid of' (not that you'd want to loose your blessing) by rolling a 1. Something I think bears repeating from Eiterorm's post in relation to blessings and curses. You start rolling during the Upkeep phase the turn AFTER you receive them! Very important.

I'm glad to hear your games went well and hope to hear more about how future games go with the same crew!

Thanks, guys. Reading an updated FFG set of rules a little too fast made me think that the upkeep roll had been done away with.

And it's location cards that get reshuffled constantly.

Typically, with location cards they are fanned through and the player picks one out to have his encounter. Admittedly this only works well with a lower number of cards. When you start stacking multiple expansions worth of location decks together fanning them becomes a little harder. I know there are people who will probably disagree because the rules don't directly state this but you don't handle location decks in the same way you handle the mythos deck or the gate deck.

The short answer is that you should be shuffling the location deck each time a card is drawn.

Yikes! I can't writing anything here while using Firefox (every time I hit the quote / reply function, I enter a new page with only the publish button available, but nowhere to write… now with Explorer seems a little better, but still… can anyone fix this?)

Anyway, yeah, you theoretically have to shuffle the dam(n) location decks everytime, but technically it's soooo boring that I simply draw a new card from the top of the pile each time I have to read an encoutner, without shuffling first

When attempting to save table space, my Cult tried shuffling the Encounter decks of three neighborhoods together—such as Northside, Downtown, and Easttown forming one big Upper Arkham deck—and drawing Arkham Encounters the same way we draw for Other World Encounters: by color, using the card backs. By cycling through three neighborhoods all at once, putting unused cards at the bottom of the hybrid decks, we find that it seems to make excess shuffling unnecessary. (Plus 3 to 6 tall decks take up a LOT less space than 9 to 19.)

Julia said:

For me it takes only a couple of seconds (literally) to reshuffle the encounter decks. Do you have a very complicated game setup, or do you just get bored very easily? =P

By the way, I'm also using Firefox (in Win-7), but I don't have any problems with the forum.

eiterorm said:

Which release of Firefox? I'm with Firefox 17.0 with Win7 64-bit, and I can't post a dam(n) word with it

As for the reshuffling thing… I tend to play solo with 4 to 6 investigators, two expansion boards and not too a big table. Enough things to take care of without bothering with shuffling the decks before every bloody encounter ::laughter:: but you can call this "extreme laziness", no probs :-D

Julia, I'm on Firefox 17.0 and a crotchety Windows XP. No posting problems here.

CrusherJoe said:

Sigh. But thanks for the feedback

Julia said:

The exact same, in fact. Firefox 17.0 on Win-7 64-bit. The forum appears just like normal.

Ah, I can see why you're not bothered when you're playing solo. I play with friends, and we play only one or two investigators each, so the little extra things, such as shuffling, don't bother us. Every time we're shufflin'! *goofydance* =P

eiterorm said:

::laughter:: yeah, being more people easen a little everything :-)

As for the rest.. I'm still unable to post via Firefox from my pc. I tried to post from my husband's pc (Win XP + Firefox 16), same crappy results. Oh, rats.