I know what you mean. It doesn't help that 2 of the group work shifts which include weekends! hence the 2 investigator team

JerusalemJones said:

Needless to say this may change as more scenarios are published but I do like this aspect at the moment. We increased the size of out team with the intention of trying to get higher scores but we found it really difficult to get the victory we needed. For us that just adds to the fun.

Ozzy said:

Ehhh personally my idea of fun involves a challenge. These new scenarios are a combination of easy and annoying ;') (unless you play them for score). I'm sick of not having unique items ;')

I know! Come back sword of glory, all is forgiven!

I'm not sure I would call them annoying, but they are well thought out for difficulty.

Ozzy said:

I disagree. I think all these scenarios are easy if you aren't playing for score. Even the third one isn't too difficult (the trick is taking just a few corruption cards at the beginning so you can get some potential benefits from them, but not getting so many that they will ruin you).

the hardest thing about 3 is the lack of easy winning conditions for 2 player teams (from my pov anyway)

so how many corruption cards per player do we think is too much?

tamsyn said:

Oh no way, it's the *easiest* with a two player team :') just pick Wilson and Marie and take three corruptions each (still only six cards out of the corruption deck). This should give you a starting 9 clue tokens and an extra doom token doom track and a magic weapon. With a bit of luck (your odds of getting it are actually quite good), you'll draw one of the corruption cards that causes two sanity damage for two clue tokens. If you get a downwards spiral, close a gate to get rid of it immediately. Hrm... Still, with 9 clues to start the game with, you should be able to manage (supplement them with science building clues). Easy game, easy win.

Well, we beat #3 last night, sealing all gates on the board and actaully having 12 gate trophies between the investigators (Wilson Richards had 4 himself, IIRC). And we scored 45 points, which is a record for us. We weren't really going for points, they just accumulated on us throughout the game. It was close, too. We somehow managed to get our hands on two Elder Signs, keeping the Doom Track from beating us down. Took about 3-1/2 hours to win, too. But we won, so we're happy. And if #4 waits a while longer, we might get an opportunity to replay the first scenario, and hopefully win for once.

scen report elsewhere but it was ok to win sc3, trouble was getting a good score, the terror level/monsters being the biggest issue.

We chose not to start with any clues, as that's alot of corruption cards when you are talking 8 investigators. At one point we were debating 3 clues/1 corruption each, but we decided to try it without again, and only falling back on corruptions if necessary. So i'm glad that we won it this way.

JerusalemJones said:

That was a bad decision... In my opinion. A little corruption can be good for a team. One card for each player could've been beneficial to the team.

Avi_dreader said:

tried both ways and corruption seemed the way to go

I think what scared us off the most from corruption cards was that sometimes the cards require all the investigators to draw a corruption card. If that happened 3 times, we'd have drawn all the corruptions, and then Shub would wake up -- and we didn't want to fight Shub. We haven't beaten it yet if it comes to a final battle. I also didn't remember that you could get rid of the corruption cards (until this scenario I never actually got to play with the Black Goat expansion), and that might have made a difference. There was alot of debate about using them, but I think we all decided to try it once without, and if it didn't work we'd start trying it with. Since it worked out for the team, we're happy. We'll just have to see how S4 looks when it comes out.

Personally, I prefer rules that force us to use the nasty stuff from the the expansions. Heck, the first time we played one of our players asked how he could get rid of his injury (broken hand). I told him that there was an encounter at St. Mary's that could fix if. He then spent 5 turns hoping to draw the encounter -- until I suddenly remembered we weren't playing with the encounter cards from Dunwich! I though he was going to hit me lol. But not being able to get rid of Madness/Injury cards made the game more interesting, and we still took them when necessary.

We are probably at a disadvantage since, even after hundreds of games, we have no idea what happens where, except for our sketchy memories.

We had also never played with black goat and it was nice to see the new bits and pieces. soon insmouth will be out!

I'm happy that they just add the bits and not the board. 2 player games can't handle seperate boards.

One encounter worth remembering. Came across it yesterday at the Science Building.

'The professors are willing to try some radical procedures for your condition. For every $3 you spend return one of your corruption cards to the box.'

Couldn't believe my luck when this came up yesterday. Really useful in a heavily corrupted 2 player game, particularly as I had been afflicted with endless greed. Got rid of the crippling corruption cards and kept the useful/neutral ones.

Anyone come across any other encounters that get rid of corruption?

JerusalemJones said:

Assuming the best case possible:

Doom track 12 + Terror Level 0 + 12 gate trophies + 8 surviving investigators + 0 Bank Loans - 2 Elder Signs = 30

You finished with 45 monster trophies and you weren't going for points? Are you sure you calculated correctly?

You are absolutely correct. We kept the Terror Level at 0 the entire game, which I think is actually a first for our group. We had absolutely NOTHING raise the terror level. Our monster hunters were going absolutely crazy, collecting the monsters. One player had 15 monsters alone -- I think it was Michael McGlen. We have one player who insists on playing Michael, and all he does is hunts down monsters. We never turned in any gate trophies (though we were starting to think about it, since there were only 4 left) and I know a few monsters were used to get blessings. The Doom Track was sitting at 10 wen we won, so it was a close thing. I did the math several times just to make sure -- it still amazes me. I think the main reason we were holding onto our monsters was we still expected Shub to wake up, and we needed as many monsters as possiblein case it came to a final battle.

JerusalemJones said:

I don't suppose you could have done much better. I've never played with eight before. It always seemed like too much downtime and too long a game so we play two 4 player games whenever we have eight.

I love 8 player games. We actaully often end up with more than 8 players, so sometimes my wife or I sit out a game. In fact, when we won this last scenario I sat out and ran the encounter/mythos/outer worlds decks, and Argonel decided to go home and spend time with his wife (who normally also plays, but didn't get done with work in time to attend the session). So we actually had 11 people for AH that night (although LinkN was originally there to play Android, but most of us already committed to Arkham). I also ran the counter at the store, so sometimes they had to work the decks themselves. But hacing an extra body to do all the decks helps make the game go faster.