I've suddenly realised, looking at some of the other threads, that we may be playing this bit differently to the rest of you.

We play that "discard an ally" means "put the ally back in the ally deck". Looking at people's interpretations of Joining the Winning Team (mission: discard 4 allies to pass), The Stars Are Right (rumour: discard an ally to pass) and even Duke (ally:discard to restore sanity), it seems the more common interpretation is it means "put the ally back in the box". I've looked through the rules and FAQs a few times: am I missing something, or is this just a very common house rule to make things slightly harder (and perhaps more thematic, too).

Discard means put back in the deck .

You only remove Allies from the game if something specific tells you to do that, such as the rule for when the Terror Track increases.

Most people assume "Join the Winning Team" implies that you are sacrificing the Ally on some altar to the GOO and therefore they are dead. Or if you discard Duke, he is somehow sacrificing himself to save you. In both cases, they is theme in overdrive and not supported by the game rules. So anyone that removes these Allies is playing a houserule.

Wow, I plead guilty. For some reason it never occured to me to put them back into the deck. Weird!

jhaelen said:

Me too

Alright, so when I discard a Common Item, does it go onto the bottom of the deck, to be retrieved by Ashcan Pete later? To be honest, my group kind of fudges the rule - we just put cards in a discard pile, which I suppose we would shuffle if we ever got all the way through a given deck - which is a ludicrous proposition So I suppose we"ve effectively been returning them to the box, too.

Yep, all discarded investigator cards, unless noted otherwise, are supposed to go to the bottom of the deck (to my knowledge).

This is part of the appeal of Pete's ability. It is also relevant to Lola Hayes's ability.

Wow. I have both been doing a discard pile and removing allies from the game.

That is crazy that I never thought of just putting them into the deck.

Lance845 said:

I think that in all cases (except maybe for Allies) you're supposed to put them underneath.

Much. too. obvious.

Wow. Perhaps I deserve some cred. I've always played it correctly.

Whenever any card is discarded , it is put at the bottom of its respective deck. This goes for Common Items, Unique Items, Spells, Skills, and Allies, as well as Encounter Cards, Gate Cards, Mythos Cards, Madness Cards, Injury Cards, etc. Whenever anything is removed from the game (i.e., Elder Sign, any Rumor that I've seen in either pass or fail), it's boxed.

So far, there's only been one thing that we mess up, and it's not so much playing incorrectly as forgetting to do it. We always seem to forget, upon closing a gate, to search the board for monsters with that symbol. Oh, memory....

Arborshate said:

That's my most common error. And I think why I don't do it time and again is because it always seems in my games, on-board monsters never seem to match the gate that is closing. so even when I remember, not much happens and I forget about it.