Hello everyone, I had a couple questions.

1.) Solo Play Variants: I got my arse handed to me on solo play and really did not enjoy the game as I did not get a chance to explore Arkham, I was running around in other worlds and trying to close gates, never drawing encounter cards for Arkham. I read about a variant at BGG that said to ROLL a D6 and one a result of 1-3 SKIP THE MYTHOS phase and 5-6 PLAY Mythos. This is adjustable if you make 1-2 skip mythos, or whatever, you get the idea. Is has anyone tried this? I tihnk this makes solo play a lot moer interesting and thematic? Agree? Are there other variants? I've heard of play TWO investigators as well?

2.) Expansions; the way I understand it, CARD expansions, i.e. Curse of the Pharaoh are to be shuffled in with the regular game? Is it possible to just use the cards from that expansion instead? I think you can do that with King in Yellow. I haven't bought a card expansions yet because I want to make sure if I get it, I can play it and not just draw a card or two from it while I'm playing a solo game or with two other people. Can someone explain a little better how the card expansions work?

Thank You all!!

Hi, in "Curse of the dark Pharao" there are 2 different game modes:

1. Just shuffle the new cards in your decks and play as normal, so you draw some new cards from time to time.

2; and much more fun: You replace all your location cards and your other world cards with the new ones from the expansion and you put the new mythos cards on an own place and draw alternately from the old and new cards.

So the expansion cards are much more involved in the game - i got my "Dark Pharao"-expansion yesterday and we played with the second game mode, it´s much more exciting.

As i know it´s about the same in "The King in Yellow".

Alex

If you're playing with one investigator, no wonder you're ass is being served. Play with at least 2, and consider even playing with 3 or 4, depends on how many big box expansions you have:

0: 2 investigators.

1: 3 investigators. one investigator's "job" is to sweep Dunwich for monsters closed to vortex, kill the Dunwich Horror if it awakens, and even close/seal gates opening in Dunwich. the other two stays in Arkham. If it's Kingsport Horror, one investigator deals with rifts while the others deal with Arkham.

2: 4 ivnestigators. 2 investigators in the main board, and one investigator per small board.

Does playing with 2 investigators get tought to keep track or is it relatively easy? I'd be interested in hearing opinions of 2 Investigators vs. skipping the mythos step on a die roll. I have only the base game and have tried to play through twice....and lost quickly.

Two investigators is still kind of tough. Shoot for three so that you have a bit of time once in a while to check out stable locations.

We generally play with 2 players running 2 investigators each (I have never tried single player with multiple investigators). What we find works best is to never combine phases for any investigator but always move the first-player marker, do everyone's upkeep (and plan out movement/turn strategy), then do each investigator's movement/combat in order, followed by encounters in order, and so on. I find it's easy to get confused and accidentally make double moves or skip an investigator's phase, blessing check, etc. unless we're religious about following the mechanics. We call the phases out loud to make sure we complete each one and don't ever get ahead of ourselves (which is very easy to do in my experience).

GalaxyUC said:

Play two, you'll find that you'll need three for handling other boards (once you add in Dunwich and Kingsport), but in the meanwhile you should practice playing a tough game, so you won't need to control four or five investigators to beat those.

Or you could listen to Tib and have a third investigator just for exploring ;'D or you could just explore the decks by *reading the cards in them*

There was a good idea in the solo play thread. Rather than play multiple investigators (if you find this too crazy to keep track of), instead just skip mythos phases sometimes. If you have a mythos phase only once every three or four turns it allows one investigator to have a much easier time.

Winning with a single investigator is challenging. I played a bunch of solo games when I first got Arkham to get the rules down, and only got a seal victory once, by wild luck. With a single investigator, you don't have time to do anything but explore, seal, clues, repeat. With four investigators you'll have more wiggle room as far as time goes and get to experience more of the game. I usually play 2 players / 2 investigators, and we find we frequently end up trying to come up with something useful for at least one guy to do - which often means having Arkham Encounters on purpose.

Four investigators with one person is do-able with organization.

The KiY expansion includes a play variant that has you place the KiY cards on top of the other decks of cards. I would not recommend playing in this manner, as you'll need to wade through all the unique KiY items before even getting a chance to pull an Elder Sign. Not fun, and it soured us on this expansion for a while.

I tend to play as a 2 player team and we don't have much leisure time in Arkham, so I can't imagine what it's like for a new solo player. Remember that the whole idea of the game is for you to have fun, so experiment with different rules and see what gets the game balance right for you, in other words what makes it fun. Consider that Arkham is designed for a 4 investigator team, that's 4 goes for the good guys for every turn of the Mythos, now at the moment you're going 1 on 1 and so I think it's a perfectly reasonable strategy to balance things out by giving yourself more turns per mythos phase. Consider that if you have 2 turns per mythos it's still only 2 goes for the good guys for 1 of the mythos which is still a much tougher deal than any 4 player game, so hold your head up high, cut youself a bit of slack and see what works.

If you only have the base game then the addition of any of the small box expansions will change the feel of the game. The expansions can be used as and when you fancy a particular theme and as Salanthas pointed out COTDP and KIY have setup options that are designed to strongly highlight their expansion.

If you really want to know how expansions work then the best thing to do is read the rules for each expansion on the FFG website, they are all there in pdf format:

http://new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=6&esem=4

...and if you ever get COTDP, for increased longevity and interest check out this alternative exhibit items deck:

http://www.sfu.ca/~cjenning/eons/samples/GilmanMemorialDeck.pdf

If you want to play with one investigator, just skip some Mythos Phases: For example, if you want to play like you are playing a three player game with one investigator, only have a Mythos phase every third round. But do this too. Play as if your monster and outskirts limits are also a three player game. So you have up to six monsters on the board and the terror level raises when you exceed 5 monsters in the outskirts. Also, you should play your rumors as if there were three players. 7 Gates are too many with three players too.

As a variant, I make it random. I'd roll a six sided die and only have a Mythos on a 1 or 2. Be warned, all investigators are not created equal, so if you play a strong investigator, the game may be too easy and if you play a weak investigator the game will still be hard.

Strong investigators: Mandy, Daisy, Wendy and Darrell.

Weak invesigators: Dexter, Vince, Gloria and Jim.

Most of the others are average enough to have a good game.

Megalith's absolutely right and makes an important point. If you do alter the number of turns you take per mythos phase in order for the balance of the game to be right you'll have to consider yourself a larger team for the purpose of determining max monsters on the board/in outskirts and max gates open. These things are referenced on the back cover of the base game rules booklet as I'm sure you are aware.

For example if you take 2 turns for every Mythos then effectively you are 2 players, if 3 then 3 players etc.

Another tip I would give to a new player is that some unstable locations are more active than others on the board and if you're going for a seal victory and are deciding where to spend your clues/elder signs it generally pays to deal with the more troublesome locations (watch out for gate bursts though in BGOTW and the big box expansions). IS, UI,WH and W are particular gate hotspots, whilst SB, HS, STL and HRH don't see much gate activity.

Good luck