I've been running a demo copy for my LGS all weekend, and everyone who'se played has had a blast (3 pre-sales so far!), but I've found myself wanting to make sure we've been doing this right, so I thought I'd just go ahead and ask here;

Most of the rules for gaining items from the deck or reserve are very clear. When the game says to gain a random weapon, for example, we pull out all the weapons and have one chosen face down, gaining from the reserve is self explanatory, etc...

The one thing we're lost on is for certain expeditions, or the puzzle box, when it instructs players to 'Take an artifact from the artifact deck.' It doesn't mention anything about it being random. Are players supposed to simply take the top card, take one randomly, or are they actually allowed to look through the deck and decide on their own prize?

On one hand, picking your own prize almost seems TOO powerful. On the other, some of those expeditions are extremely risky... Anyway, what is the official rule on this one?

Hi EDF

I would imagine you take the top card ... taken from the EH FaQ ...

Some effects instruct an investigator to gain a card (for example, “Gain 1 Artifact”). The investigator draws one card from the top of the deck matching the specified card type.

• If an investigator gains a Spell or Condition that he already has, he discards it and draws a replacement, repeating this process until he draws a card he does not already have (if able).

... But I'm guessing. Still waiting on my copy of EH, but having read the rules a couple of times, the top card seems the way too go?

Walts

Yup, that's correct. There are a number of levels of specificity when grabbing items (regardless of deck). They start with "grab the one off the top", then "keep flipping the top card until you find one of this type" and finally "hunt through the deck for this specific thing". I rather like this approach because it allows for better matching of reward to task.