I played Eldritch Horror for the first time on Wednesday, after having preordered it and eagerly awaiting it's release from the moment it was announced. While the game is amazing, and everything I was hoping for in an "sequel" to Arkham Horror, my group was incredibly disappointed with two very serious aspects to the game.

1) The Elder God research decks are incredibly light on variety. During our first game we went through the deck 3-4 times, and saw the same events several times. There desperately needs to be more cards for each elder god, as you go through them for every single clue that spawns. In a game with 5 players we went through the deck extremely quickly.

2) Losing solved mysteries is the worst mechanic. It nearly ruined our first experience of the game. We had just completed our first mystery, and had started on our second. Around the same time, we had shuffled the research deck causing us to get a repeat research encounter. Oh boy brain surgery again! Oh, this time we failed. "Take one solved mystery, and shuffle it back into the mystery deck" Wait, what?

There is NOTHING less fun in a game, that having actual progress towards the game's goal ripped out from underneath you. Especially when the goal of Eldritch Horror is to solve 3 mysteries. You have just needlessly lengthened the game by 1/3, making us redo work we've already spent a LOT of game time on. It's one thing to bring down the doom track, or make us draw an extra mythos card, or discard mythos cards, or any effect that makes the game harder for the adventurers to finish, but actually taking away hard earned progress when the ONLY goal of the game is that very specific hard earned progress was not fun. Having gone through the research deck 3-4 times in that game, we could have EASILY had every single time we pulled that research card cause us to lose a mystery. That isn't fun. That isn't good design. All it does is make players feel completely defeated. I don't care if the game was balanced with losing mysteries in mind. It's just not a fun mechanic. In fact, it was such little fun that I'm very tempted to never put those cards into the game.

I really hope that in a future expansion, Fantasy Flight rethinks the cards that cause players to lose solved mysteries. I also really hope that we see more variety in elder god cards, to make this sort of thing less common. These two oversights took Eldritch Horror from being a perfect 10, to a solid 7 or 8.

Bummer! Sounds like the cards you never want to draw, indeed...

There are several cards in EH that you never want to draw. I won't list them here, you'll find them on your own! The same was true of Arkham Horror - it's just one of the things that make these games good, you can't "coast" and you never feel safe 'cos just around the corner something really bad might be waiting for you. IMO it's not the cards that are the problem per se, it's how often you can expect to see them that's the "problem". It's quite long odds that you'll see the same encounter card twice in a game and be in the same type of location the second time around (remember, there are three encounters per card for most decks), however if you don't like these gut-punch cards you can always remove them, or remove them after you've seen them once. So, overall, I'm not overly sympathetic to your point of view, but I agree that it adds weight to the argument that the base game is a little light on cards because some dilution would help ensure that the occasions when you just get hosed would be rare. Getting hosed occasionally is just part of the Mythos experience, but it shouldn't be a regular occurrence.

Think of AH. With only one Expansion (i my case Dunwich Horror) you have th double amount of Location Cards. I think something like this will come in an future expansion for EH.

@mccrispy - it isn't about being hard. I'm completely fine with there being some cards that make the game harder for the investigators. I'm fine with a card that would outright kill me in a bad roll. I'm fine with a card that'd move doom up 3-4 spaces. These are all things that make the game hard. However, there is a difference between making the game hard and LOSING PROGRESS, which is the problem here. When you have a game that is three hours long, and you've been playing for an hour, complete your first mystery, and then draw a card that says "shuffle a solved mystery back into the deck" that isn't a time you say "wow this game just got really hard" it's a time you say "we just wasted the last hour doing absolutely nothing." That isn't fun.

@Garthnait - I've played more games of AH without expansions than with, and I've played it a LOT. The only time that any one encounter came up twice in the same game was when we purposefully sat on a single space for several turns, and if you're doing that in AH you're probably not playing a good strategy. In EH, the only time it is a problem is with the research deck. With the other decks you're unlikely to be in the same place more than 2-3 times in a game, which is just like Arkham Horror. However, with research you will be encountering that deck easily 15 times in a single game. Most of Azathoth's mysteries involve getting a number of clue tokens equal to the number of players. In a 5 player game, that means you are absolutely guaranteed to go through the research deck at least twice. You're also likely to have a rumor, which will make you go through it a third time. You are constantly having encounters to get clues, and the likelyhood of repeat encounters in the same game is extremely high for the research deck. I've played twice now, and every time I've repeated the same encounters in the research deck in both games.

I do agree that the decks don't have enough variety yet, but I'm guessing any small box expansion will fix this problem.

I'm fine with losing solved mysteries, but if this is an issue to you, remove the card from play. Problem solved

Completely agree on these two points. But I hate having to remove cards to fix problems, especially when the source deck is tragically small.

This issue needs to be fixed somehow.

• Needs more mystery and research cards but I don't mind the losing of research cards so much...played a few times and it happened to me once...sometimes life's a *****

Yeah but we play games to have fun, not to be reminded that life can be an annoyance. As FS pointed out: advancing difficulty and losing progress are distinct things.

Yeah, I completely agree. My wife and I love, love AH, but after the first play of EH we got really bummed out. The game lacks a lot of variety right now. We'll just shelve it and wait for expansions (and use the health/sanity tokens on AH, since they look so much better, haha).

It's an interesting starter game, but desperately needs expansions. Also, it's good that they're trying to bring new players to the universe.

Well you might not have to wait too too long for an expansion...

Well you might not have to wait too too long for an expansion...

That's actually pretty cool. Hope it's sooner than later.

Just had an idea for fixing the "shuffle a solved mystery back in" cards. Change the text to "treat the number of investigators as double when solving the next mystery."

Instead of losing your progress and doing another mystery, you essentially need double the clue tokens to solve the next one. So 4 investigators normally means 2 clues, but now you treat it as 8 investigators and 4 clue tokens (equal to solving 2 cards that each need 2 clue tokens).

That's actually not a bad idea. It keeps you from having to repeat a mystery and from losing progress, while having the same overall impact on the game. I still think it might be a bit too harsh, primarily from a game time perspective, but it's a step in the right direction at least.

@mccrispy - it isn't about being hard. I'm completely fine with there being some cards that make the game harder for the investigators. I'm fine with a card that would outright kill me in a bad roll. I'm fine with a card that'd move doom up 3-4 spaces. These are all things that make the game hard. However, there is a difference between making the game hard and LOSING PROGRESS, which is the problem here. When you have a game that is three hours long, and you've been playing for an hour, complete your first mystery, and then draw a card that says "shuffle a solved mystery back into the deck" that isn't a time you say "wow this game just got really hard" it's a time you say "we just wasted the last hour doing absolutely nothing." That isn't fun

Gotcha! Losing progress does of course make the game harder and there are plenty of games that contain "events" that take away "your stuff" (i.e. your accumulated progress). I think here that is a matter of degree; as you say, you may have lost an hour's progress, which is a big chunk. But again, it depends quite a bit on what you've already achieved and what the Mystery you chuck back is - it may take no effort to do it second time around (assuming it does come out again). Situational, but I understand your point even if I don't agree with it.

Most games don't lose progress in the way that Eldrtich does though. It's more than just the degree in which you've lost, though that has a lot to do with it. It's the fact that not only is hard earned progress being stolen, but there is no way to prepare for it. The wrong person with a low observation drawing that card causes it to happen. Even with a high observation, just one bad roll causes you to lose it. Even having 5 clues sitting in your stock pile to reroll can still cause you to lose it if you're just not lucky. It's not something you can see coming and predict.

To try and put it into perspective, picture a game of Settlers of Catan. The end goal of the game is to get 10 victory points. One very common way to win the game is by having longest road and/or largest army. Part way through the game, your opponent makes a road longer than your's. Effectively, you've lost 1/5th of your progress towards completion of the game, but the fact of the matter is that just building 2 more roads, or playing 2 more armies, puts you back to the same progress you were at before. Losing one of those cards isn't a big deal, because it's trivial in the scheme of the game to get them back. You still have a road that's 7 long. Your friend just has one that's 8. It's not like you have to rebuild a road from 0 back up to 7. Your victory was delayed, not reset to the beginning. Effectively you've "lost 1/5th of your progress in the game" but in reality it's trivial to regain those 2 points by building a slightly longer road. Also, the player taking your points was a reward to that player for making a long road, not a penalty slapped on you with no way of keeping it from happening. You saw it coming when that player was obviously making a road nearly as long as your's. You could have prevented it by building your road one more longer before your opponent did.

Using Descent as an example, every time you kill a monster, it's going to respawn at the start of the stage. Effectively a turn after you've killed something you "lost your progress" because it's back. However, the fact that the monster respawned doesn't affect the progress of the game. The fact that it's no longer blocking your way, and you'll have a few turns to continue towards your objective means that you've still made progress. The monster respawning is just a setback and a bit of added difficulty.

Arkham has events that cause you to "lose progress" as well. We've had a few games where a player returns through a gate, closes it, and during the Mythos phase the gate reopens sucking that player through again. The main goal of AH is to close and seal gates. You've just lost progress, because the gate you closed has respawned and now you can't even go get more clues to seal it because you're once again stuck spending 2 turns in the other world. You've effectively "lost progress." However, you're still going to have your trophy for that gate, which means it's not lost progress, because closing gates you more gate trophies which further progresses you towards the goal of the game. Now, instead of having 1 gate trophy, you're going to have two!

I've played three games now of EH, and it's going on the sale/trade block, largely because it lacks any meaningful decisions compared to Arkham. Not that AH was incredibly dense with decision-making... it's largely an experience game as well... but EH seems to have particularly stripped away a lot of those decision points. And now, you move a space or two, draw a card, roll dice and hope for 5's and 6's, with little or no means of affecting that. In AH, you have one hand on the wheel, at least. Here, you're taken for the ride.

But although I felt that lack of depth pretty strongly in my first two games, I still had hopes that I would find a hook to make me want to keep it, so I played again today. In game three, there were two epic monsters in play, and over a few turns I had managed to whittle them down to only 1-2 damage left to kill them, losing an investigator in the process. And then, a mythos card was drawn that removed all damage from all monsters. What the-- That was very nearly a table flipping moment. And that was the last straw for me. I will now gladly continue to appreciate the sumptuous feast that is Arkham Horror, bloat and all, particularly after having played this one a few times.

Your comparison to Chutes and Ladders is pretty harsh, but in another forum I did the same kind of thing with Candyland. Sure, I'm exaggerating for effect, but my point is that if you're just drawing a card and rolling whatever dice it tells you to roll and hoping to get the right roll on the dice, is it that different from Candyland? You can slap Lovecraftian details on anything you want... the giant frog is Cthulhu, landing on the licorice space is being "delayed," landing on an ice cream space is gaining a "clue," etc. Yes, Arkham Horror is a big mess of details, but to me, there is still enough *game* within the system that it makes the setting and trappings of the world that much more rich and engaging and worth playing.

The group (as a whole) can prevent losing the mission by spending a couple clue tokens. 1/2 the number of investigators. So, between 1 and 3 clue tokens (up to 6 investigators). If someone is playing Norman, he can take a sanity hit instead of one clue token, which makes it even easier to avoid losing the completed mission.

So, it seems like it is relatively avoidable, as long as the group isn't burning through their clue tokens.

I've played three games now of EH, and it's going on the sale/trade block, largely because it lacks any meaningful decisions compared to Arkham. Not that AH was incredibly dense with decision-making... it's largely an experience game as well... but EH seems to have particularly stripped away a lot of those decision points. And now, you move a space or two, draw a card, roll dice and hope for 5's and 6's, with little or no means of affecting that. In AH, you have one hand on the wheel, at least. Here, you're taken for the ride.

But although I felt that lack of depth pretty strongly in my first two games, I still had hopes that I would find a hook to make me want to keep it, so I played again today. In game three, there were two epic monsters in play, and over a few turns I had managed to whittle them down to only 1-2 damage left to kill them, losing an investigator in the process. And then, a mythos card was drawn that removed all damage from all monsters. What the-- That was very nearly a table flipping moment. And that was the last straw for me. I will now gladly continue to appreciate the sumptuous feast that is Arkham Horror, bloat and all, particularly after having played this one a few times.

Your comparison to Chutes and Ladders is pretty harsh, but in another forum I did the same kind of thing with Candyland. Sure, I'm exaggerating for effect, but my point is that if you're just drawing a card and rolling whatever dice it tells you to roll and hoping to get the right roll on the dice, is it that different from Candyland? You can slap Lovecraftian details on anything you want... the giant frog is Cthulhu, landing on the licorice space is being "delayed," landing on an ice cream space is gaining a "clue," etc. Yes, Arkham Horror is a big mess of details, but to me, there is still enough *game* within the system that it makes the setting and trappings of the world that much more rich and engaging and worth playing.

You just need to understand how play this game. IS really different to AH. Very important in right time choose right Investigator and his Fellow. They die often and one very important thing is choose next right one. Also very important have a real job together and wow you start to win. This game really ask you for think think and think. IS a hard game and i love this.

I manage to win against Ctulhu and Azatoth with 2 payers. And every game was on the edge…… Cool!!!

AH also cool game but EH is many ways better…….

You just need to understand how play this game. IS really different to AH. Very important in right time choose right Investigator and his Fellow. They die often and one very important thing is choose next right one. Also very important have a real job together and wow you start to win. This game really ask you for think think and think. IS a hard game and i love this.

I manage to win against Ctulhu and Azatoth with 2 payers. And every game was on the edge…… Cool!!!

AH also cool game but EH is many ways better…….

Can you explain why do you think that EH is better? I have seen you post allso in elsewhere, so I repect your opinions to a some degree :-) You often like a good challenge, so if EH is more diffiult it is easy to see why do you like it, but what are other reasons?

This game is in my radar and am just wainting a reason or two more to purhase it... Is it some king of sicness... is it?

Having played the game 3 more times since my post, I find that the first flaw isn't nearly as serious as it seemed in our first game. We apparently screwed up the rule that you discard clues rather than putting them back into the clue bag. (I'm using a felt bag for clues, as well as separate bag for the monster cup. It works wonderfully)

The effect this had on our first game meant that when we did a city clue, that clue went back into the bag, meaning that we always had more cities in the bag than anything else. Instead of pulling a city out, and having a better chance of getting varying locations. We have yet to have a duplicate encounter in a game since we started playing "properly." While it's still possible it's much less likely and the game feels far more balanced now.

That being said, there still needs to be more research encounters for each elder god just not as seriously as originally thought, and the "lost mystery" mechanics are still the worst thing in the game and desperately need fixed or reworked. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like it's very easy to make the current mystery "harder" in some cases.

You just need to understand how play this game. IS really different to AH. Very important in right time choose right Investigator and his Fellow. They die often and one very important thing is choose next right one. Also very important have a real job together and wow you start to win. This game really ask you for think think and think. IS a hard game and i love this.

I manage to win against Ctulhu and Azatoth with 2 payers. And every game was on the edge…… Cool!!!

AH also cool game but EH is many ways better…….

Can you explain why do you think that EH is better? I have seen you post allso in elsewhere, so I repect your opinions to a some degree :-) You often like a good challenge, so if EH is more diffiult it is easy to see why do you like it, but what are other reasons?

This game is in my radar and am just wainting a reason or two more to purhase it... Is it some king of sicness... is it?

Despite it's flaws, there are a few specific reasons that make it objectively better than Arkham Horror:

1) The casting and conditions double sided cards mechanic is brilliant. Easily the best feature of the game.

2) The end game when the Elder God wakes up is far superior and more interesting than in Arkham. With the exception of Azathoth, the god appears on the board and gives you a new mystery to solve in addition to the other 3.

3) The scale of the game makes travel more interesting. In Arkham a player could easily travel from one side of the board to the other in one turn. Distance didn't mean so much unless you were a character with really bad speed, in which case you felt gimped because you could barely get anywhere. Eldritch balances all the players' movement capabilities, and it really encourages players to spread out and focus on their own portions of the board. You have to be prepared for things to show up anywhere on the board.

4) Encounters often have multiple rolls you have to make. This means it's not usually a pass/fail like it was in Arkham. The more important cards tend to have pass/pass to get an awesome encounter, pass/fail to get a mediocre or non-harmful encounter, and fail/fail to get a bad encounter. This both makes the dice less likely to just screw you over, as well as makes their results more interesting.

5) Players dying is far more interesting. In Arkham and Elder Sign, you just roll a new character. In Eldritch, your character stays on the board, and you can encounter them with other characters. If your character went insane, you stumble upon that character in their insane state of mind. Each character has two very unique effects, one for going insane and one for dying.

6) In Arkham, you tend to b-line for the end of the game, and the goal is always the same. Seal 6 gates or close all gates and have X gate trophies. You don't have to do much damage control unless a rumor comes out or you're getting close to the monster limit. Even then, dealing with monsters and closing gates is something that happens organically while you're focusing on your goal. They're just obstacles in the way. In Eldritch, your goal has nothing to do with the Monsters and gates. You're forced to make a decision as to whether to close gates or fight monsters, to focus on your mystery, or to focus on the expedition. All 3 options give you a LOT of important decisions to be making. If you have too many gates out, the doom track starts to plummet quickly. It has a very similar feel to Flash Point, in that as long as you have the board under control you can focus on the mystery, but the second you lose control of the board the game starts taking a quick turn for the worst.

7) Combat is VASTLY improved and streamlined. Going back to play Arkham this weekend really made how good the combat is in Eldritch stand out. Not only does combat happen during the encounter phase which makes far more sense than during movement, but if you're a character who shouldn't be doing combat you can still pass by monsters and have things to do without feeling like you're locked in your current location. Plus the fact that damage dealt to monsters sticks around for your next round means that failing combat doesn't always feel like you just wasted your turn doing nothing and getting nowhere.

Thank you for being honest and admitting a mistake. I admire that. On at least one of the cards that require a completed mystery card to be surrendered, you can avoid that if the party collectively spends x clues. I presume you saw that part. That adds even more to the preciousness of clues as a resource, and I like that. You can still spend them (frivolously or not), but beware...

Thank you for being honest and admitting a mistake. I admire that. On at least one of the cards that require a completed mystery card to be surrendered, you can avoid that if the party collectively spends x clues. I presume you saw that part. That adds even more to the preciousness of clues as a resource, and I like that. You can still spend them (frivolously or not), but beware...

That's better than the card we got. Our's was a failed observation check that caused us to lose a mystery.

How you "prevent" it from happening doesn't fix the problem. The problem is the fact that losing progress in a game is the complete opposite of fun. The entire concept of losing a solved mystery is a terrible one.

I don't know if anyone else corrected the OP on this, but when they said " Most of Azathoth's mysteries involve getting a number of clue tokens equal to the number of players. ", that's actually wrong, it's *half* the number of players, so maybe they were making it too hard for themselves. When I played earlier I nailed two of the mysteries in about three turns. If I'd lost one at that point, I really wouldn't have been that bothered.

I don't know if anyone else corrected the OP on this, but when they said " Most of Azathoth's mysteries involve getting a number of clue tokens equal to the number of players. ", that's actually wrong, it's *half* the number of players, so maybe they were making it too hard for themselves. When I played earlier I nailed two of the mysteries in about three turns. If I'd lost one at that point, I really wouldn't have been that bothered.

Actually we didn't play that wrong.

Occult Research: "At the end of the Mythos Phase, if there are clues on this card equal to the number of players, solve this mystery"

The True Name: "place a number of Eldritch tokens equal to half the number of players ... spend 2 clues to place that Eldritch token on this card."

Seed of the Daemon Sultan: "spend 2 clues to place 1 Eldritch token on this card ... if there are Eldritch tokens on this card equal to half the number of players solve this mystery"

Only one mystery is clues equal to the number of players, and that one is timed to which omen is on the omen track. All of the others require 2 times half the number of players rounded up. In a 5 player game which we were playing, this meant we needed 6 clues for every mystery we wanted to accomplish, except for the last Omen of Devastation.