@FrozenSolid - Well you could have spent Clue Tokens to re-roll dice to avoid the fail - but other than that, yeah it IS a BRUTAL card to get.

Not when that player has no clue tokens and is trying to get their first one after having already spent them to finish a mystery. "Avoiding" it by requiring you to have an item that you may not have even had a chance to acquire yet is not a valid solution. Especially in our first game and you have no idea that "saving" a single clue to keep you from losing an hour of work is even something that'd be necessary.

It's a terrible mechanic. Stop making excuses for it.

Hey no offense but you ASKED for thier opinion and now that they don't agree with you you don't want it anymore?

It would be just as valid to say that YOU are making excuses for your groups inability to cope with the challenges naturally presented by these types of games that should come as NO surprise to you if you play them. Learn. Adapt. Improvise. Use your head for something other than an idiotproof hatrack (assuming normal gravitation conditions of course. We wouldn't want you feel that you're wasting "precious time" with a hat you've already put on, god forbid.) It's what these games are all about!

An' if the "extra time" to play a game is your major malfunction that WHAT in god's name are you doing playing FFG games?? Have you EVER had one take what it said it would? On the first play no less? Riiiiiight. The question was rhetorical. NO ONE I know ever has.

Most importantly this game is about fun. If it's not fun for you stick with AH! Or y'know just toss a dart at a "We win/We lose grid." then toss in an episode of Scooby Doo while playing Glenn Miller in the background and wearing a fedora. It's about the same bloody experience!

Y'know what's NOT fun (and what I will never understand) is being asked for your honest opinion in practically the same breath that you're told to shut up.

I played my first game the other night and it was a solo with 4 investigators. I lost the second mystery I had solved but barely pulled away with a win with the doom track sitting on 1.

SEE?? Totally doable! Man, congratulations, that must have been one helluva' game!! Who'd you use? Closest game we've had got to 5 any lower than that on the doom track and then usually it's all done but the cryin'.....

Yes, a section for "difficulty of reshuffled Mystery" is something I plan to include. I'm waiting for input about other "events" to put as checkboxes, including expansion effects.

See this is why I don't like house rules. Once you rip out a cobra's fangs is he really a cobra anymore? When you defeat it are you really the clever little mongoose you think you are or do you actually feel a little guilty for just kicking the crap outta' gummy gramps?

Hey no offense but you ASKED for thier opinion and now that they don't agree with you you don't want it anymore?

I didn't ask for anyone's opinion. I posted my own, and argued why my opinion was valid. That's it. No where did I ask for someone else's opinion. I posted to state my own problems with the game in hopes that Fantasy Flight and their designers would listen and fix them in future expansions. So yes, I can state my opinion, as well as argue why different opinions are wrong or misinformed, as well as tell you to "shut up" (which I didn't, by the way, I just said you were wrong. Big difference.)

It's a 3-4 hour game. Making a 3-4 hour game take 4-5 hours instead, is stupid. Especially when you put aside 3-4 hours to play only to have the game needlessly lengthened beyond what you wanted. On top of that, 3-4 hours is a long game, and I was honestly hoping that since Arkham was 3-4 hours, that we'd see Eldritch be half that. I don't often have 3-4 hours to set aside to play a board game, so a 3-4 hour game does not get played as often as one that's 1-2.

I also never argued that it wasn't doable. I argued that it wasn't FUN. It is a stupid, and terribly designed mechanic. That's it.

And stop spamming the thread. One reply. Use the **** multi-quote option, or wait to reply until you've read the entire thread.

I played my first game the other night and it was a solo with 4 investigators. I lost the second mystery I had solved but barely pulled away with a win with the doom track sitting on 1.

SEE?? Totally doable! Man, congratulations, that must have been one helluva' game!! Who'd you use? Closest game we've had got to 5 any lower than that on the doom track and then usually it's all done but the cryin'.....

It is the first game I played listed on the stats sheet. Don't remember off hand as it was almost a year ago. you can check under the name Husker for it.

Just last week we barely avoided shuffling a solved mystery back in the deck because Cthulu was just crapping out clues and I happened to have the grotesque artifact that gave me 5 more. It is all a matter of luck sometimes.

I got hit by the mythos card where we had to shuffle solved mysteries back into the deck on my first playthrough of EH.

Honestly, I agree with the OP - I think it's a BS, timewasting, frustrating design decision.

Why? Because it doesn't add challenge or difficulty, it just completely invalidates your hard work up to that point - without adding complexity or nuance to your game.

Examples of mechanics that cripple you, even harshly, but do so in a way that makes you scratch your chin and reassess the situation:

Raiders in Talisman. Especially the 3rd edition. All your objects are taken from your character by a gang of raiders. It's a horrible, game-changing shock to the system, undoing plenty of your hard work up to that point. However, the object cards are stashed in a different location. Suddenly, the game has changed for everyone else. It's become a mad rush to the center to try and capture that player's assets - and gives that robbed player the opportunity to get his/her treasure back first. If the Raiders card simply said 'discard all your objects' - it would be the same as this EH card - punishing you without purpose.

Or when I was crippled by a vengeful Efreeti in Tales of the Arabian Nights. Suddenly my movement speed was reduced and I could no longer use my seductive appearance to my advantage. But this was compensated by the fact I could gain more story points (a kind of victory point in the game) whenever I was able to overcome a situation despite my disability.

I guess what I'm trying to say is there's interesting ways and a dull ways to punish the player. I love the cruel, unforgiving nature of the Eldritch mythos - I just want to be punished in ways that give the game more spice (the EH insanity cards that get flipped, for instance), not cards that reset the clock back to square one.

Agree 100% with this. It's just plain bad game design to include a card which negates game play. It's not as bad as adding an effect of you lose the game but it's not far off. You can have severe game-over nasty effects but if you do you either give the players some kind of forewarning or give some way of balancing or cancelling out the effect. The rumour cards are a good example of how to do this well.

To be honest, I like the mechanic. The world of Lovecraft is about how insignificant we are, and that things will happen no matter how hard we try to stop it. That 'grimdark' feel is what makes the game feel at home. You can always just remove the card from the deck if you don't want to play with it and the issue disappears.

To be honest, I like the mechanic. The world of Lovecraft is about how insignificant we are, and that things will happen no matter how hard we try to stop it. That 'grimdark' feel is what makes the game feel at home. You can always just remove the card from the deck if you don't want to play with it and the issue disappears.

You can have a grimdark feel without making players repeat an hour of work that they've already done. That is the point. You can make the players feel insignificant and make the game feel hard in far more interesting and fun ways. FFG does this already with a dozen other mechanics in the game. Losing a solved mystery is NOT interesting. It is NOT good game design. It is NOT fun. If you read the whole post we've been over this a dozen times. You are wrong.

As for removing those cards from the game, in the base game as it was when this topic was made (8 months ago by the way). There were not enough research cards per Elder God to simply remove 3 full encounters from the game. It also doesn't fix the problem, because without being told that this is a stupid and terribly designed mechanic that is widely considered to be the complete opposite of fun they will keep making cards with that mechanic.

The post was made with the hopes that future expansions would not have more of those awful mystery-losing cards.

Am I mistaken that the remove a solved mystery and place it back in is not just a Mythos card? There are plenty of Mythos cards that can allow for it to be removed, even in the base game (which is all I have).

One of Azathoth's research encounter cards has a worse mechanic than the Mythos. The Mythos just requires a clue (or is it two?) among all the players in the game, which is still a badly designed mechanic, but at least it is somewhat preventable.

The research encounter card is literally fail an observation roll: lose a mystery. You can't combat that. No amount of clues or rerolls can prevent it from happening. Bad luck can simply wipe away an hour of work. That goes from being "bad design" to being completely and utterly game breaking bad design.

Just one note about this mechanic. Usually when I see people talking about it, they mention that removing a solved mystery is tantamount to removing a third of the player's progress, and extends the game by a third.

From my experience, I don't really agree with that. When I look at the games I played, the mystery progression is not linear. The first mystery usually takes 6-8 rounds, while each following mystery takes 1-3 rounds. The investigators are much better prepared and equipped with both clues and weapons that help solve mysteries.

While I do try to avoid this type of effect as often as possible (trying to make sure I have enough clues for the mythos card, and thinking twice before attempting to research a city against Azatoth), having it happen rarely delays the team for more than one or two rounds.

I pretty much agree with you Pseudonym, but what about players whose best strategy so far has been to jump out and solve that first mystery usually within the first 3 turns? Not just taking pressure off but building momemtum for the rest of the game. Even going so far as picking a team of investigators designed to do this best. (Akachi and Jackie) I swear they can put away that first mystery in the first three turns on 80% of their attempts. Aaaaaaand then frequently fail to save the world.....the opening is impressive the follow through still kinda' generally sucks wampum.

I can only speak from my experience and play style (four investigator games with random investigator draw), but in that set-up the momentum picks up considerably as the game advances. It's not rare at all for the third mystery to be solved in a single round.

In fact, thinking about your example, Jaqueline becomes much more powerful the further in the game you are, since she had more chances to generate clues by that time, so I still think solving those late game mysteries should be simpler for her.