(1)

What house rules do you use?

I have a couple of house rules that I use in my games:

*After an investigator has made the special ability of a location, he has an regular encounter as well. I decided to do this because normally no one ever has encounters in locations with special abilities. Also I have found out that even the safest locations have a mix of 50/50 bad/good encounters, so it doesn't break the game or anything, and it makes it much more interesting.

*When having an other world encounter, you first draw an properly-colored gate card as normal, but if it doesn't match your other world you disacrd it and draw another properly-colore gate card. If it matches your other world, great, and if not, you still keep it and follow the "other". (obviously for all worlds other than another dimension). Why I did this? because with so many expansions all worlds have become another dimension. With this house rule you're tripling your chances of having an other world encounter that isn't "other". Threre are two exceptions though: Gloria completely ignores this house rule, and Jim Culver does it like this: He first draw cards until he either draws a green card or a properly-colored card, whichever comes first. If he drew a non-green card and it's "other", he discards it and repeat the process, but no more than once.

*If an investigators draws a task/mission as their starting equipment, they have the choice of discarding it and draw another card.

(2)

How do you deal investigators/ancient ones/heralds/guardians

Investigators: Every player in my team (that consists of me and my brother) draws 3 character markers at random and chooses 2.

Ancient Ones: We choose the one we feel like playing against.

Heralds/Guardians: At random. When I'll have ink I will print The Dark Pharao and Dunwich Horror heralds and add them to my herads.

That's it for me, what about you?

Previous Great Debates

One of the house rules we use consistently is that we blend our turns. We have Upkeep, then each investigtor does their entire turn up to the Mythos and then the first player finally does the Mythos. If a question comes up and it rarely does, the phases still are in effect and anyone can demand we do phases for a particular turn but rarely do. Players can also adjust their focus at the beginning of their turn if they didn't (usually forgotten to) during the Universal Upkeep and there is no new knowledge, ie, encounter or monster drawn. We believe this saves us nearly an hour in our 4 player games.

Another is that I've sorted the Other World cards by location and rotate them through their listing. I've explained it before but will again if any one is interested

Then I have an Arkham Advertiser, created with Strange Eons, that is designed to "Advertise" the various locations and introduce theme (news stories from real 1926 and 1927, and background for the various locations like R'lyeh and bring in the expansions on a random basis and a few other things. It was originally designed for new players to learn some of the more exotic rules and opportunities one rule per turn.

I tried several times to have normal encounters in addition to special encounters but usually we quit doing it pretty early. Mostly because its a time eater. It probably won't change balance much, but some of the locations do have much better than 50/50 odds of a good encounter but if the additional encounter were required, it probably would balance out in the long run.

How I deal investigators sort of depends on my mood. Usually its one boy and one girl to each player and the player gets to choose. Sometimes I just put out one extra investigator and we roll of for first choice. If it's a solo game, I play what I draw.

We almost always play a herald, though many of them are homemade.

Guardians and Ancient Ones and Expansions come in through the my little Arkham Advertiser or through the heralds.

kroen said:

The only thing I'd add to that is sometimes it's too beneficial to have both the regular encounter and the special encounter. For example, when a sale takes place at the Curiositie Shop, you turn over four cards and the investigators as a whole can buy any or all of them. It seems a bit much to follow that with the CS's special encounter, where you turn over three more cards and buy one of them. I do it mostly the way that you do, except I have my encounter cards marked. Some encounter cards replace the location's special encounter while for other cards you can choose between the encounter card and the special encounter (and sometimes you have both). It certainly does add to the fun when you go to the Asylum with 1 Sanity and your encounter card has you lose 1 Sanity.

This also takes care of a problem that I have with Wilson, which is that he can escape bad encounters at the Unnamable, the Black Cave, etc. by doing odd jobs there (like, huh?) In my house rules, he can only do odd jobs instead of a location's special encounter, but he still has to draw an encounter card first. Thematically, locations with special encounters are more likely to have odd jobs in the first place, and even when he's doing odd jobs, something can still happen to him at the location.

I've actually house-ruled a rather large part of the core rules, dramatically altering the way the Doom Track works since I somewhat disliked the pacing of the original game. I posted it on BGG a couple years ago at www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/158235 . I always use this variant and it creates a bit more suspense toward the end of each game.

Besides that, I've meddled a bit with Nyarlathotep to make his Masks appear more often (with both DH and KH monsters in the cup the probability of drawing a Mask is slim) and have more effect on the game. Basically, each time a gate is closed a die is rolled. On a 6, place a mask at the location of the closed gate. For every seal on the board, add 1 to the roll. Also, for every Mask that is on the board when Nyarly awakens, he gets an extra -1 on his combat rating. Even with this, he's still one of the easier GOOs, but it makes it a little more interesting.

Then there's Kingsport. Since the town seemed so sleepy I let a monster spawn there every time a rift token would have been placed but that row is full. These monsters count toward the Arkham monster limit.

Let's see... what else? Oh, I play with the "pay one clue to reroll the Blessing" for Sister Mary.

Also, I prefer to use all allies in my games. I make a pile with 11 for Ma's and random draws, while the rest are in a separate pile only to be drawn from if that ally is specifically named in an encounter. Every time the game calls for an ally to be discarded I draw one from the "Ma's" pile and two from the "others" pile.

I generally don't use Heralds or Guardians. Whether or not we choose Investigators and AOs randomly is decided on a game-to-game basis.

kroen said:

That's a good rule. I may think about using that.

As for picking investigators: we all choose. Usually I play two or three games with the same investigator, then get bored and switch.

Picking Great Old Ones: usually what happens is I try to get everyone else to play against Shub-Niggurath and the Black Goat of the Woods, every complains that it'll be too hard, and we end up playing against something else pretty much at random (although we dislike Tsathoggua too).

Picking Heralds: we use Hypnos if we want to make the game much easier, and King in Yellow if we want to make the game much harder. Everything else we pretty much ignore. Nodens is fun but not quite as likely to be useful as Hypnos. Tulzcha and Bast basically do nothing.

Other house rules of ours:

If using other town boards, South Church also works as a train station (so you can travel from both ends of the board).

At the start of the game, at least one track from 'A Very Scary Solstice' is played. All players must stand up and salute.

I forgot another house rule I use:

I use all Allies. The first time the terror level rises I remove 4 allies from the deck, and on the rest of the times the terror rises I remove 3. This makes it equilivant to having 11 allies, as there are 34 allies with all expansions.

Rule 1:
If you go unconscious and don't take an injury, the penalty is:

• Discard half (round down) your total trophies, half your money, half your non-spell items.

Reason: you are unconscious and have misplaced some things, and possibly have had some stuff stolen. Clues are intact. Trophies could be literally material evidence, and as such can be lost.

If you go insane and don't take a madness, the penalty is:

• Discard half (round down) your total trophies, half your clues, half your total spells and allies.

Reason: you are insane; your memories are scrambled and compromised; your allies no longer trust you. No reason to lose material items and money. Trophies could be descriptions of your encounters with monsters and gates, and as such can be forgotten.

Rule 2:
Sister Mary begins the game with 3 clues. I won't go into detail about why again, but it works well for us, and gives her a start-of-game direction.

Rule 3:
If the AO awakens, add 6 doom tokens to its total, then subtract 2 for each elder sign on the board. Discourages gearing up as a victory strategy until the very end, pushing sealing as the principal strategy. Makes Yig and Hastur proportionally harder; they need it. Makes Atlach-Nacha proportionally harder; he doesn't, but whatcha gonna do? :-P

Rule 4:
The yellow/blue dual-color OW card is changed to fighting Hastur at Lost Carcosa. Shub at Yuggoth didn't make sense, and at least with Hastur you aren't devoured instantly for lacking something (monster trophies). Shub is more of a force than a material being; just bumping into her on Pluto seems kind of... dumb.

Rule I may use in the future:
When drawing the Mythos card for the turn (including startup), if it is not a Dunwich-location gate or Next Act card (or story continues), discard it and draw again.

This roughly doubles the frequency of Dunwich gates and Next Act cards, and with all expansions including Innsmouth mixed together, the frequency of these threats drops to a bit less than half of what they would be when used as the only expansion. I may use something like this for Other World-specific gates, too.

kroen:
I use all Allies. The first time the terror level rises I remove 4 allies from the deck, and on the rest of the times the terror rises I remove 3. This makes it equilivant to having 11 allies, as there are 34 allies with all expansions.

I may use some variation of this, because I hate having 75% of my ally encounters become, "not there." However, I do like not having every ally available every game. And Ma's Boarding House may have to be modified to accommodate this, but I'll see where I can find a middle-ground.

Perhaps: set aside 11 random allies to be the Ma's deck. These allies may ONLY be bought at Ma's and can never be gained any other way; not even using Charlie Kane's ability.

The remaining 23 allies act like the regular Ally deck; they can be found in town and drawn randomly, whatever. Discard 2 whenever you're supposed to discard one ordinarily (terror-up or Lynch Mob). Obviously, Glaaki's special ability would only count this as one ally. Each ally now has a 75% chance of being in town instead of out of town. You now have the potential to collect more than 11 allies in a game, but this could be the perfect complement to my above rule that makes Atlach-Nacha harder to battle undeservingly.

Maybe remove one random ally from the game so that the common deck is 22 instead of 23; a perfect multiple of the original 11.

Maybe you could add the following rule to my variation:

When buying allies at Ma's, draw 11-X allies from the ally deck and puchase one of them, then shuffle the rest back into the ally deck. X is equal to the current terror level. I might use it myself to prevent shooping allies to be overwheling with options.

edit: I've seen you edited your post, but I like mine (this) better

kroen said:

The problem with that is that it seems like you have to buy. Like the magic shop and administration, you pay up front and then take the one you like best. Part of the pull of paying so much at Ma's is to get the ally you need the most to fortify your character. If the draw is random and you can't see who you're getting ahead of time, that kills that small element of strategy. And having to buy one, even if none are what you were seeking, is annoying, and certainly discourages ally shopping more than it already is (we never buy nowadays).

If you want a more narrow selection with a higher terror level, then you can discard one ally from Ma's in addition to the two on the "town" deck. I probably should have thought of that earlier.

Tibs said:

Like I said in my post above:

I prefer to use all allies in my games. I make a pile with 11 for Ma's and random draws, while the rest are in a separate pile only to be drawn from if that ally is specifically named in an encounter. Every time the game calls for an ally to be discarded I draw one from the "Ma's" pile and two from the "others" pile.

We don't really play with many house rules, I think. Not that come to mind, anyway. Occasionally, we flirt with house rules for Mary or something like that, and of course we make our own rulings on the many unclear things in this game.

At setup, we typically let each player choose from two. After that's decided, we randomly pick an ancient one, with some veto power if people don't want to play against him. After that, we roll randomly for the herald.

Avec, why do you have a problem with Wilson? That's why that ability is there! You're ruining him! It lets him go to dangerous places and not worry about the encounters. He'll never open a gate if he uses that ability. I like to think of it as concentrating on his work, ignoring other things going on. He could be tasked with cleaning up litter in the woods, or reshingling the Witch House, by an old hermit or something. Don't think about it too much, if you don't want to. But it hurts to cripple the character.

"I worked on a house in the merchant district the other day. They had rats in their freakin' walls! Can you believe some people?"

I've stripped the game a fair bit. With every expansion set all mixed together, things became a bit diluted and there was too much ground to cover.

So I took out all the Mythos cards that refer in any way to Dunwhich or Kingsport. The deck is STILL far too large - five games over the weekend and "The Next Act Begins" came up but once - but I want to playtest it a bit more before I make any more changes. One thing I am considering is taking out the six "The Next Act Begins" cards and before each game, shuffle the Mythos deck and take just half of it. Then shuffle the six "The Next Act Begins" cards into that half and just use that deck for the game. Would make things more unpredictable and still keep the unpleasant nature of "The Next Act Begins".

I also went through all the Item decks and took out all the non-BGotW cards that no one likes. So most of the Missions have gone, some of the Tasks have, a few spells and those two Unique Items that play in the street and let you spend Sanity for Stamina, as well as some others. These were the cards that when people got them they got annoyed - getting Joining The Winning Team in your opening items can be really annoying, for example. I haven't yet played enough with the BGotW items to know which - if any - are the ones people want to avoid but when I do I will do the same with them.

We also have a House Rule that the first time Nyaralothep's Sinister Plot card "Join Me" turns up, whoever the first player is will automatically accept his offer and no one else will hold it against them *g*. But we're still waiting for this one to actually happen ... :-)

As for set up ... We reckon the mechanics of the game work best with at least four Investigators, so in a two or three player game we randomly select 4 Investigators each then choose two out of those four while in consultation with the other player(s) (to make sure we don't get all fighters and no decent spell casters, for example). In a game with 4 or more players, we get three random Investigators each and this time select one each to play - again in consultation with everyone else.

We then roll a die to see if we use a Herald and Guardian (we never use a Guardian without a Herald but we do often use Heralds without a Guardian) but we don't select it yet, we just see if we're going to use one. We then pick the Ancient One completely randomly. If the selected Ancient One has a matching Herald and we're due to use a Herald for that game, we have a random 50/50 chance to see whether we use his little friend - normally on a 4+ we do, anythign else we don't. Then we randomly pick a Herald and Guardian as per the earlier determination ... and away we go! :-)

flamethrower49 said:

I prefer to think that I'm un-ruining him. He's still plenty tough. With his 5/5 split, unlimited focus and shotgun, he can afford to go into places where there's a little more waiting for him than just $1. I don't know if MrsGamura agrees with me on this particular point, but her admonition against turning Arkham Horror into "Hello Kitty Island Adventure" comes to mind. With Wilson's ability as it currently is, Arkham is a place where bad things never happen once you get off the streets. Yawn. There's still plenty of places for him to make a buck if he needs to.

Certainly, it's a strategic decision to use his ability - I don't use it everywhere. But it's good for a few dollars over the course of the game as he avoids the encounters at the really dangerous locations, particularly at a sensitive moment. When he's low on health, or when you don't need another gate on the table, for example. It's not like he's a game breaking character, and I barely even get him enough money to buy his health back with it. Bad things still happen at unstable locations, anyway. Getting gated during the Mythos phase comes to mind.

Speaking of "Hello Kitty Island Adventure", I bet Darrell loves your house rule.

Two house rules only:

#1: Every player draws three investigators and chooses one among them, as nothing is as frustrating as playing 4 hours with an investigator you really dislike.

#2: Sister Mary may use a clue token to re-roll her "lose-your-blessing" roll (once per turn), 'cause it's the only real good thing about her and it's a shame if she starts off losing it in the 2nd or 3rd round.

Ancient Ones and Heralds are almost always drawn at random, but sometimes we like to try a specific combo, like Shub-Niggurath & the Black Goat, Hastur & the King in Yellow, Yig & Tzulzscha etc.
We only choose to play with (random) guardians when a game seems unlikely to be won (without a final battle), like against a Y'Golonac-Black Goat- combi.

flamethrower49 said:

Maybe, it's been a while since I've seen Darrell in a game. It's true that he could avoid bad encounters at, say, the Curiositie Shop about 90% of the time (with my current deck he has a 1 in 9 chance of drawing two bad cards there). But most of the good encounters at the Curiositie Shop are marked to occur instead of the location's special ability, so Darrell still wouldn't have a lot of options if he actually wants to buy something. For example, he might be able to choose between the encounter where he gives Oliver 2 Clue tokens in exchange for a spell, or the encounter where a sale takes place. However, if he chooses the sale, he can't go shopping normally. That's why I mark the cards - to prevent people from reaping too much of an advantage. (I also removed the "Jackpot" Curiositie Shop encounter where you get to draw an item of your choice.)

Regarding Wilson, I don't agree with your logic. You're saying that his ability is okay because he only uses it for protection at sensitive moments? Those moments are exactly when bad things tend to happen. To have a character that can render the Witch House or Wizard's Hill impotent the moment those locations get inconvenient, it's just, I dunno, like taking a vacation or something. It's not scary. I'm not saying that Wilson is broken in terms of power, because I'm sure it's quite possible to lose with him. But by avoiding situations where a wounded character is forced to seek shelter in a haunted house, it seems like you're denying yourself the best part of the game. At least, that's why I nerfed the character a bit.

As you will, I suppose. It just strikes me as odd that you choose to ignore a good, but not great, ability. There's plenty of more powerful abilities out there, that avert greater misfortune. Darrell and Gloria turn bad into good fairly easily, and Jacqueline is well documented as averting the worst - in terms of investigator win percentage.

It also throws me for a loop that you take encounters out of the deck. I find the frequency with which we have encounters at the "special" locations acceptable, and with all of the expansions, the really good ones don't come up anyway. It's not like it's a crime to have a good encounter, either. To each his own, though.

This furthers my theory that anybody on this board would be annoyed, or at least confused, after playing a game of Arkham with anybody else on this board. Barring prior familiarity, of course.

flamethrower49 said:

That's certainly true. I once played AH with a friend who usually plays with another group. It was almost impossible for us to play together, as he was used to such a different approach to the game as well as some different rules.

As we're only playing league games at the moment, we've stopped all house rules, pay more attention to the phases and everyone's turn (when trading, especially). Before that we usually played random investigators against a random GOO, very rarely with heralds/guardians. We've also experimented with the "get an encounter card for using a special location" rule and found it to our liking.

Vitus_Prem said:

When I play solo, I draw all investigators randomly. When playing several games in a row I'll also discard investigators and ancient ones I've already used in previous games.

Regarding Wilson: I've only ever used his special ability if I need money, never to avoid encounters at unstable locations. I guess, I haven't realized his true potential

flamethrower49 said:

I agree that Wilson isn't in the top tier of investigators. I guess I just found that his "fix" meshed well with the house rule about the encounter cards. By the way, the "Jackpot" card is the only encounter card that I removed from the game. The encounter card house rule made me uneasy about that card. Maybe it's all my years of GM'ing power gamers, but I live in fear of broken rules that allow exploits.

My harshest house rule, and only one I can think of other than custom material, is that you don't get a new investigator after a Devouring. Otherwise, it can potentially be a benefit, especially if that investigator wasn't pulling their weight (Which is generally why they get devoured, in my experience).

Everything is either random or selected, pretty much on whim. Sometimes we want to play specific things, sometimes we just want to see what happens in a random scenario.

I haven't been playing that long, but i usually have a new player or 2 in our group.

Planning ahead for the current turn is sometimes difficult so we let players adjust their skill sliders AFTER they have moved (Still using the focus limit of course) but before the encounters phase. This is a lot more friendly for newbies who react to the board, rather than plan out their next moves during upkeep.

The Message said:

Thought about something alike once. Problem: What do the players do after their investigator was devoured within the first hour? Sit by and watch the other 3 hours quietly? That's why I decided against it, in the end.

So, I'm curious: What do your players do after their Investigators are gone?

Vitus_Prem said:

Agreed. While I'm not one of the extreme feverish Euro gamers that thinks dice are the devil, I do hate player elimination. It's good in a tournament, good in a dance competition, bad in a boardgame.

Vitus_Prem said:

I suggested to increase the number of investigators for all game purposes when a player gets a new investigator by retiring. You could also do this when a character is devoured (before final combat).