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Three expansions, two of which were treading water and a third which transformed the game.
As noted last time, one of the main complaints about Elder Sign from otherwise enthusiastic players was that the game was actually too easy. Despite the "randomness" of dice, there were enough tools built into the game (Items, Focus, etc.) to compensate for any reasonable roll you were attempting to make. Add that to the fact that the starting space (the Museum Entrance) allowed you to purchase all manner of items with Trophies (Exhibit and/or Other Worlds cards that you had successfully completed, as well as monsters defeated) including the very currency (Elder Signs) that you needed to win the game and it's not difficult to figure out that most experienced gamers were going to get through with not a great deal of fuss. In an unusual direct comparison, it was actually far easier than the subsequently released app. So when an expansion was announced (this is Fantasy Flight, after all), there was high expectation that not only would a great deal of needed variety be injected into the game but that said variety might be more challenging than the base game's offerings. Well, you wanted 3 out of 6 results on the dice, right...?
Unseen Forces:
Forces added in eight new Investigators, four new Ancient Ones, and a bunch of new Monsters, Items, Allies, Spells, and Mythos cards. But most importantly it added 40 new Adventure cards and two new Other Worlds cards so there were new places to go. Almost as important, it split the Museum Entrance up into four locations: The First Aid station, the Souvenir Shop, the Chapel, and the Lost & Found. Key to this change was that you could no longer purchase Elder Signs from your home base, but the collection of locations also provided a couple other options for not pursuing an Adventure that turn. First off, the Lost & Found became marginally more useful since you were rolling three dice instead of one, but which also meant you suffered/gained all of the effects of those dice and not just the benefits. But the new location, the Chapel, granted direct exposure to the major new feature: Blessed/Cursed.
Said feature is relatively simple: If you're Blessed, you gain the white Blessed die for any roll, which is another green die. If you're Cursed, you have to use the black Cursed die for any roll (this is where I often reference Malcolm X's story about being shown the dictionary in prison) and anytime what shows up on the Cursed die matches one of your other die rolls, you have to discard both Cursed die and the matching die. So, y'know, not something you want hanging around for very long. Fortunately, every time you become Blessed it cancels Cursed and vice-versa. Also, winning a Blessed reward on an Adventure while you're already Blessed means you can take one of the alternate rewards on the Chapel card (Clue token, Spell, Common Item, or Unique Item.) This can be important because Blessed shows up as a reward a few times on the new cards (and continues to do so in later expansions) while Cursed actually shows up as part of a reward(!) on one card (Just Sign Here) and as a penalty a few other times. But both conditions really occur most often in the Mythos deck as part of a story element, while Blessed also shows up in the Item and Spell decks, as well. One good advancement for the challenge is that they introduced the Clock icon, which advanced the turn clock by one or more segments, making the Mythos deck a bit more of an immediate challenge (and also added Master Mythos cards, which were intended to be more challenging.) But on top of that, Unseen also introduces the Reprieve icon as part of the rewards from the new adventures, which removes a Doom token from the track. Once again, where most were hoping for an increase in difficulty, Unseen wasn't really delivering, despite a lot of cool, new stuff to do.
You might be able to argue that some of tbe Entry effects (stuff that happens as soon as you move your Investigator to the card) were a little harsher than most of the base cards, like Strange Robberies costing you 1 Stamina and 1 Sanity as soon as you land there, but then you have special rewards like The Director's Safe that's only asking you to complete two tasks (1 Lore and 1 Peril, followed by 2 Peril) and getting you the top two cards of the Adventure deck as trophies, in addition to a Unique item as a standard reward. Lingering Curse causes you to lose Stamina and Sanity until you only have 1 of each remaining on a Terror result, but it also only has 2 tasks (3 Investigation, followed by 2 Lore and 1 Peril) and it's s trophy value of 4(!), as well as 2 Uniques and a Spell. So, again, variety was present. Challenge was a little less so.
Grave Consequences
We're jumping out of order here, as Unseen Forces arrived in 2013 and the transformative Gates of Arkham (below) showed up in 2015, while Grave Consequences didn't appear until 2016. That in itself is an indicator as to what kind of expansion GS is, since it's mostly about flavor and color, but in the vein of Gates, it does slightly increase the difficulty of the game, albeit by taking another route to the "end condition" of many Investigators and the end game itself if you don't meet your overall goal. It's a tiny release of 50 cards (15 Epitaph, 15 Phobia, 20 Epic Battle) that just try to make the (ahem) grave effects of what happens to your investigator a little more interesting. With the Phobia cards, instead of being devoured because you've gone insane, you can instead take a Phobia that will affect your Investigator in certain circumstances for the rest of the game, always involving Sanity loss and often for routine things, like any Investigator casting a spell. So instead of getting a full reset, you're still you, but losing Sanity even faster than normal. If you do die from wounds, you can draw an Epitaph card that has a brief effect and then is used as a gravesite, complete with the Investigator's standee atop it. These effects run the gamut from gaining an Elder Sign to adding a Doom token and all things in between. The majority of them do result in Sanity loss for the surviving Investigators, though, and quite a few monsters appear, as well, so again it's a mild difficulty increase that doesn't just give you a whole new Investigator to charge into the breach unaffected by all of the terror that's taken place so far.
And, in true Arkham Horror fashion, they also included Epic Battle cards, which turn the final fight against the GOO into more of an interesting process than simply "GOO does this horrible thing to all of you and how long can you last before killing it?" The answer to that question was always "Not very long", as is appropriate when facing an otherworldly demon god, so the Epic Battles give you a bit more of an angle in lasting if you've lost the main part of the game. Just as with these same moments in Arkham Horror, I'm not really a fan of this approach. The essence of HPL's stories is that the GOOs are powers beyond our ken and if you manage to keep them from entering our world, great. But if they do enter and you're squaring off with one with a shotgun and a fancy knife? Eh. But even worse in this case is that at least half of the Epic Battle cards are beneficial to the Investigators, granting them Spells, yellow or red dice, or other advantages before the next round of battle. Now, granted, our occasional direct encounters with a GOO has usually been the immediate end of the game, since their attacks are appropriately devastating, so maybe this was a way to allow for the heroic comeback, rather than the automatic loss. Anyway, like the Phobias and Epitaphs, the Epic Battle cards are really just more gloss on top of a game that's already fairly heavy on style, which is why I decided to talk about it before the expansion that was the quite literal game changer for Elder Sign.
Gates of Arkham
This was the big change. Gates not only added in the usual passel of Investigators, GOOs, Items, and other gear, but it created a whole new system of how to proceed on your adventures. One of the keys to strategy in the base game was that you could always see what was coming. When a new exhibit was revealed, you could assess its difficulty against all of the other Adventure cards in play and decide on a course of action in a methodical way. Gates made things different, in that now all new adventures came out face down, with only a traffic light indicator system (green = easy, yellow = mid, red = hard) for how difficult the adventure was supposed to be. This system would be used in all three of the subsequent Omens expansions, as well. That change helped maintain far more mystery about the tasks ahead and often resulted in more problems on display than could be easily dealt with, especially considering the number of "At Midnight" cards that have an effect that resolves (usually negative) if the card is still face down at Midnight (i.e. take the risk of what it is or suffer other consequences.) But there are also effects that Investigators can take advantage of when turning over said cards that are usually beneficial, so it kind of evens out.
The main change flavor-wise is that instead of being holed up in the Museum, you're on the streets of Arkham. Remember all those cool locations like Hibb's Roadhouse and The Witch House and The Silver Twilight Lodge? Well, you can visit those and the backs of those cards are also carrying the associated color scheme that many of us remember from Arkham Horror. Those location details will give you a general idea of what to expect if you've been to an adventure that shares that location, but the mystery is still maintained (at least for the first few plays) as to what exactly you'll be running into. That brings us to the reason for the expansion title, which are the gates, just like AH. When an effect opens a gate or places an Other Worlds card, you place two matching gate markers on that Other Worlds card and an Adventure card of your choice. At that point, you can't go to that Adventure card until you've completed the Other World and sealed the gate. If you're stuck placing that gate on a card that has an At Midnight effect, you're about to suffer. On the other hand, cards that have an Event symbol mean you'll be drawing from the new Event deck which is at least as random as any die roll. Could mean that you get to ignore stamina and sanity loss on your tasks. Could mean that you just automatically lose both of those, too. But the new Mythos cards are heavily engaged with the gate system, too, making it even more challenging to get to the adventures that you think you can handle (when you can see them.) And your new starting card is, appropriately, Streets of Arkham which does away with all of the shopping of the base game and Unseen Forces and instead only lets you spend 2 trophies to reveal an Adventure card, discard one without a gate, monster, locked die, or Investigator, or regain 1 Stamina and 1 Sanity. Everything else you find yourself while out adventuring like you should be.
One beneficial change for the Investigators is another huge flavor boost, since you're able to become a member of the Silver Twilight Lodge or the Sheldon Gang, both of which give you benefits on particular cards if you land on them, usually letting you solve tasks without having to roll dice, like Bank Robbery, which lets you ignore the first task of 1 Investigation (followed by 3 Investigation and 1 Peril and then 1 Peril) and gets you an Ally to go with the 2 Common items that anyone gets, if you're a member of the Sheldon Gang. Or Initiation Into The Mysteries, which lets you ignore the third task of 1 Investigation and lose 1 Sanity (after 3 Investigation and a Lore and then 2 Investigation) and gains you a Unique item to go with the Spell and Clue that non-Order Investigators would get, if you're a Lodge member. You also get access to Skills, which are constant effects, rather than the one-and-done of Items and Spells throughout the game. But the penalties on failed Adventures are also more deleterious, since a lot of them involve discarding those Items or Allies or Spells that you didn't even use to try to solve that Adventure. (Seriously, I said: No more shopping!) Hopefully needless to say, the game totally changed for us when we started playing Gates. We got ROFLstomped in our first attempt at this expansion, taking on Atlach-Nacha who promptly awakened, gathered all of the gates currently in play to her web and then drained Sanity from both of us per gate. No more. The end. This was clearly what we had been waiting for. Since then, we've gone about 60-40 in success-failure against the game, which strikes me as just about ideal for a co-op about the terrors beyond our world.
The Other Worlds, key to solving that whole gate problem, are also somewhat more challenging than the base/Unseen groups. Unknown Kadath will get you 2 Elder Signs and a Skill as a reward, but it also requires 3-5 Terror, 1-2 Lore, and 1 Peril over its three tasks. If you fail it, you not only lose 1 of your already acquired Elder Signs, but also put 2 Doom tokens on the track. The Great Temple requires 4 Peril, a Peril/Terror, and loss of 1 Stamina or one Investigator at the Temple when the clock hits midnight will be devoured. The City of Gugs is only two tasks, but the first is 2 x 3 Investigation and a Peril and the second is 2 Peril, a Terror, and loss of 1 Stamina and on a Terror result you discard a trophy or get devoured. Plus, as you can see above and in contrast to his version in Cthulhu: Death May Die, Yog-Sothoth is a badass! But what all of that steep challenge produced were some of the best games of Elder Sign we'd played. That is, until we got to the Omens...
