Arkham Horror: The Card Game

And then I just go and shred scenario 1 of the base game with the "structure" Jenny and Ashcan deck. I mean just fucked it up.

Maybe... is this learning?

I was playing a continuation of the decks above on the base game 2nd scenario... the difference between a weapon with ammo and no weapon is so immense, I can see why machete is considered way undercosted in the base game.

You hit a real interesting observation with machete.

It was at one point the best level 0 weapon in the game. Most of that is really lack of options. It also depends on player count. It is a much better weapon at lower player counts. As your collection mostly mirrors the games release schedule and your playing at two it should be a beast for you.

Glad that you are enjoying the game more. And that the investigator decks have been good to you. They really knocked them out of the park. I should give miss Fine a play. Really don’t care about playing Harvy.

Hope to get back into Carcosa this week.

sornars had an excellent observation in discord that I'm going to copy over to here because I thought it was very insightful. We were talking about how I think Marvel is just decent and that I'm not that into Gloomhaven, since I seem to be focusing on these games for the puzzle/gameplay aspect rather than the narrative. You'd think those more tactical and mechanical games would appeal to me more.

He mentioned that Arkham has so much flexibility in deck building that it makes a lot of the game akin to the character building and upgrading process in an tabletop RPG. The huge sideboards give you immense variety in how to create your character and the methods they'll favor to achieve goals. I've always liked the character building part of RPGs, even if I rarely play tabletop, so this really rang true for me.

Just got the second core in so I can make a lot of arkhamdb decks, getting annoyed while sorting this. So many of these signature suited cards virtually demand two copies to build a strategy around, I hope they correct this with their slightly more expensive new core set. Base decks were missing basic utility without two copies of a lot of stuff.

Agnes and Skids failed to interrupt the machinations of his cultists, and Hastur escaped Carcosa. Sorry, everyone. I did begin to right the ship in Unspeakable Oath and was actually winning scenarios again (outside failing a coin flip choice to escape the Parisian catacombs and promptly getting swarmed by four monsters), but it’s pretty hard to get much done in Dim Carcosa when you’re dragging along seven trauma and six additional weaknesses between your two investigators. I don’t think I’ve had such a sloppy replay of a campaign ever. Forgetting to add and swap chaos tokens, playing the wrong Organist with the wrong agenda, mixing up sea and air locations and acts in Black Stars Rise, I did it all. Absolute slop fest, and I’m not entirely sure whether it made it easier or harder.

I really enjoyed my parallel Agnes deck by the end. I think it needs a few more high-level events to push it over the edge, but using Summon Hounds to power your feed your spells and constantly redrawing your best events with Arcane Initiate once the deck is sufficiently thinned felt great. Parallel Skids kind of fell apart when I realized my combo didn’t actually work, and his innate ability may as well have been blank for the last four or five scenarios.

I’m really excited to dive into the curse and bless cards now that Innsmouth is complete., but I’m not sure where I’ll go next. I was thinking Return to Forgotten Age with Mateo and Wini, but I have printed several fan campaigns that demand attention as well.

God, the bounty hunter rules. What a creative and great set of mechanics. He strolled into the the casino in the first Dunwich scenario and not many mobsters walked out that day.

My other character was structure deck Daisy, who is very good but hurt by the lack of tomes in the base and dunwich cycle. Luckily I drew the old book of lore on the mulligan, which is just incredible for her card draw---an extra card every turn for the whole game is a huge advantage.

Yeah, Tony is bonkers good. Definitely in competition for the best straight killer in the game and his deckbuilding options are fun.

I wouldn’t worry too much about not having that many tomes for Daisy. Even with a full cardpool, she doesn’t need much more than Old Book of Lore and Encyclopedia to be effective.

I totally housed the museum and then set up the train in Dunwich... what a stupid scenario. It's so close to being sensible but a couple bad pulls and you're fucked.

Pulling the bounty hunter's prey (which has a doom on it and spawns as far away as possible in the engine) was a real motherfucker on top of just being incredibly hard.

Not that I'm recommending you pick it up at this stage but the Return to set makes Essex County Express harder with the tradeoff of it being far less capricious so failure is more in your hands. If you failed due to Ancient Evils, a lot of players are quite happy to substitute all instances of that with its Return To version, Resurgent Evils , which at least gives you a bit of choice in how to deal with it. This scenario is one of the worst for exploiting Tony's weakness. It may not have mattered but it may be worth mentioning that an Agenda advance will wipe out all Doom including those on Tony's Quarry. That was something I misplayed when I was first starting out.

Oh jeez, will it??? I've been playing this totally wrong, I need to read the rules!!!

Oh yeah, that's a pretty big deal. You should also know that the agenda only advances during that one phase, or if a card specifically says "this may cause the agenda to advance"; otherwise, a bunch of doom can sit on the board without the agenda advancing. This allows you to use cards that add doom willy-nilly when the agenda's about to advance the next turn anyway, 'cause it's all going to get wiped off.

We would've been TPKed in the first train car if we didn't have a Ward of Protection to cancel an Ancient Evils, during our playthrough (which was our second playthrough of Dunwich).

When I was first starting, after each play I read thoroughly through the rules reference manual after each play, as there are indeed a lot of details to miss. I highly recommend doing that. Even so, I misunderstood the Aloof rules throughout Dunwich Legacy until I got to Path to Carcosa and realized that you couldn't attack an aloof enemy unless you engaged it first (don't think it mattered much, used Agnes to kill the Whipoorwills, but still might have goofed somewhere).

We just finished playing through Forgotten Age, and contrary to what is apparently the popular opinion, it was the favorite campaign for both of us we've played yet (we're playing through them in order). We still haven't won a campaign other than Dunwich though; in Forgotten Age, we literally lost the scenario before my wife got to take a turn (she was Calvin Wright with 5 trauma of each kind, and I played Cryptic Research on her on my turn and she drew her weakness! We were aware that that was likely though.)!

Looking forward to playing Circle Undone and finally starting to use the taboo list (though we'll be using the taboo list circa TCU, not the current taboo list); we've definitely been using the crap out of the taboo cards, Key of Ys yikes.

I did get that one right but sitting down with the rules, as you suggested, needs to happen.

Yeah, the Reference guide is written in a manner that makes it unpleasant to read. It's a worse version of the Law of format used by Leder Games but contains a lot of essential information. Relevant section is under the Act Deck and Agenda Deck header:

1. Remove all tokens from the card to be advanced. If the agenda deck is advancing, remove all doom from each card in play.

I actually like the reference book more than other FFG reference books I've read. In particular, I think going through the trouble to do all the timing windows and process diagrams is incredibly helpful.