Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Finished up scenario 6 in Carcosa. Interesting game. We started out slow. We also split up. Which is not normally the way we operate. It took me most of the game to find any clue compression so I spent most of the game grabbing one at a time. While not ideal the deck plays ok doing it. As all my bless adding is passive.

Finally got to play my latest expensive upgrades in Holy Spear and Enchant weapon. Both cards did some work for us. I enchanted a Winchester and the bonus damage was real handy. Not an ideal play. But I sorta ignored that when. I threw it on the deck. Holy Spear is fantastic. It really gives Sister Mary sole teeth. It’s a total vanity upgrade in this duo that I bought because I wanted to. I can also enchant it to really fine me more bite. 4 damage for 1 swing is pretty significant.

I am playing Mary sorta like Diana. I feel like there is a lot of overlap between the two. I mean. They are the reverse of each other with card options. So that makes wards a no brainer. I also have ward of radiance as it’s just good. I can honestly see level 2 holy rosary in Diana decks. I love this card. I don’t think I would want to try and be main clue person with Diana though. I quite enjoy both of these investigators.

Bought my second copies of Holy Spear and Enchant weapon with our earned xp. We have earned quite a lot between Yorick’s sig and me packing 2 delves for 5 scenarios. So we are pretty loaded. Not sure what Yorick is upgrading.

Hope to knock out the last two scenarios on Monday and Tuesday.

Pretty excited to take the new Holy Rosary for runs in Forgotten Age and Circle Undone. Will tests sitting around in Circle and the Explore deck in Forgotten seem like a lot of opportunities to pop in a few more bless tokens.

It’s money. I bet you could easily keep the bag pretty flush in a Carolyn deck. If you built around it with I’ll take it and you Handel this one you can really do some crazy shit. It does not exhaust so you can pass multiple tests in a turn.

It has really been one of the stars of this carcosa run. We quite often have a full bag to work from. The will bonus is great for my build and the bonus sanity is great as I have 3 mental trauma.

I can’t say enough good things about this card.

My next project will be to see how many actions I can save over the course of a campaign with riot whistle. I think it will be a lot. Not sure when I’ll get to chard this though.

Has anyone used an enchanted dog (summoned hound) build? It gives you like a slightly better Duke and then puts somewhat tough enemy in your weaknesses... feels like it's worth the negative but I'm not sure.

I find there are a bunch of cards I have in my smallish collection where I'm like, "I'd have to build around this if I wanted to use it but it seems interesting." Which is actually a big encouragement to deck build tbh.

You really have to build for Summoned Hound. The free investigate/fight is good but probably not worth the weakness and slots on their own. I enjoyed them in my recent parallel Agnes build that just threw damage on them immediately. If you have access to level two A Chance Encounter, a survivor card, you can cheese the Hounds in without their weakness. There are definitely more efficient allies and cards, but the Hounds are fun and worth playing.

Here’s the link to Agnes:
images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_..._with_bleed-good.pdf

I have Patricia Hathaway who could pull this off I think with her card churn?

I think Patrice is a fine choice because she can use the free actions well and doesn’t need the arcane slot so much, but you’d need to play Chance Encounter because she’s definitely pulling the weakness otherwise.

I just played the Unseen scenario from dunwich and it was great! My team was well fucked by having to fight on will and having a bunch of will treachery but we gutted it out due to a lucky final location draw for the last spawn. I had a ton more time so I should have been more deliberate in clearing the thrall enemies, they're kind of an emergency.

boardlandia.com/collections/deal-of-the-week

This game has elevated so much for me in the last week or two, I play it most evenings when my spouse goes to bed, that I just bought this tranche. Price was too good; better than it would be even with the new release model.

I'm very weak.

Sornars and I had a very funny game starting Carcosa where I drew my weaknesses in like the first two turns and drew none of my clue events. This is, uh, a slight problem since I'm running a Luke Robinson deck that's supposed to investigate from the gate box, open gates, and other adjacent locations using clue events.

We had one of those classic moments where we were completely out the door trying to escape but my foolishness in placing the hazardous materials and the vagaries of the encounter deck turned a perfectly cromulent sure win into a mental trauma for his Yorrick and a very lucky parlay token draw from me to escape with my final action before KO.

Played through the penultimate game in my Dunwich campaign, the one on Sentinel Hill. This campaign has really been teaching me about putting a little sustain in your deck. I managed a win by the skin of my teeth, including a solid "take attacks of opportunity and then blow yourself up with dynamite" moment to finish off the guy at the top of the mountain and some horrors. But I had only gotten 11 doom in and there are like 13 more turns I could have used, but my characters were ground down by damage and horror very early. The design of some of the paths just felt kind of arbitrary and silly.

I thought I was so fucking smart by including the upgraded lady that digs tomes out in Daisy's deck and +1 intellect and mind but was horrified to learn she a) mills your deck hard in these big scenarios which is *horrible* in Dunwich. Similarly, she mills you so hard on tomes in a scenario like this that you're going to be forced to draw your stupid weakness with it before long since it's an automatic reaction.

Whitton Greene and player card reactions in general aren’t actually forced. There’s no ‘may’ in the text because the reaction itself isn’t demanded.

You may want to keep searching if you’re trying to trigger cards like Astounding Revelation, but once you have the cards you want, it’s probably good to hang tight, so you don’t find the Necronomicon.

Hope you enjoy Lost in Time and Space. It remains one of my three favorite finales after all this time. It really evokes the feeling of disorientation and loss just right.

Oh shit, ok! So there's no may because the rules themselves say any non-forced thing is a may. Thank you for that.

Glad to hear the game is really starting to click for you Gary.

The you explode for drawing your deck remains one of the lamer things that can happen to you. But there are some cards you can tech to deal with it. If you have them. Not sure if you have Quantum flux. But you are about to be done with the campaign anyway so a little late on this advice.

We are now on the last scenario of Carcosa. We muddled through this last scenario. We crossed the board 2 times which was real unnecessary. Enchanted Weapon continues to impress. We had an enchanted baseball bat as it turns out both of Yorick’s new chainsaws were in the last 7 cards of his deck. Kicking the bat to three damage was huge. Holy Spear, still an awesome weapon. I really like this Sister Mary deck. It’s a lot of fun. That said I am excited to try something new.

On Saturday I am going to be teaching 2 total newbies how to play. So I built some strait-forward decks. A Daisy list with a lot of simple to use books. Nathen will be punching stuff. Also pretty basic. And an event focused Jenny deck for me. Just gonna play night of the zealot as a good set of teaching scenarios. They should have no trouble picking up the game. They are seasoned boardgamers.

Should be a nice change of pace.

The deck mill death, I don't love it as a mechanic either. Since it's such a core mechanic they can leverage I get how they got there as their first expansion, but it just doesn't feel that good.

That said, I had a good time with a good number of these scenarios. And I thought the one I played with sornars (Carcosa first scenario iirc) was a blast.

If you made them decks yourself from your big sideboard I bet they'll have fun. Being able to leverage your actual powers and do some damage is fun. So even if you lose or whatever if you felt like you had options and weren't just pinned under a bunch of engaged monsters or locations with too high a clue value I think that obviates a lot of my bitching. On top of that, you know how all the scenarios work broad strokes so they won't be groping about trying to put together a conceptual picture turn to turn.