Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Gary Sax wrote: Honestly, wish eater works in any scenario with swarm for any muscular guardian. It works elsewhere too but it's much iffier because you might not get it early enough and you might not fight enough 2 health normal annoyances to really flip it.

That is the challenge with all exceptional cards. Fortunately, it’s more of a “great to draw” than “need to draw” for most decks. Better in higher player counts, too, where more enemies should appear.

Oh yeah, good point, with 3 or 4 it'd be huge and more guaranteed to fill up.

I sort of understand the principles of high level play of this game, but I must say it does shunt you toward guaranteed permanent cards and test less clue and damage stuff. Seems... boring to me I guess?

That’s my feeling, too. Expert play seems to really demand specific cards and builds that don’t really excite me. Fortunately, the community is accommodating to different goals and play styles and doesn’t treat Easy as baby town or Expert as the real game.

I prefer Standard as the right level of challenge for the sub-optimal builds I prefer but would probably run Hard in Dunwich because it has fallen behind as the card pool has grown.

Finally finished Innsmouth. My wife drew a bonkers opening hand that put into play every asset she needed and proceeded to run roughshod over the entire scenario. I was also present. It kind of felt like cheating, but we were due to trounce a finale after some rough endings lately.

I’d put the campaign somewhere in the mid tier, probably just after Carcosa but before Circle Undone. I think the flashback organization of the scenarios and memories mechanic are standouts, giving the investigators a type of narrative agency that goes beyond stumbling around and messing with the bad guys while also encouraging replays and “perfect” scores. However, I think Innsmouth is held back by a certain sameness to the scenarios. The box famously comes with the first new tokens since the core. Bless and curse tokens for players are the best known of these, but there are also flood and key tokens for scenarios. Newman and Zwirn decided to go all in with these tokens in mind, but where it felt like they exhausted their ideas for bless and curse with different themes and mechanics for how they interact with all the classes, it feels like they just repeated the same key token mechanics again and again. Find a key. Find the key’s trigger. Repeat. Of the three standout scenarios in the campaign (Vanishing of Elian Harper, In Too Deep, and Horror in High Gear) only one used keys and did so without the locations every other scenario used to trigger them. Not to say this is in anyway a bad campaign or not worth buying, but it didn’t feel as inventive or exciting as some others.

Looking forward to Edge of the Earth now, whenever that finally drops. Excited to see what breaking the eight scenario rule does for the creative juices. Newman has already said a campaign can last between four and ten scenarios.

Nice, looking forward to comparing notes when my first playthrough is done.

I can’t wait to try insmouth. But unless I do it solo I am waiting to play it with my buddy. It’s at the end of our run through stuff though. As we are about to start Forgotten age.

Speaking of forgotten age we are building decks for it. Looks like the duo will be 2 generalist decks from Finn and Ashcan Pete.

Should be exciting.

Argh, I missed a rule in the act in the first Innsmouth campaign that you progressively add locations so I got locked out of even having a chance of winning. So frustrating, I cannot get these right on the first try sometimes.

There are a lot of little niggles to movement in Innsmouth. I definitely missed stuff in my first plays of Horror in High Gear, Lair of Dagon, Light in the Fog and Devil Reef. Probably evened out overall in terms of making things more or less difficult. Definitely read every act, agenda and location closely and still be prepared to make mistakes, unfortunately.

sornars and I just had a tale of two scenarios in easy Carcosa. Literally nothing went right in the first one and we were both defeated on terrible draws and miserable luck... then we went to the next scenario and just wrecked house, interviewing everyone and getting out without much fuss. Very funny how the same deck can just be the subject of such swings; it's not like the first scenario was so much better for our decks or anything.

It’s funny what a scenario can swing on.

arkhamdb.com/deck/view/1586527

This is the new deck I cooked up. I plan to buy into On your own and Quick Learner pretty fast as well as relic hunter. Likely be the first 10 xp I spend. Quick learner would be the third of the 3. On your own should really clean up my deck econ.

Pretty excited to try it out.

Interesting, it never occured to me how many of those crucial survivor skills and events are "spirit."

Yeah. I am banging the spirit drum pretty hard.

It’s funny cause my original deck was very different. Both my buddy playing Finn and myself wanted Peter Sylvester. So I said you take him and I went back to tweaking. I was not feeling any allies, level 0 Granny is really expensive for a buff I was not super into. So instead of going that direction I went On your own. I added the lost star buffs in with Dreamstone and ditched grisly totem and rabbit’s foot. And then started harder into the fail spirit events.

We will see how it plays. But it should be exciting one way or another.

So, the forgotten age begins.

In the end. Neither of us took young Peter Sylvester. What sorta started off well. Ended ok. But the middle was a huge mess.

I let my buddy pick all our gear for the adventure. I think he did pretty well. No bedrolls. But I was ok with that.

I think we both had ok opening hands. We got rolling and I ate an encounter card strait today the face off explore. Then another the next turn. Not an ideal beginning. We got rolling till I pulled Ashecan’s weakness. What a kick in the pants that thing is in play. It ended up crushing me for two whole turns. I had a big snake on me that I needed to evade then clear my weakness for 2 actions. I proceeded to fail to evade twice and getting it on go 3. Then had to clear the next turn after evading. Meanwhile, Finn was bogged down with parley checks and other things.

It was a mess. We both learned some things about our decks. I’m the end it went pretty well. 10 xp and Finn poisoned. We cleared that in the interlude and now we go onto the ruins.

For my upgrades I grabbed All alone, Agro vision and relic hunter. Two pretty huge permanent cards there. Should make a difference right off the bat. Rhat 2 Econ for events should really provide a huge boost. Not totally sure what Finn took. I think he did one Lockpick. But pretty sure it was clue oriented. And also upgraded Burglaries. For the Econ.

Can’t wait to see how this progresses.

I vastly prefer the new explore rules from the Return if only for the speed of set up, but I think I’d rather draw the treacheries from the bounce than later when there might be enemies chasing me down.

Sounds like a solid start to me with only the poison.

God damn the first mission in Innsmouth is hard. The token setup is brutal, even on easy.