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Anonymous Robot posted:I picked up Return to Dunwich, because I was fixing to get a long box to pack it all up anyhow, so why not get the nice bonus stuff too? I really wish they would have bitten the bullet and included the three cards needed for a new rats. They could have just included the same rats but with different art or something. Now there is one small packet of cards that prevents that box from being completely independent and it is annoying.
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# ? Jun 7, 2024 20:08 |
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Maybe there's a need for 'Reinforcement Pack' encounter sets that are frequently used / leveraged between campaigns. And hard use / wearing out / eaten by a grue casualties during play.
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https://www.etsy.com/listing/866619604/arkham-horror-lcg-wooden-path-markers I see these but what are they used for?
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People use them to show which locations are connected, so you don't have to memorise the map or constantly check the connection icons.
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Xlorp posted:Maybe there's a need for 'Reinforcement Pack' encounter sets that are frequently used / leveraged between campaigns. And hard use / wearing out / eaten by a grue casualties during play. Eh... I don't think so? In large part because they just recently printed the revised core set with all the encounter cards again. As for Rats, I remember someone made a custom alternate version of them where they just had Surge, which was such a good idea TCU used it! (also they said they were inspired by TCU, so that may be more causal than coincidental).
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Omnicrom posted:Eh... I don't think so? In large part because they just recently printed the revised core set with all the encounter cards again. I'd love a few extra sets of the shared encounter cards without needing to shell out for a new core set. It'd just be nice to have everything standalone within a given return to box, without needing to dig up the right sets and remember to put them back when I'm done with the campaign.
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I've been thinking of picking this game up. How easy is it to put together "pickup and play" decks for each character with just the core set + Dunwich expansions? Are the cards limited so that you'd need to be constantly swapping specific cards between packs? I'm also not super interested in the character progression aspect of it. Is it possible to put together a deck for a character and play through a whole campaign without changing the cards? Or do the scenarios get progressively harder so you'll be getting your rear end kicked by the end? Basically, I'm wondering how close you can get to the Marvel Champions method of deckbuilding for this game. Thanks!
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Jimmeeee posted:I've been thinking of picking this game up. How easy is it to put together "pickup and play" decks for each character with just the core set + Dunwich expansions? Are the cards limited so that you'd need to be constantly swapping specific cards between packs? Funny you should ask that. I literally just built and played with these: https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/6942/roland-turn-2-cores-into-a-5-character-pick-up-and-play-se-1.0 https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/6938/skids-turn-2-cores-into-a-5-character-pick-up-and-play-set-1.0 https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/6940/agnes-turn-2-cores-into-a-5-character-pick-up-and-play-set-1.0 https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/6941/daisy-turn-2-cores-into-a-5-character-pick-up-and-play-set-1.0 https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/6939/wendy-turn-2-cores-into-a-5-character-pick-up-and-play-set-1.0 The user "StartWithTheName" is apparently pretty popular, and he made some pick-up-and-play decks for the five investigators in the core set. You don't even have to worry about having to swap any cards around like the deck primer says, because the revised core set brings enough copies of every card to build all five. E: I do believe the scenarios are put together in such a way that the game expects you to have improved your deck as you go along.
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Upgrading your cards is fun! They become cheaper, more effective, you do more of what your character does best. If you want your deck to become identical but better, you can just proxy “down the rabbit hole “from edge of the earth and play Diana. I think she can beat a campaign with 94% identical cards that she started with, simply upgraded. I play a lot of Marvel but upgrading an Arkham is half the fun.
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Batterypowered7 posted:Funny you should ask that. I literally just built and played with these: Hey this is awesome, thank you!
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Jimmeeee posted:I'm also not super interested in the character progression aspect of it. Is it possible to put together a deck for a character and play through a whole campaign without changing the cards? Or do the scenarios get progressively harder so you'll be getting your rear end kicked by the end? The game explicitly expects that over the course of the campaign you will upgrade your deck. There is a difficulty curve in the game such that enemies and locations become harder the further you go into said campaign. It's possible to finish a campaign with the same deck you started with, but that's generally just going to make it harder to succeed than it needs to be. The thing to remember is that a lot of very cool and very powerful cards are gated by an experience cost, unlike Marvel Champions you can't just put any card from your class in the deck, the strongest, coolest, most exciting cards are pretty much all going to be high-level and only become available in a campaign once you get the chance to change up your deck. Another thing that is different between Marvel and Arkham is that Arkham restricts card access by character. Unlike Marvel were you can have any character choose any aspect, Arkham has strict guidelines on what cards a particular character can play. Furthermore, a character's unique cards are going to be, at most, four cards (and for most people it's only going to be two) so your Faction cards represent a huge portion of your character's abilities (note that at the same time there's enough variety in Faction cards the characters generally avoid feeling same-y). You can definitely make ready built, pick up and play decks for characters, but it's not possible to make an interchangeable, good all-around core of Aspect cards to swap around between characters like you can in Marvel.
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Arent there also rules for starting with a deck with experience cards? You just have to add more weaknesses or something? Or is that just for stand alone scenarios and not campaigns? I remember seeing people say they stop at 9, 19 or 29 xp since hitting the multiples of 10 hits you with another penalty.
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bagrada posted:Arent there also rules for starting with a deck with experience cards? You just have to add more weaknesses or something? Or is that just for stand alone scenarios and not campaigns? Those are the rules for running standalones and aren't meant to be done for campaigns, though you probably could TBH. There's also a couple of characters who start with XP and In The Thick of It which gives you a starting bonus at a cost.
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Those are the stand-alone scenario rules, yeah. Honestly I wouldn't recommend Arkham to a group with zero interest in upgrading decks between scenarios. You'd lose so much of the game, including the tension between whether to take risks and potentially earn more VP for upgrades or play it safe and get out. Ripley fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Omnicrom posted:It's possible to finish a campaign with the same deck you started with Or with the 0xp deck you had to build for scenario 8 after you died in scenario 7.
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A little foolish that the deluxe campaign scenario books don’t fit into the Return To boxes.
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Anonymous Robot posted:A little foolish that the deluxe campaign scenario books don’t fit into the Return To boxes. I wanna get these printed out: https://github.com/Antimarkovnikov/AHC_CYOA/wiki They look cool as poo poo.
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No dividers for the “return to” encounter sets either, huh? Not great. Edit: Well, you can toss the return to sets in front of the regular sets and they’re not that obtrusive. I’m worried these cards won’t stay in place and will just get shuffled up if the box shifts or turns, though. Edit 2: Realizing now that the cardboard space filler is probably meant to keep the cards from getting mixed together. But the folded-up deluxe scenario booklet is handling that job now Anonymous Robot fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Mar 13, 2022 |
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![]() So Roland's first attempt at the game came to an end, after about 2+ hours of going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth through the rulebook trying to figure out what the next steps are. Unfortunately he just couldn't do enough damage to the ghoul priest and ended up taking maximum horror damage, because he failed a skill check (which I still don't quite understand that well, but I'm pretty sure I did it right.) ![]() As you can see here, Magnifying Glass doesn't appear to have helped me pass the Parley check to obtain Lita Chantler, because that's only for investigation checks not just automatically add them to my int checks. I could have done a chaos bag int check to try and parley her, but as this is Solo and I didn't think I'd win, furthermore, I tried using vicious blow on a fight check in order to do two damage, but then the token on vicious blow I picked is a -1, and if i fail the skill check that's 1 horror damage, no damage to the boss, which means the following enemy phase he gets to do 2/2 damage to me, which maxes out my horror hit points and I fail. I think the only way he would have won is by resigning, but I'm not sure I can do anything to improve my deck from there vs a resign or a loss, other than just not calling it one or the other, the effect is the same. So, I assume I just have to keep going at it until I luck out on better hand draws. There's other aspects I don't quite understand, like, i assume that "taking control" of Lita would mean she gives me extra health/horror, and that when dealing damage to myself, ideally I want to do damage to the equips that have such things so the investigator themselves don't die (in other words, if Lita has to die for Roland to survive, then RIP, sucks to be her.) I forgot to put supply tokens on First Aid, so just assume there's 3 tokens there, I didn't have the action economy to actually have the time to use it (I had used it, then decided if I didn't attack that would mean I'd have an attack of opportunity, which would have put me to 4 horror, and then phase 3 is just basically another 2 horror on top of that unmitigated (unless you have a card like Dodge, which I had used the previous turn to move to the Parlor without fighting the Priest the previous turn since I had him and another ghoul engaged on me) and because of Frozen in Fear it meant that I only really had 1 action anyways instead of 2 that turn, because of attacks of opportunity if I didn't fight an engaged enemy.) I think I could have got this if there was another investigator like in 2p (the act saying you had to actually be on the hallway in order to advance the act was slightly annoying and didn't help me since I wanted to exhaust all the clues from the cellar for the VP, and of course, doing so spawns the boss on you, which if I understand correctly auto-engages you in combat, so if you don't interact with him and fight then that is really bad overall) who could have provided their cards for my skill checks but that's unlikely to be the case for some time. I'm a bit grumpy when solo board games have a high difficulty level, where you feel like you're like just-almost-there if only RNG would have been nicer to you, cause that's less skill based and more just "hahafuckyou" and that's not "hard" that's just annoying. I much rather enjoy games when the difficulty is a notch or two lower than that. It very well could be that I've completely misunderstood a mechanic or did something wrong, it wouldn't surprise me. I'll not have time again today but in a few days I'll try again. GreenBuckanneer fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Mar 14, 2022 |
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A few helpful things: Solo is much harder than more players, because the game wants you to do a lot of things and specializing hopes you more than the difficult increases for having multiple people. It’s also statistically unlikely to have a bad start for four people compared to a bad start with one. You level up no matter what happens as long as your investigator isn’t driven insane or killed. That doesn’t mean defeated by damage or horror, that means you take as much trauma as you would start with (five horror in Roland’s case.) Healing items that take actions are extremely ineffective in solo. You have three actions to turn and they all need to be used on progressing the game state. (The reason Roland is good for solo is that he can combine multiple efficiencies: on the hunt handles the encounter phase, and killing the enemy you spawn can give you a clue in a single action.) It’s possible that two experienced players, with decks built for the campaign can still lose in part 1. Almost every campaign is designed to continue even if you did badly, and some balance the fact that you did badly! (In the Innsmouth Conspiracy, my partner and I completely flubbed adventure 4, but part six rewired the bag to make up for it.) Get used to losing a little, because it makes the game exciting: can you afford to go after victory point locations, even if it’s incidental to your objective? What will matter more for the next adventure, killing the boss or getting people out alive? Running two handed with Roland and Daisy or Roland and Wendy is recommended for the first run through zealot.
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A lot of people play "solo" two handed where you use two investigators cause then that lets you do the more co-opy thing where one character is good at fighting and the other good at investigating. As Golden Bee has said, a lot of the scenarios are designed with you resigning as a reasonable potential outcome like when you've done enough in your opinion, other times it's a neutral/bad ending for the scenario but you nearly always carry on regardless, it just changes the story/setup for the next one. It's nearly always better to resign than it is to run out of health/sanity if you can but even running out of either of those things isn't the worst. In our first proper campaign, we've all accrued some mental trauma and it just means you have to be a bit more careful or use some healing.
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One of the people I play with asked me to tune up their deck after a couple of disappointing sessions. There were a number of problems with it, but the funniest and most notable one was that they misread Carolyn Fern’s deckbuilding requirements (they understandably missed that Carolyn can take level 0 weapons) so their damage was based on using charisma and churning through as many guard dogs, beat cops, and Brother Xaviers as legally permissible. Sociopath Carolyn! Ironically, tuning up their deck meant making Carolyn a more expert manipulator: sifting out the less competent allies and adding in cards like Leadership and Stand Together to allow her to leverage fellow investigators instead, and giving her a flask and a machete if all else fails. Ideally, she would have two copies of shrivelling (she’s currently built for wit+might, but the might part is a bit of a crutch to get her baseline okay with the machete whereas her wit is extremely strong) but Jim is still clutching the last level 0 copy of that at present.
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Anonymous Robot posted:One of the people I play with asked me to tune up their deck after a couple of disappointing sessions. There were a number of problems with it, but the funniest and most notable one was that they misread Carolyn Fern’s deckbuilding requirements (they understandably missed that Carolyn can take level 0 weapons) so their damage was based on using charisma and churning through as many guard dogs, beat cops, and Brother Xaviers as legally permissible. Sociopath Carolyn! sounds like they built a Tommy Muldoon deck on accident. But my real question is why are they trying to build Carolyn Fern as a damage dealer when she has 4 intellect and access to seeker cards?
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thebardyspoon posted:A lot of people play "solo" two handed where you use two investigators cause then that lets you do the more co-opy thing where one character is good at fighting and the other good at investigating. https://irebeldestiny.com/2020/11/24/true-solo-or-dual-handed-solo-in-arkham-horror-the-card-game-issue-1-true-solo/ That's a bummer. I'll have to break out the table to set this up on, I don't have that kind of room on my desk.
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DontMockMySmock posted:sounds like they built a Tommy Muldoon deck on accident. But my real question is why are they trying to build Carolyn Fern as a damage dealer when she has 4 intellect and access to seeker cards? It just sorta happened that way. Jim is built as a flex and Carolyn doesn’t have access to a wide enough pool of cards (we only had Dunwich) to reliably be a dedicated cluever. So I built a flex Joe with a bent towards clueving- it’s going okay so far- and the idea was that Carolyn would be a full support to hopefully boost the two generalists to specialist-tier performance. But Carolyn’s player didn’t totally get how to do that and focused hard on healing and non-test burst damage. (They also misinterpreted Carolyn’s ability and have been paying themselves for all horror healing, not the healed party, which weakened their support output and also made their ally-burning strategy slightly more viable.)
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Wait, I'm supposed to pull from the bag for skill tests even on investigating for clues?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvcMrk6-gCU ![]()
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You always pull from the bag on a test. The only reason you wouldn’t do if you would auto fail (possibly due to an encounter card effect right click or auto succeed (due to a player card effect, like stray cat). The reason flashlight is so good, is it lowers the difficulty of the test to zero, which works on on anything but the autofail.
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GreenBuckanneer posted:
Apologies if this has been answered recently, but where did you get this play mat?
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GreenBuckanneer posted:I tried using vicious blow on a fight check in order to do two damage, but then the token on vicious blow I picked is a -1, and if i fail the skill check that's 1 horror damage, no damage to the boss, which means the following enemy phase he gets to do 2/2 damage to me, which maxes out my horror hit points and I fail. Two points here: First, unless I'm mathing completely wrong if you committed Vicious Blow and and pulled a Cultist token (the dude with the robe) you succeeded. 4 plus 1 from the Skill Icon on Vicious Blow minus 1 from the Cultist equals 4, which equals the combat value of the Ghoul Priest so you succeed. You were playing correctly and winning on ties, right? Because players win ties in Arkham Horror. And good thing too, huh? Because the Ghoul Priest has Retaliate as a keyword meaning that if you fail an attack against him he will immediately counterattack. Secondly, judging by your board state you had no weapons. That's an extremely bad place to be if you are trying to fight monsters, Arkham explicitly balances monster health and combat values assuming you have something to fight with besides your bare hands. quote:I think the only way he would have won is by resigning, but I'm not sure I can do anything to improve my deck from there vs a resign or a loss, other than just not calling it one or the other, the effect is the same. So, I assume I just have to keep going at it until I luck out on better hand draws. Resigning usually does not cause permanent trauma to your character. Being defeated does. If all else fails, make a run for it. quote:There's other aspects I don't quite understand, like, i assume that "taking control" of Lita would mean she gives me extra health/horror, and that when dealing damage to myself, ideally I want to do damage to the equips that have such things so the investigator themselves don't die (in other words, if Lita has to die for Roland to survive, then RIP, sucks to be her.) This is mostly correct. When you take damage or horror you can generally distribute that damage to any Asset (of which Allies are a type) with health or sanity as you like. This is how Arkham models armor as well, it's just an Asset with health on it. The only exception is damage or horror that is explicitly Direct damage or horror, that goes straight on your character. quote:I forgot to put supply tokens on First Aid, so just assume there's 3 tokens there, I didn't have the action economy to actually have the time to use it (I had used it, then decided if I didn't attack that would mean I'd have an attack of opportunity, which would have put me to 4 horror, and then phase 3 is just basically another 2 horror on top of that unmitigated (unless you have a card like Dodge, which I had used the previous turn to move to the Parlor without fighting the Priest the previous turn since I had him and another ghoul engaged on me) and because of Frozen in Fear it meant that I only really had 1 action anyways instead of 2 that turn, because of attacks of opportunity if I didn't fight an engaged enemy.) Healing in Arkham, especially in solo, is usually not very good. There are some exceptions to that, some characters really like healing and some healing cards are VERY strong, but in general cards like the baselevel First-Aid are extremely inefficient. As to the rest of your post, there is a reason that many people suggest playing two-handed, that is playing two characters at once. Arkham is rather nasty in true solo mode. GreenBuckanneer posted:Wait, I'm supposed to pull from the bag for skill tests even on investigating for clues?? Correct, you pull from the bag whenever you make a test. That's actually one of Roland's strengths though, he automatically gains a clue without a test whenever he kills an enemy. Were you doing something differently?
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How do y’all handle enemy spawns with multiple options: ie, when an enemy spawn is “any empty location,” do you place them strategically or disadvantageously? We’ve been operating with the “grim rule” in mind, which makes a sort of sense: if the enemy is trying to thwart us, then if there’s a choice between two different spawns, they choose the meaner one. But I’m starting to think we may be doing ourselves too dirty. Specifically, in Greater Good it can result in an enemy spawning in a locked room and generating doom every mythos phase until they’re dealt with, which could easily take four or more turns.
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Anonymous Robot posted:How do y’all handle enemy spawns with multiple options: ie, when an enemy spawn is “any empty location,” do you place them strategically or disadvantageously? We’ve been operating with the “grim rule” in mind, which makes a sort of sense: if the enemy is trying to thwart us, then if there’s a choice between two different spawns, they choose the meaner one. You are explicitly allowed by the rules to place cards strategically and so the game expects you to do so. The grim rule is explicitly only there for keeping the game going. If you can't figure out which of the options is correct you choose the bad one and look it up later to keep things running smoothly.
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Yeah, making every encounter card do the worst possible thing could make the game unwinnable even with perfect pulls.
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I abandoned a campaign where I 2H-solo'd with Gloria and Daniela. Gloria was fun until I saw that by picking apart the encounter deck I was removing all the challenge. Even though it's not possible to remove everything, I could spread out the challenges enough so that it didn't matter when Daniela got hit with a three horror treachery, because the odds of her drawing another one were that much lower. It's also possible there could be no empty location for those "spawn at an empty location" enemies. In most scenarios that means the enemy card just gets discarded. I know there's one where that isn't the case, but it'll tell you what to do otherwise.
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First watch is a lot of fun with Luke for that reason, give your pal an enemy that spawns on him, he’s in the gate box, discard it. I guess I would mean Luke’s sleeping during his watch.
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Five Eyes posted:Apologies if this has been answered recently, but where did you get this play mat? https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/167325/1p-playmat-a3-size I loaded the playmat image into adobe then printed as poster size with a 1" overlap to make sure I didn't misprint (was going to take 3 pages anyways) I then printed on my laser printer (unfortunately HP laser printers don't have borderless printing ![]() I just cut the white parts off and matched, it was nice! I have a playmat AND a "table mat" coming in from Etsy but I guess I should have bought two playmats if I'm going to be 2h solo playing this ![]() I think I'm doing better this time around? Edit: made it through the first and second campaign. I think now I don't understand fully engagement but it sounds like, I can evade an enemy, which means it's exhausted and can't chase me during the enemy phase? If so then I won the masks by the skin of my teeth Edit2: I'm wondering if I can do this solo again but with the upgraded deck, at a higher difficulty next time. I don't think I can do the hardest setting solo otherwise GreenBuckanneer fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Mar 16, 2022 |
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Man, has anyone else struggled with the start of Edge of the Earth? We did the first scenario last night, admittedly we'd all had a few but it utterly kicked the poo poo out of us. Myself as Leo and our Minh both lost a partner as we scraped by with a single sanity remaining, largely due to what seemed like a lot of very big enemies for a first scenario (mild spoiler I guess) It was 4 player: Leo, Minh, Diana and Jenny. I'll admit my deck could definitely be better but holy moly the encounter deck just seemed to hate us. For reference we're only on standard, with player cards up to the end of circle undone cycle, and just basically sailed through return to Dunwich. Guess I'm wondering if it's worth a full restart if we were just really unlucky, or if losing two partners that early is gonna suck hard.
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Doesn't part 1 of the first scenario only have the one big enemy?
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It has multiple 3 and 4 health enemies, added at the same time to the encounter deck, without shuffling in the discard, unless I'm missing something. Just seemed a bit brutal for a first scenario.
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Just got the dunwich legacy campaign/investigator expansions![]() On one hand, great, I love not having to fight with needing storage. On the other hand, what am I supposed to do with all this storage, especially if I buy the other expansions too later? (carcosa/circle undone/dream-eaters/insmouth/EotE, each with their own equally large box?) Is this more space than is needed to shove the return to... Expansions in so you have the content together for each cycle type? If anything, this would end up making me buy a custom box (or make one) instead, especially so I don't waste so much limited shelf space
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# ? Jun 7, 2024 20:08 |
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Just got the dunwich legacy campaign/investigator expansions I went through all that space with the cards from the core set, Dunwich, 5 investigator decks, and two stand-alone scenarios because I sleeved it all up. Probably more space than you really need if you're not going to sleeve the cards.
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