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Anonymous Robot posted:For campaigns, Path to Carcosa is the best starting point. There aren’t any extra frills to the mechanics, the theme and campaign design is more compelling than Dunwich, and the scenario design is a little more consistent. As new players (3 of us) who have only played Dunwich and Path to Carcossa (and a handful of the standalones) I'm inclined to agree with this. We all felt that Dunwich was the weaker campaign, it was fun but we were not as hooked as when we came out the back of Carcossa. And there's nothing in Carcossa that really threw us or was too complicated. But I would agree the Dunwich invesgiator set has a much more sensible set of cards for new players. Edit: Also after Dunwich, only one of us had any interest in replaying it. After PtC everyone was "but what if?" "we need to find out what happens when we do..."
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Oct 4, 2023 08:37
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DontMockMySmock posted:That is correct; the only thing an exhausted card can't do is be exhausted again as a cost. That makes a lot of my micromanage-y decisions of when to use an exhaust action over keeping a card permanent effect or other action seem really worthless now...
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Oct 10, 2023 09:29
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Ubik_Lives posted:Yeah, so I feel like there should probably be a warning about that. Saying they are functional might result in people seeing the fault of the deck as a fault of the game. Just letting people know that the recommended decks aren’t good, and they should feel free to experiment with redesigning decks without paying the minimum 1xp during NotZ might be helpful. FWIW I historically hate deck building. I've always liked the idea but found the actual task to be like torture (tried a few card games like Magic and Netrunner). I was gonna just use decks off ArkhamDB for this but the game baited me hard into doing it myself and I actually really enjoy it. The Arkham cards app plus the reasonable card pool and the fact you filter down the set just by your characters deck building restrictions really scratch the right itch for me. It's like a puzzle. What I mean by that rant is, the poo poo starter decks and by extension the slightly less poo poo deck I played immediately after got me to actually try deck building.
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Oct 24, 2023 07:33
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Is anyone playing this online? We've been playing face to face with physical cards and it's great. But I'm emigrating soon and we want to keep playing, but it looks like online options are very slim pickings these days.
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Oct 25, 2023 23:16
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thebardyspoon posted:There's a fully functioning tabletop simulator mod with scripting and all the official campaigns in it as well as a bunch of the fanmade ones also with scripting and stuff. Can import decks from arkhamdb as well. I assume just linking it is probably against the rules but if you google or go on one of the discords they'll point you in the right direction. Google is giving me nothing, so I'll go ask around a Discord, thanks.
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Oct 26, 2023 08:47
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Powered Armor posted:Check out the SCED Discord.
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Oct 26, 2023 12:05
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I'm sure this is a topic else where, but I didn't find it with a quick search. The more I play the more it seems that melee weapons are the better choice over firearms for pure guardian monster killers. For the most part you don't need to worry about charges, therefore spending additional actions either playing a copy or another asset/event to refill a firearm. Plus you get those potential cards back to do other stuff with in the deck. Hand slots seem mostly equal, there's pretty good single hand melee and firearm cards, then better two handed ones. So it's not like you're getting more bang for buck there. Some firearms let you circumvate engaging or retaliate, but if you're a good guardian you probably don't mind, or you used one of the freed up asset cards to get riot whistle etc. Few enemies are immune to firearms and vice versa but I guess that's hard to plan for unless you know the scenario well. I only see a handful of upsides: Some ranged weapons do a shed load of damage, which makes pulling them out and blasting the big bad guy a good use, but you wouldn't rely on it as your staple 1-3 damage enemy weapon It's cool, who cares if it's not as good, pick some guns You're not playing a pure guardian monster killer and just want something to dish out a handful of points of damage before getting replaced by another asset Am I right in this or am I missing some firearm magic sauce that makes them really viable to monster killers?
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Nov 25, 2023 17:33
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On one hand, I'm kinda pleased my analysis was right. On the other hand, I'm upset there wasn't a "ah but you didn't consider you can play firearms like this" post I threw together a Mark Harrigan deck with firearms in mind. Custom Modifications, One in the Chamber with plans to go deeper into it. Seems like it could be fun to end up with all your XP dumped into Custom Modifications on the M1918 or lightning gun.
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Nov 25, 2023 21:46
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Anonymous Robot posted:There’s also plenty of design space for gun events and skills left. Why not another event fighter like Nathaniel, but with an ammo management gimmick or something?  That would be great. Nathaniel is a fun gimmicky character, and it's funny they went to "boxer pulling a left hook out of nowhere on a monster" before "person with lots of guns and lots of ammo shoots big monster"
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Nov 26, 2023 00:14
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Ripley posted:Tony decks quite often lean into switchblades or other melee options though, he doesn't have anything to make him a gun specialist. But yeah, he doesn't seem to lean that heavily into guns. He seems like a more viable monster hunter Jenny to me.
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Nov 26, 2023 11:04
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Nebrilos posted:How do you all store your collections?
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Dec 2, 2023 01:03
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Irony.or.Death posted:Are your separators an easily linkable/buyable thing or did you just cut your own? I'm planning to go a similar route but am sick to death of estimating measurements for various storage options and want something at least slightly nicer than I could carve out of construction paper, so if you've already done the research on what fits well in the gamegenic boxes I'd love to steal your notes. I used these. They aren't cheap but I knew they'd fit and they are bright/I can sharpie on the tab. Although the larger my set gets the more I want to get some custom ones with the encounter set icons on them. I've seen some on Etsy and the like and I'm willing to try dropping some cash to see if they'll fit.
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Dec 2, 2023 11:48
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Anonymous Robot posted:Boundary Beyond/Heart of the Elders feels weird. It seems like the design was intended as a catch-up mechanic, where players that are ahead of the curb can skip HOTE-A, and players who are behind the curb can replay HOTE-A until they can pass it. But because you can’t gain experience from incomplete runs of HOTE-A, it doesn’t (fully) work that way. But it made HotE-A a real chore. It's not hard, it just took us like an hour and a half of moving and investigating to fill in the missing totems, which we all agreed we'd rather have spent the time starting the HotE-B (which we are going to do tomorrow). Does Return To make it any more interesting or balanced?
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Dec 3, 2023 11:22
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Anonymous Robot posted:If you are already using the Return To explore rule, as is often recommended, not really. It adds one enemy that is kind of fun, which is a smaller snake bird that you can command to attack other enemies if you control the mysterious scepter supply item from scenario 2. And yeah, that would be frustrating. We were very close to just running B right after A but we were running the wire close with the setup and we assumed that B would be more meaty than A.
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Dec 3, 2023 15:02
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So my understanding is if you are playing through a campaign and your investigator is properly killed or driven insane (as opposed to defeated) you can choose a new investigator and rejoin the next scenario with zero XP. Assuming this is like 3/4 the way through a campaign, wouldn't that be kinda difficult to catch up on? Like some investigators would probably be fine, but others would struggle (I'm looking at Guardians for the most part, not having XP weapons or assets to deal with higher health enemies) Has this happened to anyone here? Am I worrying about nothing?
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Dec 4, 2023 15:57
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Yeah I had similar thoughts. We are going to do scenario 5B of TFA tonight and my Ursula was unlucky enough to get Doomed and was even more unlucky enough to be on the final card in the chain, putting me one unlucky draw away from horrible, instant death. So I'm considering mg options for if I need a new investigator (even though we are rocking the campaign).
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Dec 4, 2023 16:17
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Yeah well, you see, I was trying to keep in the spirit of the game and really just going for a "Random Basic Weakness" and honestly had no idea what Doomed actually lead to. Well now I know.... We managed to get through HotE-B pretty easily. We lucked out with the placement of 2 easy locations to get clues (and some Victory) then immediately drew the objective location right after we added it from the Act. After a quick upgade we went into City of Archives right after for the first time and phew, this was a tough one. Great theme, but man we struggled in that scenario. First off I drew right into The Bell Tolls and was killed off before the first Act or Agenda flipped, so the team was down a member right away. That put the rest of the gang on edge, but they powered through most of their decks and manged to just get out with 4 out the 6 tasks completed. It didn't really feel like a win though, they said that too. No-one was super pleased with the sudden death nor a lot of the very text-y rules in that scenario. Was quite a lot to take in and we all made mistakes for sure. Going to play Depths of Yoth on Wednesday with a thrown together Harvey deck!
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Dec 4, 2023 23:38
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I guess I wasn't super mad personally. One of the other players was kind enough to warn me of the end of the chain before I got there so I knew where it was going before having to cycle in the final card. And I actually enjoyed the final few rounds with it, it was quite fun/tense knowing the card was there and I could draw it at any time. Couple of time were very close with deck searches then I actually got it on an Elder Sign card draw with Body of a Yithian after an important skill test. Would I run it again? No. I think we had our fun with it, we got he novelty and the surprise. The other players really didn't enjoy it, they understandable felt like they'd just been left for the rest of the scenario and it was a bit bullshit. I do love the theme of it and I'm sure we'll all remember the time Ursula Downs died in that cave with her eyes rolled back in her head and personally I think that's better than having every single weakness be perfectly balanced, building perfect decks and steamrolling every scenario.
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Dec 5, 2023 08:31
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Kalko posted:This is a fun card:
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Dec 11, 2023 08:32
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NRVNQSR posted:This phrasing is pretty normal; compare Spectral Razor, for example.
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Dec 11, 2023 13:25
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Kalko posted:The card is thematically cool as hell just in general.
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Dec 12, 2023 08:04
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Orange Devil posted:So you spoke to Ichtaca is what you're saying? We wana go back and side with humanity at some point!
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Dec 12, 2023 14:09
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How does thread feel about playing a campaign with the investigators that come with it vs any in your collection?
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Dec 14, 2023 15:48
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Interesting We decided as a group we'd try to use investigators from the same set just for fun really and to force us a little to try characters we might not pick first. But the above all makes sense.
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Dec 15, 2023 00:35
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Nephthys posted:Seems Wolf Mask was also revealed yesterday. I know it had already been mostly spoiled but here it is officially: Does that mean it doesn't work unless you use the engage action? As in, does it trigger if you step on a location with an unengaged, not aloof enemy and they engage you or you draw an enemy from the encounter deck and they spawn ontop of you? Or am I reading into this too much?
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Jan 9, 2024 15:56
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Orange Devil posted:It works whenever an enemy gets engaged with you.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:41
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I think another point lightly mentioned above is people tend to deck build differently. My friends for example pick an investigator "because they look cool" and we get a new set and"i haven't played blue in ages". There's nothing wrong with this, they just don't pick for stats and only occasionally because they have a good/cool ability. Likewise they don't exactly scour every card and compare them (neither do I to be fair). We use the arkam cards app to get the deck list for an investigator with our card set and throw togerher something that might work. I think it's unfair to ask the campaigns get harder in general. Myself and my group play for the theme and (when it's good) story more than the challenge. Also if campaigns start getting more difficult, how do you expect new players to pick up the box with ~one investigator boxes and not have a terrible time? I think there's maybe room for a new difficulty, like a challenge mode, that alters some of the actual mechanics in the campaign rather than just changes the chaos tokens. That would be really cool, but also a fair amount of design effort and text on pages. Feels like something that could be home brewed but would be a pain to test for balance.
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Jan 12, 2024 09:18
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Anonymous Robot posted:If you don’t already have the Return To box, however, it’s worth mentioning that you can get the biggest improvement without actually buying it or playing the Return To scenarios. You just need to use the revised explore mechanic. Where the base campaign has you seed a certain number of encounter cards into the explore deck when creating the scenario, instead you will start the scenario with zero encounters in the explore deck. Then, each time you successfully explore, shuffle one encounter into the deck. We just finished TFA and I wouldn't play without this rule once we learned about it half way through. Made the pacing much better for pretty much ever scenario. As for the actual campaign, I thought it was decent. Probably a little better than Dunwich but not as good as Carcossa (we are playing in order). I think it had some cool game mechanics, but the story was the most disjointed out all the campaigns I just listed. It felt like it jumped around a lot and it was a little confusing at times, especially nearer the end. But the actual play was fun.
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Jan 23, 2024 18:18
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thebardyspoon posted:Yeah will likely be done with the reprints of the old campaigns by the end of this year and then we'll see if they have plans/the capacity to speed up the release of new campaigns very slightly, I doubt they'd go to 2 a year but maybe a 9 month gap or something, regardless I hope we never have a gap like the one between TSK and Hemlock Vale again.
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Feb 18, 2024 19:05
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I don't normally go out my way to recommend a specific shop or anything and I am in no way affiliated with them, but I've got nothing but good praises for Gameslore in the UK. I met the team at a couple of UK Games Expos and they were genuinely nice people with a really good business. https://gameslore.com/acatalog/PR-Arkham-Horror-LCG-The-Feast-Of-Hemlock-Vale-Campaign-Expansion.html#SID=47 Have a look, I'd recommend anyone gives them a go. They aren't the cheapest if you shop around, but their customer service and speed of delivery is really second to none other I've used.
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Feb 25, 2024 19:20
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We just played The Witching Hour (first scenario in The Circle Undone). Holy poo poo, is it supposed to be that hard? 3 of us on standard basically did not have a chance to actually win. I think if we designed characters and knew the scenario before hand we might be able to do it, but it seems real difficult for 0 XP investigators.
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Feb 27, 2024 00:21
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To the above posters, thank you for justifying our loss. Hopefully scenario 2 will be kinder
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Feb 27, 2024 18:15
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Sounds about right with our time with FA. I think my problem with the story is it kinda goes from like 10 to 100 fast. There's like 5 scenarios where it's all pretty grounded then SURPRISE ALIENS. And I know that's a bit of a trope in Arkham Horror in general, but like there could have been a bit more foreshadowing or tying the plot threads together in the book.
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Mar 5, 2024 12:15
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DontMockMySmock posted:Well, there's a little bit of foreshadowing with Alejandro being vaguely shady. But yeah, that he is in fact a Yithian in Alejandro's body is still a really big surprise. It helps if you've read some Lovecraft, I suppose; when they showed up the first time I was less baffled and more "oh, yeah, those guys."
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Mar 5, 2024 13:52
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Nephthys posted:That's my assumption as well. It's reasonable for him to be suspicious and not want to work with Ichtaca's tribe, even as a human. I think doing Alejandro's side in a second playthrough works out well, since in hindsight he actually was right to mistrust them and he probably wasn't just being racist. They really are Yig worshippers. We just interpret it as racism from our perspective.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:42
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I'll be interested to see how modern the rule set is and how crunchy it is. It being Arkham Horror rather than CoC gives me the impression we'll be shooting and slashing monsters with stat blocks rather than spending a session going insane at the weird noises coming from the looping audio played from the GM's phone.
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Mar 7, 2024 16:59
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DontMockMySmock posted:So for our next campaign, our playgroup decided to build decks, then roll to see which campaign we're playing afterwards. We built Leo Anderson, Carolyn Fern, and Norman Withers. And then we rolled up (Return to) The Forgotten Age. That's right, we're doing TFA with an average agility of 1.33. We're so hosed.
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Apr 25, 2024 07:15
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I think if you wanted a restricted challenge like that you'd do something like draft your deck rather than restrict sets personally
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Apr 27, 2024 09:30
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My group are about to finish Circle Undone (I have some opinions which I'd like to share but I'll wait until we finish it up) We're going to start Dream Eaters basically right after. Does thread have any non-spoiler advice? (Like Forgotten Age is a well known campaign for needing plenty of health)
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May 5, 2024 22:18
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thebardyspoon posted:Dream Eaters feels pretty evenly balanced in terms of what stats it tests or things it wants from you, nothing skewing it one way or the other in terms of health or sanity like TFA/Carcosa and no heavy reliance on testing willpower like Circle Undone or Dunwich so it might be one to bust out the characters with weaker defensive stats if you don't usually like playing them or just haven't so far.
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May 6, 2024 08:00
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