[Arkham Horror] LCG! Board Game! A bunch of other spinoffs!

Athenor

I spent last night going through and organizing/updating my collection. It's been long enough, given that Circle Undone's finally finished.

Also my LGS is out of FFG Green sleeves, so I can't add in the AH 3rd expansion. Hopefully they'll get in some this week.

I know I keep saying I need to do it, but I really want to get the OP updated.

PMAvers

Bumping this from the deeps since it looks like this week's upcoming LCG announcement is New Investigator Starter Decks. I'm assuming they're taking a lesson from Marvel and releasing new investigators with a ready-to-play deck out of the box.

Tomanta

As someone who kind of feels like Dunwich and Carcosa are enough story content for how little I play, investigator starting decks are pretty enticing (depending on contents).

initiatefailure

Yeah I was confused by that because technically every new investigator has a starter deck it's just a list of cards from the core set + their deluxe so I thought they were just going to be showing the starter decks for the next big box expac.

But then all the AH announcements got pushed back because of ya know, the world being as it is, so now I don't even know

PMAvers

I actually have a theory that they might be making a move to try to separate scenario and investigator cards in products for future cycles.

At the minimum, it might be possible to make a campaign take less packs to get all the scenarios, and thus might be able to keep them easier in print by doing a bigger print run of each individual pack. Maybe move to the larger blister packaging and put two or three scenarios in one pack? And those people who are picking up packs just to deck-build can focus on the investigator decks, not necessarily picking up scenarios they don't actually need.

It really sucks trying to pick up a full campaign right now and one of the packs in the middle of, say, Carcosa being out of stock constantly.

A Half Eaten Oreo

The Dream Eaters has been really good so far. Up there in Carcosa tier for me. We’ve played everything out so far except Return to Carcosa (it’s next on the list). We found A side much much harder than B side, but that might be because of a choice we made in 1A and probably because our A deck are just worse than our B decks.

1A (and light A in general) spoilers :

We managed to win 1A without straying off the path. Getting 0 xp for the scenario instead of 12 if we had. We got to write that we didn’t stray off the path in the log, but we already finished all of A and it never came up. Maybe it’ll come up in 4B. I doubt it since you’re supposed to be able to play each by themselves, but I’m still hopeful.

End of A spoilers

We lost because the black cat knew the truth. If he didn’t know the truth we would’ve “won”, I didn’t read that ending but I assume it’s not the best victory. I’m guessing with the cat knowing the truth you get the best possible ending, but we just had no chance of winning that fight.

PMAvers

And there’s the official announcement.

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/3/24/your-investigation-begins/

Stella!

initiatefailure

so it doesn't say but seeing some of the cards in there makes me feel like this can replace 2nd core set?

but also, ugh, there's so much stuff to buy for this game coming soon

MrBody

initiatefailure wrote: »

so it doesn't say but seeing some of the cards in there makes me feel like this can replace 2nd core set?

Frankly that should have been an option from the start :-\

Tomanta

Finally started playing this again with Carcosa, and keep being reminded that true solo is really hard. Maybe I'll try two-handed for the next campaign playthrough, but I find it hard to manage the table space when I do that (but also, I have a bigger table to use now than I have before).

Athenor

I keep meaning to try that. I think the main thing that's intimidating me about playing the LCG again is building decks. And lack of table space, but that goes for all my games.

Tomanta

Athenor wrote: »

I keep meaning to try that. I think the main thing that's intimidating me about playing the LCG again is building decks. And lack of table space, but that goes for all my games.

To get back into it, I just netdecked (I'm following this guide for Jenny / Solo / Carcosa) since that also gives strategy tips for the campaign. Even after a bunch of expansions, Arkham has a fairly small card pool available to an individual investigator, especially at 0xp. Deck building still isn't easy, and I think you also have to know the scenario you are playing pretty well to build good decks for harder difficulties. In some ways it's a much different skill than building a deck for other games.

ChaosHat

Netdecking is pretty effective, although in a non competitive game I don't feel the need to do it as aggressively. On normal, most reasonable things will do fine, and the nice thing is you can do a lot of tuning on the fly with upgrades, so if you need more econ, get an upgrade for that.

Also, I tend to be pretty lax with some of the metagame rules. If I fucking hate a level zero card and it's just totally not working out, I'm gonna replace it for free. There are so many investigators to get through, unless I really really like them (and maybe even then) I'm gonna play each one maybe once or twice. I'm not going to slog through eight games just hating the deck I've built. I'll remix the base cards on the fly.

Athenor

I really am looking forward to the bless/curse mechanics in the Innsmouth Conspiracy, but it does kind of suck that they are gonna continue their model of not making things inter-operable... in other words, only cards in that cycle are going to use the bless/curse mechanic.

I am sure fans have put together scenarios that mix components from all the various cycles.

ChaosHat

Athenor wrote: »

I really am looking forward to the bless/curse mechanics in the Innsmouth Conspiracy, but it does kind of suck that they are gonna continue their model of not making things inter-operable... in other words, only cards in that cycle are going to use the bless/curse mechanic.

I am sure fans have put together scenarios that mix components from all the various cycles.

I'm pretty iffy on bless/curse, it seems pretty strictly a nerf for players. Blesses don't really help you that much. When I'm doing calculations on what I need to get to in order to pass a test with reasonable certainty, I'm not calculating "well if I get the +1..." I'm starting at the bottom. I feel like blesses will be win more, you'll draw them when you planned around a -4 in the bag, and then you drew a -2 into a bless, hooray.

On the other hand, for the exact same reasons, you'll have to factor the curses into each and every pull. If the lowest token in the bag is a -4, you now have to be cognizant that if you absolutely need to pass the test, you now need to commit +5, so the curses will end up being a static resource drain even thought there are low odds of any curse hurting you.

These things get exacerbated the more inundated the bag gets with them. As you get saturated with blesses, your odds of drawing them are better, sure, but they could also just chain off each other, now you get +4 to a test you committed to passing at a -2, and then you just removed the blesses. Hoooooray.

It seems like a lot of complication for little benefit, and it mostly just adds to the stress/mental load of the players.

Athenor

Seems... appropriate for Innsmouth, but I can see where that is coming from.