Eldritch Horror MEGATHREAD

Gary Sax wrote: ^the first expansion provides a bunch of extra investigation encounter cards for the base game GOOs and adds two mystery cards for each base game GOO.

Ah - that probably explains why the AOOs in my small expansions have more Research cards ! Have to look harder for Forsaken Lore.

Also definitely re: getting to other boards with few players. Not likely to happen. Traveling is pretty costly/difficult in this game relative to AH.

Doing the Arkham expansion boards is fun and easy with the Arkham movement mechanic.

With just forsaken lore I'm pretty happy with the game. I figure if I play it like 10+ more times I might go for another expansion... but probably just a small box? Any of the big boxes good? Which ones? Upthread I think people had mixed feelings on them besides beefing up the key decks with variety.

Of the two you got, Southernman, which do you prefer? Which one had Focus?

Gary Sax wrote: With just forsaken lore I'm pretty happy with the game. I figure if I play it like 10+ more times I might go for another expansion... but probably just a small box? Any of the big boxes good? Which ones? Upthread I think people had mixed feelings on them besides beefing up the key decks with variety.

Of the two you got, Southernman, which do you prefer? Which one had Focus?

Strange Remnants had the focus - they are both about the same except Strange Remnants has an Adventure mechanic plus a new encounter deck for its AOO while Signs of Carcosa has Impairment tokens (opposite to Improvement)., both have Prelude cards (changes the initial setup). We have only played the base AOOs so far but probably would say Strange Remnants .

Thanks!

Played this again last night against Cthulu and got completely trashed by the game. Clues, clues, clues in this game. Even more than AH monsters and gates are only important when they're important. The world is going to be infested by monsters and gates by the end of the deck and you have to accept that.

Eldritch Horror tonight, almost to the final phase. Fighting Yig. Fun game, but showed off the strengths and weaknesses. Stuff like the boss specific clues and mysteries is a godsend, fighting special monsters and whatnot is a blast.

That said, there is WAY too much shit in EH that delays you or otherwise prevents you from acting or performing actions---the same or worse than AH. It's a bit infuriating. It makes me want to do 2 investigators each but I must admit I like the game speed and manageability of two investigators.

I tried a variant a long time ago for 2p/2i games and it works OK: Every time you'd be delayed, you may choose to be Delayed or draw a random Condition. Might be good, might be bad.

My conditions are all sorted alphabetically, but I made a deck with one copy of all of them specifically as a randomizer deck. If you wanted to be "thematic" you could tune it for mostly bad or all bad.

Played again. I've played maybe 10 times in the last 2-3 weeks so, before I bitch, let me say that I really like the game, they solved a TON of issues. My wife would still much rather play AH but she knows what a hassle it is and how long the game is so she puts up with EH (AH is her favorite game).

A beef I am having in the game is that travel is hard... which I really like in principle because it makes the parts of the board very distinct and travel quite strategic.

But it's like the way the game rolls is that gates open all over the board constantly make travel choices not strategic but almost pointless. Almost every game I've had has 4-5 monsters stacking up at about 8 gates all over the world by the end (all losses but 1). But on the other hand, there was no real time that I could have run around closing those gates and killing those monsters to do better---you have to solve mysteries and get clues! Moreover, gate encounters are HARD, requiring two successful tests and often a clue expenditure on top of that. Moreover, another gate is likely to open next mythos so what's the point? Killing monsters is largely pointless too, its only utility is to get to the gates underneath them and since you'll be buried in a wave of monsters shortly regardless of what you do there isn't much point in trimming them down or anything.

Part of this could be a 2 player problem, so I may be backing down from my previous "2 player setup is totally viable!" position. I think it's viable on some level to win, but it's not very... diverse? You're just going to have to let every gate open and blitz at mysteries and just enough clues to solve those mysteries and rumors, you'll never have enough actions to do any sort of gate or monster management.

I've done 6 plays in the last 3 weeks, four 3-player games with my regular AT group and we've had three wins and a loss (today, after getting swamped by monsters at the end and multiple investigator defeats). I initially thought movement was hard until I started to change how I looked at the game - to win it you have to complete Mysteries plus any insta-lose Mythos cards so we only chase gates (& monsters hanging out there) if they become dangerous (about to cause Doom track to drop to fast), otherwise is concentrating on the win condition or the insta-lose problem with a bit of buffing up when we can. We have even gone back to our normal Arkham Horror play of choosing random investigators (although that did contribute to our loss today as our 2nd & 3rd investigators weren't that good for immediately jumping into monster and gate action (a requirement at that stage). Our last game today was against Azathoth (because we wanted a shorter 2nd game so it was either going to be win or oblivion) and even though we lost a couple of investigators we still won with a couple of Mythos to spare.

^Yeah, I'd love to hear any advice you have. I just played another 2 player game (solo) with the monster creating guy and just got completely buried. I even managed to get a completely world beating monster hunter in Lily Chen (6 strength, badass sword) but she just couldn't move around fast enough to do anything.

Gary Sax wrote: ^Yeah, I'd love to hear any advice you have. I just played another 2 player game (solo) with the monster creating guy and just got completely buried. I even managed to get a completely world beating monster hunter in Lily Chen (6 strength, badass sword) but she just couldn't move around fast enough to do anything.

Well (remember I'm just six games in but we are winning now) here's how I see it:
1. Concentrate on what makes you win -> Completing 3 Mysteries before Doom hits zero (so two things to do there, complete mysteries and stop Doom progressing too fast)
2. Watch out for what makes you loose and adjust 1 when necessary -> Insta-lose Mythos cards, Doom moving too fast, Mythos cards being used up.
3. Buff your investigator when possible.
4. Work together (one of the reasons why I lost with my non-co-op euro group). Last game one guy was teleporting us around taking sanity hits, later I stayed Lead Investigator and take some hits and then when not Lead Investigator took more hits to prevent the Lead getting conditions as he was important to finish a mystery.
5. Don't roll crap

But it's an unforgiving luck game and it is not hard to have your investigator screwed badly from a poor dice roll or just from a card - there is one Mythos card that basically defeats an investigator (removes all strength and doesn't allow you to prevent it).

My last two games have been failures due to #5 there. I think we 0-9'd once on a Yeti or something and it was downhill from there. This game can suuuuuck if you roll low at the wrong time. Those snowball effects on doom tokens are no joke--you need to think of redundant systems on some of these things, they are that important.

In some ways EH relies a little more on luck... you will typically be rollIng between 3-5 dice since they wisely limited bonuses. But that also means that games depend on fewer amounts of dice per test.

Thanks for the tips, I need to think harder about my priorities during a given game. The closing gates/solving mysteries dichotomy is hard to get right, especially with 2 investigators.

I don't know about playing with two but the variant Reference cards don't include ones for 2,3 or 6 players so those numbers are probably neither too hard or too easy. But two players has the same number of gates opening as three player (just less clues & monsters) so maybe try playing with three as two investigators definitely must be challenging getting to the Mystery and Mythos card locations plus one third less goodies to use.

Poor dice being more destructive than Arkham but with less clues around is the likely reason they introduced the Focus action in the expansions, you bloody need those re-roll tokens ! If you don't have the expansions with them just grab a handful of your good old pennies and introduce the Focus action to your game.

Two more 3-player games today (against Syzygy and Hastur) for two thrashings, in both we stopped when the AOO appeared and it was blatantly obvious we had no chance of winning. My investigators got nerfed pretty early in both games, was on my 3rd in the first game and my second in the second, showing that No.5 in my list can smack you from the beginning. My dice luck was below poor in both games and one of the other guy suffered too, we ha no problem moving around but just couldn't complete important tasks when there and, in my case often and the others sometimes, couldn't avoid bad shit happening. Random character draw didn't help in either game and when I did get a good starting character one game poor dice meant she was so badly nerfed that I actually killed her off (running her to a tough monster) so I could get a new investigator to try and help pull us out of shit but the main problem of base investigators arriving mid/late game with no gear then raised its nasty head.
And to finish off a crushing day we were smashed in Space Hulk: Death Angel as well.