AH - How do you separate the monster chips?

So far, I have only played the base game. I am slowly acquiring the expansions.

What methods are there for separating the monster chips so that I can break down the peices after playing into their various expansions?

At the moment, I am leaning to labelling each chit with a letter to mark the expansion, e.g. "D", "K" and "I".

I was wondering the same thing recently, too. I don't think I'd bother with labelling them all because there must be a list around somewhere. I bet somebody on the FFG forums has a breakdown so you can separate them.

I don't imagine that many people sort them out after they've integrated them though. I am starting to wonder if the cup needs some tuning.

I have a very sophisticated sorting system in place. I dump them all in a black cloth bag.

I usually play with all the expansions (HARD CORE MF), but if for whatever reason an expansion is left out or you're not using the mask critters or something, just mulligan the draw.

I will say this though...that with the card decks, I did some serious tuning to get rid of a lot of the redundant items. It makes no sense to me that there's multiples of some of the artifacts and tomes. So I ditched them.

I haven't tuned any of the decks out. I don't see that it's unreasonable for there to be more than one rare volume floating around. Multiple artifacs might not make much sense though. Are you doing this just so there's more variety or is it just personal taste? Like my buddy does NOT allow certain undead monsters in his game.

What about your spell decks?

I don't separate monsters except for Mask monsters. I guess if you're a purist you can do that. But FFG didn't put symbols (Dunwich, Kingsport, Innsmouth) so I don't think they expected anyone else to separate monsters.

I try to separate gates but sometimes a gate gets pulled for expansion I'm not playing. We just re-pull when that happens.

For cards I always separate the Mythos cards out but other cards I keep mixed unless I want a heavy dose of one expansion. In this case I'll separate the cards from one expansion and mix them with about equal number of random cards than put them on the top of a deck pile. This works well with the small expansions (DP, King in Yellow or Black Goat) so your encounters and items tends to work together.

For trimming down decks, I just started doing that. The first thing I took out was a couple impossible missions. Personally, I like the tasks and missions but I've played with whiners who complained about getting a crazy task. I personally like how the expansions have diluted the common, rare and spell items decks. Now the items aren't all mostly great combat items. Many of the items now take some creativity to use them effectively in a game. The strange items just seem much more in with the theme of the game.

Except for the time when we first played Innsmouth in a base + Innsmouth game only, I never ever sort out the expansions. We play with everything in, all mixed together. Some people complain that it dilutes the themes of the individual expansions too much, but I personally only find that to be true of the Act cards from the King in Yellow.

You just need to pick the right Herald to bring out the theme you want to emphasize. Want to emphasize the curses and exhibit items of Dark Pharoah? Instead of wasting time doing a bunch of sorting, just include the Dark Pharoah herald in your game. Want to see the Dunwich Horror as a significant threat? Play with the Dunwich Horror herald or, better yet, play with the Black Goat herald.

Sorting is boring, annoying, and a big waste of time. When we sorted out for that Innsmouth game, the five of us spent about an hour on the sorting. We could have easily played a game of Escape from Innsmouth in that time, then moved on to a big freaking game of Arkham Horror with everything plus Innsmouth.

There are two exceptions to my objections to sorting out expansions. First, we didn't always play with the Kingsport board, due to the annoying rifts. And second, it's probably a good idea to pull out all the cards that trigger the next act in the play, and shuffle those into the top half or one third of your Mythos deck if you're playing the King in Yellow herald and/or Hastur and you want to really get into the theme.

I keep things in separate Ziplocs labeled by expansion. I have a separate Ziploc for the Mask, Spawn, and other situational monsters that I'll toss in as needed. I played CotDP with DUNWICH once and was disappointed--Curse just made the game go SO fast for three players: two gates, two gates, they're in Dunwich, GOO. I like CotDP on it's own, KiY on its own, and so on. That's just how I roll.

I leave out the Masks/Spawn monsters. Aside from that, it's all in the bag!

mrmarcus wrote:

I leave out the Masks/Spawn monsters. Aside from that, it's all in the bag!

Same here.