Expanding Arkham Horror

Because there aren’t enough Arkham Horror Threads on here…

So a while ago when I was still a FATty I was working on an article type thing about how I mix and match my expansions in Arkham Horror, but put it on Ice to wait for Innsmouth, the supposed final expansion. But now that I have Innsmouth I don’t think I like my mix and match solution to Arkham horror, and am now back to square one in choosing how to play this fucking game.

So I thought I would use this opportunity to go through my notes on the AH components and see what can be mixed together without problems, and what gets screwed when mixed together due to dilution.

The following components I don’t think have dilution problems, and can be mixed in to become a permanent part of the game without problem.

Investigators: Chuck em in every game and deal em out to players randomly – variety is the spice of life. The only problem one may be the sailor from Innsmouth, who sort of sucks if you are not using the Innsmouth board, but them’s the breaks. Note that some characters use Items and Skills from expansion decks, so you’ll need these decks mixed in permanently too.

Common Items: I mix them all in together to give me a greater variety – no more do I see the shotgun in every game! I don’t see a reason to not have everything mixed in permanently.

Unique Items: The only “problem” with mixing this deck with all of the expansions is that the elder signs get diluted (Only 1 extra elder sign was ever given) – but I consider this a good thing rather than a bad. Lets be honest, fishing the unique item deck for elder signs was a base game tradition, but now that is no longer as effective a strategy.

Spells: Much like the base game, they range from shit to great.

Skill Cards: The skills from the expansions tend to be a little better, but since the game becomes more deadly I don’t think this boost in power is a problem and the new skill cards are a permanent fixture to my skill deck.

Allies: The problem with Allies is the shitty rules that got adopted to handle having more than 10. Based on the ‘proper’ rules, an ally you find in a location has more than a 2 in 3 chance of not being available even if the terror track has yet to move. I’ve house ruled this in different ways over the years, currently I deal 10 to the boarding house, and have the others sitting on the side of the table who can still be picked up via encounters. When the terror level rises, an ally from both the boarding house deck and other allies deck gets chucked into the box.

Personal Stories: The only issue with these is that a couple refer to the Innsmouth track, which may be a problem if you aren’t playing with the Innsmouth board. In this case just ignore that part of the instructions, and enjoy this addition in every game you play.

Madness & Injury Cards: Need I say these are permanent fixtures for every game!

Exhibit Items/Corruption Cards/Innsmouth Look: These things were only in one expansion, so if you play a mega game with all of the expansions these things will be rare as balls on scooby. Not a bad thing I think, just makes them more special. May make a rumour/Event or 2 very hard to complete, but shit happens.

Other cards: These are the odds and end cards – Twilight Lodge, Blessings, Barred from Neighbourhood, Rail Passes, Sheldon Gang memberships etc. Just put em all in one big deck and keep them at the side of the table if they ever come up, they wont hurt anybody.

Arkham Locations: As an adventure game fan I live by one motto – the more the better. So I chuck them all in for big fat assed decks. None of them refer to the expansion boards, so even if you leave them out you should be fine. The only exception may be a rare reference to the Innsmouth horror track, in which case just ignore it. Also the stacks are big enough now I don’t bother reshuffling after every draw – if someone wants to try and fish one of those babys now for a specific encounter good luck!

Ancient Ones: None of the ancient ones assume you are using the expansion boards, so mixing these all together is in no way a problem.

Epic Battle Cards: No reason not to make these permanent.

Monster Chits: For starters separating these out every game would be a colossal pain in the ass. Secondly the expansions have been pretty good in giving you new monsters without busting the ratios up too much – they have given you extra cultists and the like so they don’t suddenly become a rare draw. Most importantly the mask monster numbers have increased, so that if you play with them they should be any harder to draw then they were with the base game. Therefore I keep the new monsters as a permanent fixture to my games.

The following components may have dilution problems, which I’m experimenting with solutions for.

Boards: Unless you have a lot of players, the boards can be a problem simply due to their being too much area to cover. Lots of people pick on Dunwich because in some games Dunwich wont be very active at all, but I don’t think this is a bad thing, it keeps the variety up. Some games you’ll hang out a lot in Dunwich, others you won’t go there at all. A bigger problem for me is Kingsport, which is TOO active in my opinion, forcing one investigator to hang out there the whole game. I’d love to devise a way to break this, so you only need to send investigators there every so often, rather than being forced to just sit there. It also might make Kingsport more dangerous, as you may be caught out with a sudden surge of Kingsport activity when no investigators are stationed there, something which doesn’t happen to me now as I never not have a guy there! I haven’t played with Innsmouth anywhere near enough to judge it’s impact – with lots of sealed gates it may have the Kingsport problem, but since that would only happen towards the end of the game I don’t mind as much. Originally I was only playing with 1 expansion board at a time, but now I’m tempted to go all three at once permanently.

Gates: Obviously if you are not playing with a board that has additional other worlds you don’t have gates that point to that other world! Obvious really.

Gate Cards: Arkham Gates are fine, the problem is the gates for the expansion boards – if you use all of the gate cards you are just going to be having “other” encounters in those worlds since finding that location will be rare. Originally I was simply using the base game + 1 expansion worth of gate cards, but that meant I was seeing the base game other world encounters too often, which gets boring. I recently heard an idea where if you draw a gate card of the appropriate colour but it doesn’t have your other world on it, continue drawing. If the second card of the appropriate colour doesn’t have your other world on it either, THEN you use the ‘other’ option on the card. This is the solution I’m going to try next game, hopefully it will help make specific encounters in the Kingsport & Dunwich Other Worlds happen more often.

Mythos: This is the big one that people argue about, mainly for this reason:
- Innsmouth & especially Dunwich will have less gates open in their locations (and the Dun Horror is less likely to appear). I’m starting to think these are not that big an issue anymore though – I can’t afford to have all 4 board have a lot of activity if I am only playing with 4 investigators. Now I’m more concerned about Kingsport having too much activity as it isn’t diluted by expansions.
- The Act cards from the King in Yellow are less dangerous as they are likely to come up. However again maybe this isn’t a bad thing – if playing only with KIY it’s a no-brainer to stop the first Act each time it occurs as there is a high likely hood another act card coming up. If the deck is diluted though then this may become a more interesting choice – should you suffer the penalty and cancel the Act card even though there is a good chance another wont come up? But if you let it through what happens if it does?

I put this together in bit of a rush so I hope it all makes sense (I may give it an edit tomorrow – got to run now!) I wanted to get this up today as I’m playing AH on Friday with new people and don’t know if I should just go Base + Innsmouth or go the whole hog and have a megagame with everything in. What do you guys think?

I agree with you almost 100%, expecially in regards to the Allies. It's fairly discouraging to finally get an Ally, then to find that they aren't even in the game, and that's only going to get worse with each expansion.

As much as I love expansions, I think I'm good with the game where it's at right now. Add nothing else, and I'd be quite happy.

Of course, if FFG announces another expansion tomorrow, I'll be forced to get it.

These days we pretty much treat Arkham as a GM-less RPG. Theme is most important, so I've taken to actually editing the decks by taking out cards as I feel like it. For example, for purposes of flavor, there is only one copy of each Unique Item in the deck. Sure it makes the real one-ofs easier to draw, but then again there is now only 1 Elder Sign in the entire deck.

For me, this is the worst thing about Arkham. The fact that I can't just put everything in and expect a fun game is a bit annoying. They obviously want you to just play Arkham with just one expansion, but that's such a hassle.

Great post, this could be on the Front Page.

I think I play over 95% of stuff the same way as you. Similar to your 10 Allies in the boarding house rule, we play that any card that says go through the whole deck to pick a spell we count out 10 cards to pick from. I don't want some clown spending 30 minutes reading every spell in the deck.

During my first 5 games of Innsmouth, I played Base Mythos + Innsmouth Mythos. I'm starting to think Innsmouth needs to be diluted out with at least one expansion. The gates seem to come out to quickly so there's too much of possibility of the ancient one coming out in 7 or less turns or there could be too many gates that open in Innsmouth and with a monster surges you can have Innsmouth full of monsters pretty quickly. Next game I'm planning on playing Base Mythos + Innsmouth Mythos + 1 small expansion (Black Goat).

If you have room it's possible to play with only 1 large board expansion but still play with the outer worlds from other expansions. What we do is overlap the boards so only the outer worlds are showing. Thaad and Shellhead taught me that trick.

I'm thinking some of the Innsmouth character are geared strongly to Innsmouth. You mentioned Silas. Some of the other clue magnets work really well with the Innsmouth expansion. The violist for example maybe too strong with the just the base game but with Innsmouth she's very helpful.

We almost always use just the base Arkham board due to space limitations. I've already done a lot of what Mr Skeletor suggests, but ultimately I'll probably customize the decks further like kookoobah does. My project now is to make a custom insert to pre-sort everything I use for the base game into one box.

I think that Kevin Wilson did design each expansion so it can be played alone with the base set or with everything else. I agree with Skeletor's analysis, that most elements of the game can easily go into every game, and that the game is more fun that way. Due to randomness, each game often takes on a distinctive flavor due to a randomly stronger influence from one or two expansions over the others.

Allies do present a problem. I've been following the rules strictly regarding allies, but it does seem unfair that 2/3 of the allies are unavailable each game. This seems like a necessary evil, because leaving all the allies in would be too convenient, letting investigators at the boarding house choose perfect allies for each situation. On the flip side, the chances of getting an ally from an encounter have become terrible. So maybe a compromise. Play with twice as many allies, but discard them twice as quickly as the terror track goes up.

My solution with the Act cards is to emphasize them when thematically appropriate, if Hastur is the GOO or the King in Yellow herald is in play. In either of those situations, I pull the several Mythos cards related to the Acts and then shuffule those into just the top third or top half of the Mythos deck, to increase the chance that three or more will show up in the game.

The boards are the easiest and yet most important aspect to customize for a given game. As KingPut mentioned, you can still use the gates from the Dunwich and Kingsport boards without otherwise using those boards, by just sliding most of those boards under the Arkham board, leaving just the gates showing. The Kingsport board is problematic, with the overly fiddly rift mechanism, so we usually leave it out unless we have a big table and a big group. But the base game alone is too easy, so we almost always play with Dunwich, too, and the new Innsmouth board is great.

Personally, I really hate the idea of sorting huge stacks of cards just to narrow the scope of the game. But if somebody really enjoys that, I recommend using different colored card sleeves for each expansion, so sorting becomes a lot easier. I don't know if FFG's new mini-card sleeves come in colors, but then I don't know of any good reason to strip down the small card decks for a given scenario, either.

We use the compromise Shellhead mentioned. We play with all allies and remove multiples every time the terror track increases -- always taking away 1/11. This seems to really work well. There is a lot of options if you get to them early, but it sucks when they are fleeing fast so it feels pretty balanced.

I thought that the title of this thread was pointing in a different direction. Has anybody here been using the Strange Eons custom content generator for Arkham Horror? So far, I've just used it do character sheets and movement tokens for a few of my regular players. And I've designed new Guardians, Titus Crow and Doc Savage. I will probably also design some custom ally cards to represent Doc's loyal crew, or possibly full-blown characters.

For the last two years now, I've been pondering the idea of making a big Dreamlands expansion. Use the Kingsport board alone for a starting point, and then have the characters go on dreamquests on a separate Dreamlands board. First player to complete a dreamquest wins the game. Otherwise, make it a standard co-op game, only this time players are trying to save the Dreamlands from the GOO.

Investigators: Use the standard ones, and maybe have a few extras that are more tailored to the Dreamlands.

Common items: Guns don't exist in the Dreamlands. Make some medieval weapon items and randomly deal out substitutions each time an investigator goes to the Dreamlands. Certain other common items should also have Dreamlands replacements, like vehicles would become zebras.

Unique Items: Use the standard ones.

Spells: Use all the standard ones, plus add in several dozen spells from the rpg that are only usable in the Dreamlands. Flip those Dreamlands spells over when the investigator is in not in the Dreamlands.

Skill Cards: Add in a few new cards, like Dreaming and Dream Lore.

Allies: Exciting new allies to be found in the Dreamlands. Knights, rogues, even sentient spell-casting cats from the town of Ulthar. Flip them over when the investigator is not in the Dreamlands. Normal allies from AH are considered to be dreamers who can show up in Kingsport or the Dreamlands.

Personal Stories: To keep some interest in the Kingsport part of the game, the personal stories should all require goals accomplished in Kingsport. Successful players will strive to find a balance between pursuing their dreams and getting things done in the real world.

Madness & Injury Cards: An injury could shock a character awake, ejecting him from the Dreamlands back to Kingsport. Madness might do the same, but the rpg had an interesting mechanic, replacing insanity with a dreaded Nightmare Effect. A character confronted with madness might find themselves instead stuck in a nightmarish situation, like running from a monster without really moving, or abruptly trapped in a featureless box, or even transformed into a monster.

Kingsport Locations: Create more encounter cards for every Kingsport location, to double the size of each neighborhood deck, and make these encounters relevant to personal stories for every investigator. Don't use the rifts.

Dreamlands Locations: Since one week in the Dreamlands is the rough equivalent of one night of sleep in Kingsport, the Dreamlands board should encompass the entire Dreamlands. Each "neighborhood" will include three cities or major locations in the Dreamlands that are relatively near each other. Stable locations will be the happier cities of the Dreamlands, while unstable locations will be the scarier parts, like Unknown Kadath or the Underworld.

Ancient Ones: All Arkham effects should now relate to the Dreamlands instead.

Monster Chits: Most monster encounters will now take place in the Dreamlands. There are a lot of monsters that are specific to the Dreamlands, so they could have an additional trait of Dreamlands, which means that they are discarded and replaced if drawn for Kingsport encounters.

Mythos: Either don't use the Mythos cards at all, if you are playing with dreamquests, or make new Mythos cards that are unique to the Dreamlands. While you're at it, you could have some gates opening in Kingsport, especially at the Strange High House in the Mist.

This will be a big project, and I'm already busy with an even bigger project, but I will get around to working on this, hopefully in 2010. It will just be for fun, but I can post the files online if anybody wants to try it.

Excellent article Mr. Skeletor. I just wanted to let you know that all your efforts on Arkham Horror are appreciated.
And Shellhead, that idea sounds pretty interesting. Be sure to keep us posted.

Excellent write-up Frank, and as good follow-ups the rest of you. I haven't played AH that much so a lot of this has opened my eyes and got the ol' grey stuff ticking over.

With regards to the Kingsport board, someone posted a file on BGG that replaced the rift tokens with new tokens that could put a rift clue at any location on any of the boards. I really liked using this variant, since not only does it mean you don't have to keep an investigator in Kingsport permanently, it also makes you go take encounters at some locations you'd never otherwise see. That's a win-win for me.

And I do the same as you guys with the Allies, keep two separate piles, one for Boarding House, one only for encounters, swap out if necessary, and remove 1/11 every doom token.

Bullwinkle wrote:

With regards to the Kingsport board, someone posted a file on BGG that replaced the rift tokens with new tokens that could put a rift clue at any location on any of the boards. I really liked using this variant, since not only does it mean you don't have to keep an investigator in Kingsport permanently, it also makes you go take encounters at some locations you'd never otherwise see. That's a win-win for me.

The more I think about this the more I just want to set it up a a big megagame, but kingsport is the only thing stopping me. I'm not into deck trimming (I paid for the cards so I want to use them all!)
These tokens sound good - where did you find them?

Other solutions I'm thinking about to 'dilute' kingsport activities a bit:

- Rift tokens appear only every second turn. Might make the pattern too predictable though.
- The rift token tracks need double the number of tokens to activate (after an area is full, flip that token. This will probably make it too easy.
- The rift tokens appear ONLY on when Mythos cards from certain expansions appear. For example, a rift token can only appear if the Mythos card with the symbol pattern comes from either the base game, Kingsport, Dunwitch or Innsmouth. Or perhaps only on Event mythos cards. Or mythos cards that are stock standard gate openings (not bursts or other activities.)

I like option 3 because it keeps things unpredictable - you could have stretches where no rift tokens appear, then bam - you have to rush an investigator there as they begging poping up like crazy. I just have to find a good way to pick what mythos cards rift tokens are occuring on, and which ones you skip that mechanic.

The rift progress markers are here: http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/33623 .

Mr. Skelly, I tried out a variant last night that would work to "dilute" the rifts. Add Shudde Mell's rubble tokens to the rift tokens. This serves to "dilute" the rift effect because it's easier to stop them from opening as 8 out of 20 possible locations to investigate will be in Arkham.

This also adds the nice side-effect of forcing more encounters in stable locations in Arkham. All in all an almost excellent house-rule. Rifts never opened, and they didnt scare me at all.