[Arkham Horror] Anyone played Innsmouth yet?

[Stark]

My friends and I are getting back into playing AH, and I notice the next pair of expansions came out (Black Goat and Innsmouth). Black Goat looks a bit lame, but Innsmouth looks interesting, appears to offer some increasing risk into mid-late game (my biggest problem with vanilla AH) and isn't a massive timesink of boredom like Dunwich or Kingsport. Does anyone have it?

[Rawtooth]

I don't have Innsmouth yet, but I'm thinking of picking it up for use soon, so if you haven't tried it out yet I'll get back to you on it. I have Black Goat and, like Curse of the Dark Pharoh, it's meant to merely slightly change the game. Out of the small expansions I would only heartily recommend the King in Yellow, simply because it can make the game alot more deadly from what I have seen/heard from friends. Adding another way to lose the game tends to do that though.

Out of curiosity, why the dislike towards Dunwich? I can understand Kingsport, as every game I have seen with it has basically come down to the fact that everything was extensively used barring the new board area/encounters/locations which were rarely used since rifts aren't that big of a threat.

Dunwich though has always had a bigger threat from what I've seen, simply from the fact that gate bursts first showed up in that expansion along with the fact that adding more gate locations is far tougher than the rifts mechanic. Some of the harder Ancient Ones also appeared in that set.

[Stark]

Yeah King in Yellow is top of my 'if we really start playing again' list, since it's apparantly hard and very theme-y. My general group is only really 4 people, so I'm not sure Innsmouth won't just be a big timesink (but things like the personal stories and the late-game deepone threat sound good anyway). More ways to lose are good, because I still think the game is too easy. From talking to others, I think the premeditated cooperation of my group isn't usual.

Dunwich isn't bad; I obviously like a lot of the rules that fix the broken first game (like gate bursts and surges). Dunwich itself is really theme-y, and it's fun, but the ancients they added are literally fucking retarded (ie you have absolutely no chance to beat in combat and they should just say 'you lose', which is true of all later expansions too) and the locations seem a bit bland with the only real excitement coming from rift management (which is super lame) and doesn't sound as much fun as dodging the police in Innsmouth. I don't hate Dunwich; I'm really just not sure my group is big enough. I understand Kingsport isn't to awful if you have like 7 people either.

[NeoGoomba]

Is Innsmouth just a card expansion, or is it another "map pack"? Because I have no more room on the apartment table if its a map pack

King in Yellow was neat because it just seemed like a "tweak" to the gameplay. Dunwich Horror was fun (I loved the injury aspect), but it didn't seem to add much challenge. You almost need to handicap yourself. We took out the "eldrich sign" artifacts, so we can't one-shot gates, and that seems to throw a monkey wrench into things.

[Stark]

I hear it's called 'use your brain and only deploy one extra board at a time'.

With lategame, Innsmouth adds the deep one rising mechanic, which rises every time a gate hits a seal (among other ways) which means lategame isn't a simple cruise as you're going to have to keep the innsmouth situation under control (while avoiding the cops, avoiding fidning out you're a deep one, etc).

[Rawtooth]

Premeditated cooperation is what my group does every game until the day one of my friends gets his lucky pull and turns traitor on the group to the Ancient One. Afterwards, my group will be minus one but it will all be good.

Yeah, I think the problem you are having is that four people is really only good for the base set + little expansion. Six is the usual number in my group, with occasional games ranging up to eight! I'd say five would be good for base + Kingsport, since rift management is far, far easier than gate control in my opinion. Kingsport is mostly encounters, encounters, encounters which are on average positive instead of the mix of bad/neutral/slightly smaller slice of good that seems to be in the base/Dunwich encounter sets.

Dunwich definately needs six in my mind. Gate control becomes more of a hassle, and some of the new monsters are absolutely foul. I do agree that some of the Ancient Ones added in the later expansions are retarded, but the base set also has it's own super heavyweights in the form of Cthulu and Yog-Sothoth.

To be honest Stark, it just sounds like you need more people in your group for the actual board expansions instead of the mere small box sets. Having more people to cover the increase ground/other world size is vital, especially since some of the later Ancient Ones are, as you said, all but unbeatable in combat and need to be stopped by sealing gates. It also introduces a new dynamic, as you end up having people dedicated to street cleaning, gate-closing, and just to different areas of town. Personally, I just think the larger games are more fun since they seem more helter-skelter as everyone runs about trying to keep a lid on things while in smaller games it seems to be more binary; i.e. either everything is going fine, or you are being horribly raped by the game. I do want to try the Huge Game at least once, with all of the board expansions, just to see what it would be like.

Also, as a word of caution and I doubt you are the type to bitch about chance fucking you, but the King in Yellow has the potential to end in the first of turns from pulling the Next Act cards. Plus the rumors can all but end the game on their own quite easily from what I understand. You will probably enjoy this, but the rest of your group might now. The King in Yellow wasn't meant to be read by everyone after all...

[Stark]

I think it's an important distinction between KP and D and I that in KP you apparently need someone nearly full-time in KP doing nothing interesting, and I have pretty much zero interest in that. Innsmouth sounds managable with occasional visits, and depending on cards Dunwich can be totally empty a whole game (or the focus, so many can go there). I've never had a Dunwich heavy game (although I haven't yet tried to stack the deck to create focus the way others with many expansions do) and occasional visits + occasional panic rushes are fine. For me most of the increased difficulty in Dunwich comes from the rule changes like gate bursts/surges, which really should have been in the base game.

To be honest, the Next Act loss is the part of King in Yellow I want the most. More losing, please! Before I got the game I heard it was 'very hard' and you'd very seldom win, but we win more than we don't and often don't even get past 8 on the doom track. The player-scaling means that going from four to five players makes the game MUCH harder.

I think the way the rules do combat with the GOOs is totally broken and should be scrapped. The base game had GOOs you could pretty easily kill; in Dunwich they're all 'discard 1 gate, 2 monster trophies and 5 clues or YOU'RE DEAD ROFFLE' even when that has NO thematic link to the GOO in question and they shouldn't even be as hard to fight as Cthulhu etc. I -seriously- think they need to release arkham horror 3.0 and just change the way it works because it's fucking stupid. If you pull a base game GOO, you can often easily just shoot the guy, but if you pull an expansion one (the ones in Innsmouth look very retarded) you can't, which is fucking dumb.

[Rawtooth]

See, that's different from what I encountered in my Kingsport games Stark. I found that having one investigator semi-based out of there was the most important, as that let them shut down the rifts before they became a problem, but could still cull the normal monster population in Arkham. On the other hand, Dunwich frequently had one investigator permanently camped out there, since they would jump into one gate and by the time they had closed/sealed it another would have opened. I agree that gate bursts/surges are very important and keep the game lively.

I think Arkham more gives the illusion of difficulty. If we were playing like chickens with our heads cut off, I think even the base set would give us trouble, but since we both have actual brains that we use and communicate it just becomes more of an exercise in risk management. I do agree that part of the increased difficulty is likely my group's larger size and the rules interaction.

God, yes, that is one of the problems with the GOOs from Dunwich. I don't know how often you've faced them, but the Kingsport GOOs look to be much more sane in actual combat although they compensate in other ways, like making every gate opening a gate burst or having a maximum limit of only five clues on one investigator. Still much less assinine than the Dunwich GOOs though. Haven't looked at the Innsmouth GOOs yet though, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had swung back to utter retardation in GOO design.

I know that in my group we treat winning by seal/closing a more "pure" win than by combat against the GOO. Does your group have the same perspective?

It's interesting that you mention that you can easily just shoot the base set GOOs as someone on the Fantasy Flight boards pointed out something weird about Azathoth. He can actually be killed in the Final Combat, you just have to do all the damage in one player round. It's from the fact that it's his attack that ends the game, as in Final Combat it's player's turn then GOO turn, thus giving you the time to shoot him. Of course, he does have one of the larger damage tracks so it's not entirely useful information but it is there as an option.

[Stark]

My favourite is Quattil Uttach or whoever his name is; every turn someone dies. So your DPS is constantly going down, and the only real way you have a chance in fuck is if you get lucky and your big damage dealers are at the back (ie, to the right of the first player for the turn). I even like the 'sliding tests' where the modifier gets worse every round; it's way better than 'you have to spec the whole game to pile up gate tokens or you have zero chance' silliness.

We haven't actually had that many 'kill the GOO' wins, but we've tried to house-rule stuff to make it harder lategame (although Dunwich helped that a lot). The final phase of the game can sometimes be long in base game, and it's often almost zero threat. We tend to think the seal-wins should be much harder than they are (and they certainly are post-Dunwich, but if you get lucky it's still easy).

But I've certainly heard that many groups don't play the game very cooperatively at all, which I guess would make it harder (apparently co-op games aren't very popular in general) whereas my group can spend fifteen minutes plotting out each turn - which helps, but when the first guy gets eaten instead of doing his xyz plan, everyone else is boned too.

[Rawtooth]

I like the Yeti GOO and Cthulu himself. The Yeti since it tends to make nice, simple games where you don't have to worry about a million modifiers on the board from the GOO. Cthulu is when I'm in the mood for a harder game, since losing one STA/SAN permanently is just a pain in the ass. The sliding test GOOs are good ones, since you do have a chance, but if it drags on too long you are screwed. I agree about the stockpiling bullshit found in some of the GOOs, especially since you expect and desperately want to use those clues/monster/gate trophies to close/seal gates and buy blessings/allies/whatever. It really removes some of the nice elements of the game when you can't use them for fear of the GOO waking up and eating the entire group in one round.

Have you been using the Epic Combat decks for the Final Combat from Kingsport? Everything I've heard is that they make it far harder, although I haven't had a chance to try them out yet. From my groups experience, I found that about half of the wins are combat and the other half are seal wins. When you get a large group, winning from closing every active gate and having enough spare trophies is absurdly unlikely since you want to use them to help stem the tide. And if you don't like seal wins just play against Atlach-Natch (sp?) from Kingsport. Every gate opening being a gate burst certainly solves that problem.

See, I can't understand not playing Arkham cooperatively. If I wanted to fly solo, I'd be playing some other game and having my friends bitch at me as I stab them in the back. Arkham is when we all want to sit down and have a nice quiet evening having our sanity eroded away.

We tend to plan in a more free-flowing format. We will disperse throughout the town, gobbling up clues at the start, and then as trouble comes we deal with it in our own portions with an occasional running assist or two. But we don't plan out beyond "You dive into the gate Rawtooth, we'll hold off the monsters!" We found that sometimes a certain encounter or failed or even successful gate closing can change what certain investigators need to do that round. It helps avoid the derailed train effect you describe. I think it also goes without saying that having people like the Martial Artist with her Kung-Fu or the Drifter with his shotgun and motorcycle stay in-town and kill shit instead of gate diving makes the game easier.

Out of curiosity, what are some of the other board games you've tried? I think we could start up a SD.net threat on just general board gaming right here.

[Stark]

Actually, Arkham Horror is pretty much the only 'ludicrously complex for grown-ups' board game I've ever played. I'm interested in some of the others I've seen on BGG, but everyone I know digs the Lovecraft theme of Arkham so it's easy to get a group together for it. I can't imagine playing Generic Fantasy Stab 3000 or Spaceships in Space Accounting. I find themed or interesting games (like the Dracula Scotland Yard game, or that crazy 'fit the submarine' game) more interesting than 'Diablo, but a boardgame and really slow and fiddly'.

Is it wrong that I really, really wish someone would just make a piece of software with virtual player sheets and card decks?

[Civil War Man]

There are people who try to play Arkham Horror non-co-op? What, do you only win if you hit a win condition and you are the only investigator left? That just makes no sense to me (of course, I am someone who enjoys co-op games).

One thing I'd ask about Innsmouth is any new investigators they added. Because some of the new investigator powers can get stupidly broken. I played a game with the Kingsport expansion, and I got the Bounty Hunter. During upkeep, I could exchange any monster trophy for its toughness in money, all my monster trophies were worth +1 toughness, and the character starts with the even more stupidly broken handcuffs, which are literally an "I win the fight, then gain 1 sanity" button for a large percentage of monsters in the game. Pair him up with the hobo from the original game, and the investigators won't have to worry about not having enough Elder Signs.

Addendum: I've looked through the Arkham Horror wiki for the Innsmouth characters, and it's definitely a mix of useful and useless abilities. One ignores resistances and treats immunities as resistances. The gravedigger's "monster trophy = clue token" ability is huge, as is one investigator who gains one clue token whenever a gate opens. Then there's the investigator who basically gets a sneak attack round, and doesn't have to make any Horror checks unless he fails to kill or evade the monster on the first try. Or the one who never has to discard items.

Some of the expansion investigators basically make the original ones worthless unless you are in a group that specifically avoids the new ones for an extra challenge.

[Stark]

There are people who try to play Arkham Horror non-co-op? What, do you only win if you hit a win condition and you are the only investigator left? That just makes no sense to me (of course, I am someone who enjoys co-op games).

What I hear is that many groups just kinda do their own thing, without cooperating with regard to resources, locations, items, etc. I imagine four players running around not helping each other would make the game a lot harder, but I can't really imagine the sort of emotionally-broken nerds you'd have to play with to have that happen.

The Investigators are a mixed bunch in all the expansions; I really like the base ones, but I think they add too many with each expansion so you get the useless/overpowered/unthematic ones. I mean seriously, a fucking martial artist? Get fucked.

[Rawtooth]

It's funny you mention that, especially the dig at Eve. Many of the board games my group enjoys tends to be the ones that are simpler in execution. If we wanted complexity, we would break out our minis and play Warmachine or something. The Eve board game is surprisingly simple and is fairly enjoyable, although like most vs. board games it comes down to a popularity contest more often than not. Descent, which is the Diablo clone you mentioned, is universally hated around here. The only other really complex board game we play is Twilight Imperium, which has it's ups and downs. One that is pretty desired to test-drive but noone has spent the money for yet is the Battlestar Galactic board game. The Cylon traitor factor makes it interesting.

I recommend looking into Kingsport, Red Dragon Inn, and Betrayal at House on the Hill. They are all relatively simple compared to Arkham and all fun. They all have unique mechanics; Kingsport is all about resource management with dice rolls, Red Dragon Inn is a faux drinking game with card decks although you could easily turn it alcoholic if you wished, and Betrayal is basically reenacting all of the cheesy B-grade horror movies you can think of while exploring a house that is randomly built from a stack of tiles.

I agree wholeheartedly about the digital board game. It would really simplify some things.

Personally, I don't mind the Martial Artist in the game, since I think a touch of the Orient and a monastic order dedicated to some vague prophecy about the end of the world is fitting right in, but everyone's milage varies.

@Civil War Man: It's no worse than the Private Eye, armed with shotgun and one of the fight related skills, blowing his clue pile during the Final Combat and killing the GOO by himself. Or the Reporter which gives anyone a free reroll once per round. Or the Photographer which gets to pick and choose out of two encounter cards during Arkham encounters. Many of the original investigators are still powerhouses, and there are duds in every set; i.e. lol Magician from base-set.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Betrayal at House on the Hill has been out of print for several years and will be expensive as hell to get hold of.

Red Dragon Inn (and its sequel) are great fun games that are light and easy to play. They are the games we play after playing games.

[Civil War Man]

lol Magician from base-set.

At least he's not the Student or the Salesman.

Yeah, many of the original characters are still powerhouses. The Mobster's whole meat shield shtick is great, as is the Hobo's ability to draw cards from the bottom of the decks. My personal favorite from the original characters is the Scientist. The one who's the walking Elder Sign.

However, compare the Mobster with the combat mule in Innsmouth, who has almost as much stamina, almost twice as much sanity, and replaces the damage reduction with "I don't have to make horror checks until the second round of combat".

Or maybe the Dreamer, who gains a Clue Token every time he moves in another world, and starts the game with a Gate Box that he can not lose.

It's basically the power curve shifted upwards a bit with the expansions. A powerhouse from the original game is still better than a lame character from the expansions, but they are often beaten by an expansion powerhouse.

I mean seriously, a fucking martial artist? Get fucked.

Innsmouth apparently has a Spy. Because Lovecraft and James Bond go so well together.

[Stark]

Frankly, I'm just glad Strange Eons is such an awesome app so I can just make my own rule-compliant investigators.

It's just annoying you can't use the card database instead of GIANT PACK OF CARDS RAR CLUTTER RAR. Bah.