Got it. Patience is a virtue. Those VIP’s must be lurking somewhere with their absinthe and gin…
Man, I had a great stretch of combat last night. The first time the Agenda advanced, I was engaged by the Pit Boss when his Aloof went bye-bye. Immediately afterwards, Roland drew a Conglomeration of Spheres from the encounter deck and Daisy drew the Servant of the Lurker.
Over the next few rounds, they managed to evade or kill all three enemies, along with a Swarm of Rats and a Mobster, all while taking minimal damage in the fight. It helps when you have guns and first aid kits and plenty of cards in your hand! This game is so satisfying when you have the right tools at your disposal and you manage to use them wisely. I kept almost every chaos token draw at the +2 sweet spot.
How would y’all handle Hunted Down if it’s Act 1 (so criminals are Aloof) and the sole criminal in play (Pit Boss) is already in the same location as the investigator with the highest intelligence? (That’s his Prey.)
Would you draw another encounter card due to Surge? Or would it just have no effect?
I’ve been playing it as a no-effect freebie encounter but a comment I just read on the BGG forums has me second guessing my rule interpretation. The game state didn’t change so they said Surge would apply, but technically there is an unengaged criminal in play.
Come now, jag. We all know one player’s perfectly clear rule is another player’s black hole of confusion. :)
I suppose the pseudo-double negative is throwing me. “No unengaged.” But, like I said, there is an unengaged Criminal enemy in play due to Aloof. But Hunted Down doesn’t lead it to move anywhere, so…
There doesn’t seem to be anything on the card negating the first sentence, so unless Fantasy Flight is paying you, don’t write new rules for their game! :) There’s an unengaged Criminal enemy, so don’t do what the card says to do when there’s not an unengaged Criminal enemy!
(I’m not super facile with this game so I’m assuming you’re handling the Aloof and Engagement rules correctly.)
From my cursory glance, it does look like the Aloof enemy may move toward “you” even if it’s starting the turn in the same space as its Prey. The only thing that would keep it from moving would be if it were Engaged, which isn’t going to happen until you spend an action to do so, since it’s Aloof. Caution: I don’t know Jack Shit. But this only took me 30 seconds to figure out without the game in front of me, so let’s see if I’m right.
Yeah, just to back up what @justaguy2 is saying, there’s no ambiguity here, @rrmorton. What you’re characterizing as an “interpretation” is actually just the rules. :)
So I’m about to do something with the Arkham Horror Card game that I’ve literally never done: play with another person.
My friend who played Star Wars: Rebellion with me last week wants a break from Star Wars before our rematch, but he still wanted to meet up to play boardgames. After batting a few suggestions back and forth, he very tentatively mentioned Arkham Horror, which I didn’t even know he knew! So I jumped at the chance to play “live” with a friend, even though I normally prefer not to drag my friends into coop games. But given that I’m not playing games like I used to, given that I’m having to deal with increasing difficulty speaking, given that the experience of sitting down to play a boardgame has been bogged down from being so darn sick for so long, I figured it would be cool to at least try coop, to finally try to indulge in this silly cardgame/lifestyle with someone else, even if just briefly. Why not give it a shot? What’s the worst that can happen? We hate it, we go back to Star Wars, and I remain a solitaire Arkham Horror player? In other words, the status quo? So let’s give it a shot.
So next Tuesday morning I’m sitting down to start an Arkham Horror campaign with my friend who has the core set, the Dunwich Horror campaign, and zero compunction about playing cooperative boardgames with his friends. I’m not sure what we’re going to do – hopefully not another Dunwich playthrough – but I’ll keep y’all updated.
Also, @triggercut, how is your game going? Anything to report back? Or, better yet, pics? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d enjoy a look at those boards in action.
Right, thanks! Glad to hear I’ve been playing it correctly. Someone on the BoardGameGeek forums who sounded authoritative made me second guess how I was playing it.
That’ll get ya. (But also, please note what I said about Prey not preventing the Aloof enemy from moving! There’s no rule that I found that says Prey will keep the enemy there. Just that it will choose to move toward Prey if it has a choice among movement options. But “stand still” is not one of those options, according to this card.)
Yep, the Pit Boss likes to keep a watchful eye on Daisy. She has to dart out of his sight to quickly grab some clues because if he sees her doing it, he’ll attack. One of the myriad neat ways these rules can adapt to fit the narrative.
Agreed! I was also hoping to see pics of those in action. Do the cards actually stand up in those slots? If so, I was wondering what something like a weapon with ammo or a spell with charges would look like.
Satisfying: The way abominations slurp up any criminals on the same location every turn.
Unsatisfying: Being cornered in the VIP lounge by enemies and not being able to draw cards or take resources every turn, meanwhile Daisy has two Cursed Lucks stacked on her and Roland is trying to clear clues off of his Cover Up weakness.
This sounds awesome to me. I’d love to move through these stories with someone else making strategic and creative choices along with me. 20-page AAR with pics or it didn’t happen!
So I just learned something I really wish I’d known ten minutes ago. You can engage exhausted enemies at your location and then ‘carry’ them with you when you move!
Daisy evaded and exhausted the Servant of the Lurker then moved away. On his turn, Roland moved to join her. But first, I should have had him engage that exhausted enemy in order to bring it along on the move. Now I have to wait an extra turn for it to ready and then move (hunter) to my location.
I need Roland to kill it in the Art Gallery where there’s one clue because:
A) That will give his 38 Special a +3 combat bonus, and-
B) So I can trigger his special ability after I defeat the enemy and take the final clue off of his Cover Up weakness. I really don’t want that mental trauma.
This is the first time I’ve needed to have a fight in a specific location like this, so… now I know!
I used to think this was going to be improbable to the point of being impossible without finishing the previous scenarios as optimally as possible; now I think it can be done, it just needs a lot of things to break your way.
Well, so that happened. We played the first introductory scenario for the Carcosa campaign, using two decks I had made. We had a Guardian (Tommy Muldoon, ally deck) and a Seeker (Norman Withers, astronomer, deck based on getting cards in hand). He knew Arkham Horror well enough, so with minimal rules reminders, we got through it and beat the scenario pretty quickly. Time for scenario two!
But then my friend decided he wanted to play another game, so he hauled out something he’d recently bought but he hadn’t read the rules for, and we spent five hours reading the rules for that and trying to play it – incorrectly, it turns out – after only two hours with Arkham Horror.
So the bottom line is that it didn’t seem to “take” and Arkham Horror is back to being a solitaire game for me. But the upside is that now I’ve got a Carcosa campaign under way. Watch out, King in Yellow! I’m coming for you!
Well, I’ve decided to strike out into the Path of Carcosa on my own. Well, with rookie cop Tommy Muldoon and his new partner, at any rate. Tommy, meet your new partner, fresh out of the library and she literally plays it by the book:
Daisy Walker is a librarian, but does this look like someone who wants to lend you a book? That’s because she’s saddled with a copy of the Necronomicon, and doesn’t quite know what to do with it. She knows she should probably get rid of it, but like with Frodo and his jewelry, it’s not always that easy.
I tore apart the Norman Withers astronomer deck my friend had been using. Honestly, I have no idea what I was thinking making someone else play some weird deck I didn’t even remember building, much less what I was thinking when I built it. And I scraped together a pretty quick-n’-dirty Daisy Walker deck based on her ability to take free tome actions. So I’ve got 10 tome cards in her 30-card deck, along with some pretty vanilla Seeker cards. A laboratory assistant and Whitton Greene, rare book dealer. Some potions and invocations. The usual.
And now I’m going to back-up, re-play the first Carcosa scenario, and then see how far we get after we fall asleep during the play. Because that’s how the Carcosa campaign opens: with the players falling asleep during a production of The King in Yellow. Stand by for the post-snooze debrief!
