I forgot to mention one particular highlight… midway through the scenario, Ursula drew an Elite enemy with 5 health. She was defenseless and had better things to do than fight but evading would be tough and stupid Leo was two whole locations away.
Fortunately, he had an M1918 BAR rifle plus the Marksmanship tactic in his hand that would let him fire at an enemy in a connecting location. So he moved once, loaded his rifle, and BANG! He shot that enemy dead in a single Fight action. Yeah, sniper rifles in Arkham Horror!
Ah, sweet success! How I’ve missed you.
The Heart of the Elders went really well for Leo and Ursula. Plus they both survived so that was nice. They needed ten clues to uncover five pillars which I thought might be tough to accomplish but, after some relatively painless exploration and investigation, they had all the clues they needed. Fortunately, the shroud values on these jungle locations were a lot kinder than that last, difficult scenario.
I also appreciated this scenario’s Winged Serpent massive monster which is unkillable but quite avoidable since it can’t do attacks of opportunity.
Best of all was Leo rocking the actions… he had one turn where he played SIX (!) distinct actions. Added on to his usual three, he had Leo De Luca (free action), the Expedition Journal (free Explore action), and his special ability (play an Ally at -1 resource cost at the start of his turn.)
Even though I’ve played enough Arkham Horror to know that I should never feel confident, I was still feeling pretty confident. All I had to do was get back to the Mouth of K’n-yan and wrap things up and I had four whole rounds to pull it off. I even burned two actions to remove a Pit Viper from the Vengeance display.
En route back to camp, some Poisonous Spores and Boa Constrictors and Ants slowed us down and I started getting nervous. Then on the last round, Ursula drew a Basilisk and I thought that meant for sure we would run out of time. But then, exactly like she had done in the third scenario, she just took those four points of damage from two of its attacks of opportunity when she Moved and then activated a pillar… which banished the Basilisk back into the encounter deck, so, problem solved! That Ursula is one tough cookie.
In the end, it came down to Leo’s very. last. action, but they pulled it off. Heck, yeah!
Leo and Ursula went spelunking in Heart of the Elders Pt. 2 and got up to their old tricks… only one investigator made it out alive. It was another dramatic sequence of events and came down to a huge moment of decision for Ursula.
They had explored most of the map and were heading for the final act. Leo had only two points of health remaining and an exhausted enemy at his location when he drew this horrible, awful, really-not-good weakness:
Both of those encounter card draws were enemies. Suddenly Leo was surrounded, plus his Machete +1 damage advantage was nullified now that he had multiple engaged enemies. Ursula was at the same location and I thought maybe she could help Leo by engaging and evading one or two enemies to buy him time to hack them to pieces.
But with time a-wasting and no hope of survival, Leo bravely shouted, “Ursula, it’s no use! Go on without me!” But when he looked up, she was long gone. She hightailed it right tf on outta there. Fortunately, she went on to the final location and achieved the objective to open a portal to another realm…
So now they’re wandering around The City of Archives in their conical alien bodies without any item cards in their decks. Geez, Forgotten Age! Good thing I like punishing games.
I guess sometimes a rules oopsie is a pain in the ass while other times it can save your ass.
My investigators were doing quite poorly trying to navigate the City of Archives. When the agenda advanced, I was instructed to draw 9 cards from each investigator deck looking for items… but during setup I had removed all item cards from my investigators’ decks. What, as they say, gives?
I checked the rule again and discovered I had overlooked the word Unique. I was only supposed to remove those one-of-a-kind items with asterisks next to their names, not every single item they owned. So, yay, now I get to start over. No wonder I was doing so poorly.
But as I was reading up on the rules for Unique items, I remembered you’re only allowed to have one copy of that item in play at any time across all investigators. But Ursula has two of these in her deck…
…and during the previous scenario, I had one Chthonian Stone in play attached to my ally Dr. Elli Horowitz and another in play that Ursula controlled. That meant I had two of the nastier chaos tokens out of the bag when I was only ever allowed to have one. I played it wrong! I hate that.
