So looking forward, I see that Norman Withers is even weirder than I realized:
Check out those deckbuilding options. “Seeker Cards level 0”? Uh, what? Norman Withers can’t put leveled up Seeker cards into his deck? Gah! Apparently he’s been drummed out of the scientific community and they won’t let him upgrade his cards. If he wants upgraded cards, he has to turn to the Mystics!
Serves me right. My own unofficial bias about Arkham Horror is that mystics have gone over to the other side and are cheating. Once you’re casting purple magik spells and flinging cantrips and engaging in unfettered thaumaturgy and public prestidigitation, what sets you apart from the cultists? Don’t answer that! As I said, it’s my own unofficial bias, so don’t mess it up.
Anyway, looks like I’ll be hunting through mystic cards when it comes time to upgrade Norman. Who knew he was hiding a purple streak?
Alright, you guys have made me do it. I’m gonna break this out over the weekend. I found an upgraded TTS mod with alllll of the content up to the present on it. I’ll find a pair of appealing characters (my last campaign run through Dunwich was Daisy and Zoey), pull up a couple of nice netdecks, and Return to the Night of the Zealot.
Oooh, do it, @Matt_W! I’d be interested to read about your experience trying this in Tabletop Simulator. I came this close to falling in with TTS earlier in the year over Marvel United, but the module I was using eventually beat me down. : (
Seems to me if a fella was interested in some “deck piloting”, he might give Winnie Hambock a shot! I do love the idea of an aviatrix in the mix, if you’re taking requests. :)
So I just added weaknesses to my deck. Tommy Muldoon drew Chronophobia:
Sanity is his vulnerability, so this could be a fun one! This is one of those weaknesses that has a 50/50 shot of being “no big deal” or “gah, I just lost the whole goddamn game!” Direct horror is no joke!
And check out what I drew for Norman, who just has to do something weird and different:
So when this comes up, I have to dump into the chaos bag five “curse” tokens, which are a new feature from the Innsmouth Horror expansion. When you pull a curse token during a test, you apply -2, remove the token from the game, and then draw another token. So Norman is basically going to trash up the randomness pool with five one-shot -2’s. What a dick move, Norman, taking a weakness that’s going to mess with the whole team! Plus, now I have to pry tokens out of five of the dang plastic coin cases to prep a bunch of curse tokens.
Whose idea was it to use one of these fancy-pants latter stage characters anyway?
OK will do. I saw a comment somewhere that Ms. Fine pairs well with Winnie so I’ll give that a try :) And will definitely take screenshots and report back. I’m kind of interested to try the new campaign-in-a-box FFG is doing now (instead of monthly deck drops.) After I get through NotZ, I think I’ll try Edge of the World.
I just have time to do setup for the first scenario and thought I’d give a demo of how it works in the really awesome scripted TTS mod. Here’s how the mod opens up:
First things first, I need to create my investigator decks. I’m going to use Winnie and Jackie. Those are their full experience decks. Their starter decks (linked in the full deck description) are the following:
I’m using code tags so that the URLs are displayed in the post. Note the numbers at the end of the URLs. I just have to input those in the appropriate spaces on the deckbuilder…
…then push the Build All button and voila! Here’s Winnie’s play area with her deck, including random basic weakness (Dread Curse) and bonded card off to the left (because her deck includes Crystallizer of Dreams.) You can also see it’s created a bar with her stats, given her 5 starter resources, and some tokens to indicate actions taken. Jackie is set up similarly, with her Arcane Research permanents also automatically displayed next to her tableau. (She’s supposed to have 2 mental trauma for having those cards in her deck. I’ll have to add that manually after I spawn the campaign.)
Ha, she got the same Basic Weakness as my Norman. Curse tokens, here we come!
I look forward to hearing more about how bag draws work in TTS and whether you miss them. I think I would miss the act of reaching into a cup or bag, swirling the click-clacking tokens around, feeling with my fingers for the one that hopefully won’t hurt me, and slapping it down on the neoprene. Or would I? I used to hate this part of Arkham Horror, the bag building and drawing, but oddly, it was Gloomhaven that made me really appreciate it. The way Isaac Childers used decks of cards to give you levers to affect the basic probabilities. That’s a constant in Gloomhaven, but I appreciate how the chaos tokens in Arkham Horror allow for similar levers, mostly in campaign progression, but also with gimmicks like the Dreaded Curse and some of the later expansion powers to lock tokens and whatnot.
Anyway, yeah, yeah, set-up is a breeze on TTS. Rub our noses in it some more, why don’t ya? I look forward to hearing more about the gameplay. :)
OK, so I decided not to go with those netdecks for Winnie and Jackie and instead just used the starter decks they’re packed with. Just to get a feel for what FFG was intending for these investigators.
I started up Return to the Gathering and was having a great time. Explored the west wing of the house and was able to punch my way through to the hallway. But now I’m in a bit of trouble:
And those ghouls are in addition to the two others I have engaged with my investigators, who are investigating the sub-basement. I fear I took too long dicking around killing monsters when I should have been clueving like two madwomen. Quite possible I’ll fail this one (I fail if I don’t get to Act 3), but I’ve packed it away for the evening.
I will say that I appreciate Jackie’s ability to manipulate the Chaos draw, though I screwed up big time when I was trying to put down a ghoul and played Dark Prophecy on a 5 vs 3 combat skill check
I drew -2, -1, 0, 0 and finally a tentacle. Fail. I would’ve been fine without using the card.
I’m super curious to hear more about your experience. I’ve set up the mod a couple of times and once I begin playing I feel like I’m just destroying pieces and wrecking all the careful scripting. That’s not the mod’s fault, I’ve just never learned to operate TTS correctly.
There were some unique chaos token gimmicks in the Edge of the Earth campaign that I enjoyed (aside from the new Frost tokens, which were meant to feel oppressive and succeeded.) A couple of puzzley scenarios made me pay very close attention to the contents of the bag.
Sure sounds like the digital chaos bag behaves like the physical version :)
I’ve got a couple of hundred hours intp TTS in general and have done some mod creation and scripting for it, so I’m pretty comfortable with the interface, which helps. This one is probably the best scripted mod I’ve seen. I have no idea how they got it to do some of the stuff it does. But even so, you have to operate it like it expects to be operated. There are some notes on how to do this in the notepad, and some videos you can pull out of the gun, but I figured most of it out just by playing around with it for an hour.
Arkham Horror the Card Game is mostly about two things: clueving and clobbering. Investigations are how you advance the Act and get to the scenario end. And Victory points are granted for successfully clobbering difficult enemies and for clearing difficult rooms of clues. Clueving and clobbering. So a Seeker/Guardian pair ends up strongly playing into the game’s themes and can be rather straightforward to play. My last campaign runthrough, of Dunwich several years ago, used Daisy (a seeker) and Zoey (a guardian.)
Winnie is a rogue who specializes in agility and deck churn, but sucks at willpower checks. Jackie is a mystic who specializes in chaos bag manipulation and using willpower to pass skill checks. On my failed runthrough of Return to The Gathering, I was trying to use them both as kind of mediocre cluever-clobberers, which didn’t work. It took too long and the doom clock caught up to me. So I’m gonna try again with a different strategy:
For Winnie: I think I need Lonnie Ritter in play quickly. She’s expensive, but her ability to be calmed by fixing things makes Winnie’s terrible willpower less of a problem, since Lonnie can absorb and heal any resulting sanity damage. (And Winnie’s Arrogance weakness goes away once Winnie fails a skill check, so it can be helpful to fail.)
For Winnie: I really need to churn fast to get both Opportunists and Lucky Cigarette Case in play as soon as possible. Winnie’s signature can draw a card if she commits at least two cards to any skill test. And if I can get Lucky Cigarette Case out too, that means Winnie can replace her committed skills. Opportunist returns to Winnie’s hand on a big win, so that’s even better.
For Jackie: I tend to underutilize Scrying. Since the doom clock is a problem here, it would be nice to shuffle Ancient Evils (which advances doom) down into the encounter deck and/or set things up so Winnie isn’t doing willpower checks.
For Jackie: Jackie has assets that when equipped let her use willpower to perform other skill tests. She needs to shore up the team’s weakness. In particular Clairvoyance lets her use will on investigations and lets her discover 2 clues at once. It’s probably worth a hard mulligan to make sure that one shows up in her starting hand if possible. And Arbiter of Fates lets her use her signature twice in a round, which is huge. I need that one too (never got it in my first playthrough.)
Overall I also just need to be more aggressive in using Jackie’s abilities. A bunch of her cards let her make extra chaos draws or ignore bad tokens or etc. Those can set up some powerful combos. For instance, using her signature with Voice of Ra seems like a good way to farm resources
OK, this evening I’ll make another run at it now that I have an idea how I want to play these characters.
I’m very into this game now. Played the introductory box solo and I’m now halfway through Dunwich (playing with a friend, so one scenario per week).
It’s an incredible game. So glad they changed the release model so I could overcome my concerns with the previous one (I buy imported English versions of most games, so many small items potentially hard to source is a hard sell).
I’m also learning I misread some rules in my playthroughts with this thread.
Biggest one is that investigator turn order can be chosen on a per-turn basis.
Last night I played through The Gathering and did… better but not well. I took Matt’s advice and went with Skids and Daisy.
Things were going great at first… no enemy encounters and generally smooth investigating until we got to the Parlor. The Ghoul Priest AND Skids’s weakness Mob Enforcer showed up at the same time. NOT GREAT. Skids fired off all four shots from his pistol in a single round but even with help from a Beat Cop he only hit the Ghoul Priest once for three points of damage. Then he went insane.
I briefly thought Daisy had a chance to fight the Ghoul Priest when I drew the Mind Over Matter card. I played it at the start of her round. but she still only got in one hit for a single, measly point of damage. So she hightailed it out the front door.
Play was much smoother and more engaging now that I more or less knew what I was doing. But I still made two mistakes and realized too late to undo them…
-I accidentally used Daisy’s tome ability for Old Book of Lore on Skids when they weren’t at the same location.
-Three times when Skids fired his pistol into the walls and floor around the Ghoul Priest, I forgot to apply Retaliate damage. Skids should have been eliminated from the game one round earlier.
Later today, we’ll see how The Midnight Masks goes with a mentally traumatized Skids. (But I really don’t like living with those two mistakes I made so I might replay The Gathering again first.)
I’m going to be playing Return to…, so because I’m heading into what I assume will be more difficult than the OG Zealot Night, I’m going with a tried-and-true duo that I’ve had some success with in the past.
So. I am going with everyone’s favorite probably-crazy-but-maybe-not stabbing chef, Zoey Samparas as my enforcer. And as my Cluehound, I’m rolling with Daisy the librarian.
Meanwhile, in extremely-off-topic news, the Mortons are currently decorating their tree with every single triggercut Christmas mix playing on shuffle throughout the house. 2K15 is Now Playing. Merry Christmas, trig!
Two memorable mistakes is low compared to my average playthrough :) If I felt like I sailed through the scenario otherwise, then I might consider replaying, but it sounds like Daisy was lucky to get out alive!
Zoey’s my favorite investigator of those I’ve tried so far. She turns my least favorite event (annoying enemies spawning on me) into a good thing!
And that run was quite successful. I focused on quick investigations, specifically using my mulligan to pick up Arbiter of Fates for Jackie and Lucky Cigarette Case for Winnie. I also wasn’t afraid to sacrifice some investigator health or sanity to investigate faster. Crucially, I was able to investigate fast enough that I made it to Act 3 before Agenda 3 came out and then was able to use Evades (which Winnie is very good at) to manage the ghoul population. On to the Masks!
