Ha ha, I actually own all six Cosmic Encounter expansion decks and I pretty rarely play any of them. Those guys are really good at this.
Thanks for the tips guys.
It’s pretty shocking how little you really get in the core set, sure you get five different characters, but good luck trying to build two decks for investigators who share a class. And even just making one deck, you have no real deck building choices. And then you get three scenarios to play through, which doesn’t really take a huge amount of time. The second scenario seemed interesting, but I didn’t have much time to explore the town. And the second scenario was brutal, it was over before I could play out enough cards to have a chance. In the end, the damned Ghoul Priest from the first scenarios caught up with me and smashed my face in.
In the interests of balance, I’ll point out one thing about this game I really liked. When I read the rules on leveling up during campaigns, I thought they sounded a little thin and unlikely to have much impact on the game. But in practice I was really taken by the character development, and want to play a longer campaign with more card options so I can see how my investigator changes.
A couple of questions for you all. Is evading enemies with the hunter trait almost pointless as they will just catch up with you a turn later? For those of you who play solo, do you just run a single investigator?
Thanks for the offer Tom, I will take you up on that if you don’t mind.
typo?
The hunter enemies only move one space a turn , so if you move far enough away you can evade them for longer or they might (depending on what they target) latch onto another character. Also, evading at a minimum disengages them from you, which can be valuable.
And the game is playable with a single investigator - there are quite a few solo deck designs out there. Just depends on what you want to try.
Yes, but probably not the letter you’re thinking is a typo.
-Tom
I honestly thought it was a Tony Carnevale pack!
Didn’t offer it to me. sniff
Maybe Tom is still smarting from that copy of “Aquaman” I sent him all those years ago…
I think that is par for the course for LCG games, for good or ill. LotR definitely felt the same to me until I had the first cycle, at that point it started to feel like a complete game.
I guess I just accept it as the cost of these games if I want to play them, though I completely understand how folks might view them as a poor value proposition.
An evaded enemy is exhausted so won’t move during the Enemy phase. This applies to enemies with the Hunter keyword.
When playing solo I prefer using two investigators. That said, I do have two core sets which reduces the variance of each deck.
I know it gives me one turn off from their attacks (unless I can run away constantly), but that hardly has seemed worth it so far.
I had a question about that, does playing duplicates of critical cards remove a bit of the character from the game? One thing I was thinking of doing once I have more investigator cards is house ruling deck building to only allow one copy of each card.
Most card games of this sort run 4 copies of any given card per deck. Two is already pretty low.
I appreciated the fact that with one basic set I could roll through the first three scenarios (obviously having to be a little choosy about which two investigators I paired up) to see whether or not the game clicked for me. Which, happily, it did. And at that point I can go in a little heavier on my investment in that system.
Sure beats paying $60 for Mage Knight a few years back and ending up with a pretty box pretty much anchored to my newly-built game shelf.
Certainly you can play it as you wish but, as with most deck building games, you typically want to reduce the variance of your draws ie see your better cards more often. As malkav11 points out a limit of two is already pretty low for this type of game so it’s not like you’ll see a hand full of duplicates all that often.
A massive plus (in my book) for AH LCG over LOTR was the much smaller deck size. Key cards show up much more often and deckbuilding itself is far quicker (you don’t feel like you’re padding out the deck with tier 2/3 cards, etc). FFG went down this route with Star Wars Destiny (which I’ve played an awful lot of) and those games are far more interesting when you can do some rough mental calculations of what cards you might expect to see in a mulligan or mid-game hand refresh, etc.
I don’t think you have to buy two core sets to enjoy AH though. If you’d rather just by more expansions/packs and build your collection that way you’ll eventually have a fairly deep card pool to build decks from. It was really when playing with multiple investigators who share a class that I found I wanted extra copies of certain cards. Even then, if you’re playing with opaque sleeves I see no issue with printing off a couple of proxies as required…
Richard Holt seems to need a little prodding. You’re capable of getting hooked on an LCG boondoggle by your own self!
I think I still have that! I bet it’s a super valuable collectors item. Or it will be when the Aquaman movie turns out to be a huge hit.
-Tom
Don’t you have any doors in your house that you need to keep from swinging open?
-Tom
This is precisely my experience. Getting screwed over by how little deck-building content comes in the base set turns into a non-event once you get expansions. There’s plenty of deck-building opportunity once you mix in those cards. And in case it’s not clear, that’s what you’re supposed to do immediately. All of the non-story cards from the expansions go straight into your collection, without waiting until you get to that storyline. Just fish out all the investigator cards, add them to the ones you’ve already got, and build away! Now you’re actually playing the Arkham Horror LCG. Prior to that, you were basically playing a canned tutorial. Bleh.
-Tom
Probably true…I may or may not have ordered the first two cycles as well as a couple novellas (with bonus cards). :)
Yikes, I thought I was being a little rash just picking up the first box of The Dunwich Legacy.
Although in full disclosure I may have impulse bought the entire Warhammer 40k Conquest LCG range when the thing was discontinued…
Played 2 4-player games of Gaia Project on Saturday, and two more last night. I am like in the zone on that game now, both in terms of playing and enjoying. Low randomness (after setup), lots of (indirect) player interaction, and excellent strategic choices. It’s displaced Terraforming Mars as my current favorite.
Yeah, I LOVE LotR LCG and have been reading some of the Arkham Horror novels lately. I was doomed on this one. (Plus I know from LotR you need a card pool to make these games work so I ordered the entire first cycle. The second cycle got “mysteriously” ordered after a particualrly rough week at work.)
Nice grab on the Warhammer Conquest set, I wish I had snagged that myself. Sadly by the time I got a look at it a lot of it was sold out already. I’m planning to be more vigilant for when they phase ot LotR.