geek
Hot Games
Blackbeard
Agricola
Race for the Galaxy
Risk
Puerto Rico
A Touch of Evil, The Supernatural Game
Conquistador
Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game
Pandemic
Settlers of Catan, The
Descent: The Road to Legend
Power Grid
Twilight Struggle
Stone Age
Treasure Fleet
Carcassonne
Arkham Horror
Descent: Journeys in the Dark
StarCraft: The Board Game
Hanging Gardens, The
Dirge: Carnage in Crimson
The Devil's Cauldron: The Battles for Arnhem and Nijmegen
War of the Ring
Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm
Tigris & Euphrates
BattleLore
Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition
Age of Piracy
Galactic Emperor
Dungeons & Dragons Board Game
Wealth of Nations
Tide of Iron
Galaxy Trucker
1960: The Making of the President
Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage
Brass
Caylus
Combat Commander: Europe
El Grande
Manoeuvre
Ticket to Ride
Clue
Lost Cities
Commands & Colors: Ancients
Titan
Kingsburg
Shogun
Scrabble
Last Night On Earth: Growing Hunger
Recommend
14
35 Posts
1 , 2  Next »  
New Thread | Printer Friendly | Subscribe | Bookmark
Your Tags: Login to Add Tags | View 
Popular Tags: [View All]
Brian M
flag
Avatar
We've found that Arkham Horror tends to have the opposite feel that it should - in the begining, there is a frantic rush to seal gates. Later on once you have a few gates sealed, you can move at a very relaxed pace. In fact, it often becomes apparent there is no way for Old One to appear at all, since there aren't really enough gate locations to build up enough Doom tokens, which also leads to the problem that its actually very BAD to close (without sealing) a gate, since it just lets more Doom tokens appear!

We tried changing things a bit, and really liked how this worked out.

When you draw a gate at a location with no gate, place a gate and a monster as usual, but DO NOT add a Doom token.

When you draw a gate at a location with an active gate, add a monster at the location and ADD a Doom token, but do not place extra monsters.

When you draw a gate at a sealed location, do not place a gate or doom token, but place one monster at every open gate (as you would have when a gate opened where there already was an existing gate in the normal rules). (This represents dark forces mobilizing in direct response to your investigator's efforts).

This seems to nicely alter the flow of the game. Early on, the Doom isn't building up, and you can actually afford to close gates. As more gates build up, the Doom track builds up faster. Seal gates, and its a big boon - but you will face more of a threat. And there's never a "safe" point where you know the Old One will never appear.

The other change we made, which is really quite seperate, is to reduce the number of monster strength trophies need to "cash in" to 3 (or 6 for those that would normally cost 10). One gate trophy would replace 3 strength. This lets you actually get to buy more stuff, and have more fun in choosing what to get and actually getting things like allies.

Edit: Whoops! Forgot to mention a minor thing. We did start out the doom track with one token on it.

Another Edit: Just for the record, credit for this variant goes a lot (probably more than me) to Nightmare.

A much, much later Edit:
We've kept tinkering around with variants; as the new expansion comes out, things change around. However, I don't have Dunwich, so any suggestion may fall apart with an extra board.

Last time we played we tried this:

At the start of the game, place a Doom token on the 0 space of the terror track. This is the Threat track. (It has nothing to do with the Terror level, that's just a convenient place for it).

Place one gate with one monster and one doom token to start the game as usual.

When a NEW gate opens:

1) Increase the Threat track by 1.
2) Roll a number of dice equal to the new Threat level.
3) For each die that scores a 5 or 6, place one monster on the gate that just openend.
4) If any of the dice scored a 1, add 1 Doom token to the doom track. Only add 1 Doom no matter how many 1's came up.

When a DUPLICATE gate opens:

1) Add 1 Doom token to the doom track.
2) A monster surge occurs.

This worked nicely for slowing down the start a little, but making duplicate gates even nastier and making new gates get progressively worse as the game went on (but not usually as bad as a duplicate gate). This also hopefully fixes the 'stalemate' problems some people reported where they just focused on closing gates; while closing a gate is actually a good idea in these rules, its still going to overwhelm you eventually.

The only question is what to do on sealed gates. Last play, we had sealed gates be safe, but that led to a lack of tension once we had 4 gates sealed. I'm thinking of trying:

When a SEALED gate is drawn:
1) Roll a number of dice equal to the Threat level.
2) For every two dice that scored a 5 or 6, place one monster at that location (even though it is sealed).
3) If at least two dice are scoring a 1, place a doom token on the doom track.

This would make Sealed gates much safer than open gates, but not totally risk free.

I'll give more comments when we get a chance to try it.


Last edited on 2007-08-21 15:50:02 CST (Total Number of Edits: 4)
Alex Rockwell
flag
Avatar
06
This is interesting. It makes it so you really want to close gates (as opposed to only wanting to close them if you can seal them).

I dont think it would work well for 1-2 players though, but it seems very interesting for the middle numbers.

What do you think of my cultist player variant? The cultist player can collect tokens and turn them in to increase the doom track, among other things. You can get to an end where the players are rushing to win before the cultist can push the doom track to the max.
Sean McCarthy
flag
Avatar
0607
That's a very interesting idea, and it looks really cool. I'm pretty sure it will have some side effects (as all major rule changes do) but I think it has a lot of potential when the kinks get worked out.

I'd be very interested to hear about people's experiences with this or similar ideas.
Brian M
flag
Avatar
Quote:
I dont think it would work well for 1-2 players though, but it seems very interesting for the middle numbers.

No idea how it would work for 1-2. I've been playing games almost exclusively with 4 characters, so I don't really know how the game goes with lower numbers. I suspect it would be much harder (with any rules set).

Quote:
What do you think of my cultist player variant?

Sorry Axelfrog, it looks like a workable idea, but the concept of making a co-op game into a competitive game is not something that appeals to me :)
Scott Forster
flag
I like this variant. Under the current rules, there is a serious dis-incentive to closing gates -- there's a right way (seal) and a wrong way (don't seal). The only time there's an incentive to do it the "wrong" way is if you're extremely close to having too many gates open and there are few doom counters, which doesn't seem too likely if the method so far has been to seal gates from the beginning.

This variant looks like it gives you different benefits depending on your choice, which feels like better game design.

Before I unleash this on my friends, have you played enough to get an idea of how this affects the game length? I'm concerned that a slow start on the doom track will add some time. If it adds too much, it's probably something my group wouldn't want to deal with...
Dead Eye Dick
flag
Avatar
05060708
I also really like this idea - well thought out and sounds like a fun way to ramp up the challenge for those who are having an easier go and/or want a change of pace.

I do think, per the designers concept, that with 1-2 playes, it is better to play two investigators a piece - which makes this a good gameplan even with fewer players.
Matt Crawford
flag
We have also found the doom track to stall in the second half of the game espicially if you focus on sealing gates and the gates you do seal are the most active, so we tried your variant.
Below is a turn by turn run down of the doom track for a 3 player game we played last night, we recorded both the variant and original rules.

        Doom track
Gate     V  O
Opens   0  1
Opens   0  2
Active   1  2
Opens   1  3
Opens   1  4
Active   2  4
Active   3  4
Active   4  4
Active   5  4
Opens   5  5
Opens   5  6
Active   6  6
Sealed   6  6
Sealed   6  6
Opens   6  7
Opens   6  8
Sealed   6  8
Active   7  8
Opens   7  9
Sealed   7  9
Sealed   7  9
Sealed   7  9
Investigators won with 6 sealed gates.

Key
Opens - A new gate opens
Active - Active gate
Sealed - Location sealed
V - Variant rules
O - Original rules

Our approach to the game definitely changed everyone could could now see it was important to close gates not just to gain them as trophies but to slow the advance of the Doom track. I think the variant only partially worked it certainly gives you more incentive to close gates rather than just sealing them. Ironically this resulted in far more new gates opening making the original rules work much better.
Brian M
flag
Avatar
Quote:
Ironically this resulted in far more new gates opening making the original rules work much better.

Could you elaborate at all on what you felt did not work well? I'd definetly like to hear any details.
Its interesting to see the difference between original and variant doom version, but I'm curious how you tracked it. We've tried that as well, but it gets a little tricky since we occasionally close gates that we really wouldn't have bothered closing and not sealing in a normal game. So far, our rough estimates have always indicated that we would have gotten fewer doom tokens with the regular method.

We've only played with the variant 4 times so far, so its not exactly extensive, but we've been happy with it. Its also handed us our only defeat, which really wouldn't have been a problem in the regular rules - we picked up around 5 or 6 doom tokens with only 2 gates open! In the regular rules this would be an ideal gate draw - with only 2 gates open, you don't get enough extra monsters for it to matter much.
(Things were pretty wacky though - we actually got 3 of our doom tokens out of Independence Square, hitting it twice, then shortly later reshuffling and after the shuffle hitting it twice in fairly short order again)

Quote:
Before I unleash this on my friends, have you played enough to get an idea of how this affects the game length? I'm concerned that a slow start on the doom track will add some time. If it adds too much, it's probably something my group wouldn't want to deal with...

I'm sorry, we have not really been tracking game length - it has also seemed to vary a great deal with how things happen to work out.
I can see some added time from the variant - time spent closing gates you wouldn't close in the regular game. But I can also see some reduced time - you don't get as many 'monster swarms' in the middle/early. Reducing the monster strength cost to 3 to purchase also speeds things up a little for getting resources faster.
Sinister
flag
Avatar

Maybe there's something I'm missing here but it seems you extend the game dramatically by doing this. In an 8 player game would the GOO even ever come out? If the only time a doom token can be placed is when mythos card lists a gate that's already open and you have players keeping every gate closed then the odds are pretty slim on adding doom tokens, except maybe the turn after a portal is open (simply because is takes a awhile to explore). The odds of adding doom tokens at all (in large player game), as long as you making closing portals your goal, seems pretty slim. Is there something I haven't thought of?

Last edited on 2005-07-09 11:09:04 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Matt Crawford
flag
I think both sets of rules suffer once gates are sealed. If you look at the Mythos cards or just play the game 2 or 3 times it becomes very obvious that 4 of the gates should be sealed before any others. Once 3 or 4 of these are sealed the difficulty (and worse tension) of the game drops right off. Were finding this happens with the doom track half way or just above so there isn't much chance of it going to the top (note the terror track is high at this point). This is really my only contention and .

Quote:
I'm curious how you tracked it.

We played the game using your variant then each time a Mythos card was drawn recorded the effect on two seperate doom tracks. If a gate opened 1 token was added to the original track, if the gate was active we added a token to the variant track. What we didn't do was try to second guess whether a gate would have been closed had we not used the variant.

Quote:
We've only played with the variant 4 times so far, so its not exactly extensive, but we've been happy with it.

Considering it was only one game I don't put to much stock in the figures. We'll certainly try the variant again but I think with some additional difficulty tweaks.

We did all agree that the original rules would work much better for our group if the incentive to close gates was higher.

Overall I'm really enjoying the game it's just a bit too easy for my taste (thats after about 7 plays). My personal preference is for these sort of games to be very hard, both Doom (FFG) and Lord of the Rings (knizia) I enjoyed for this reason. There are many ways to increase the difficulty so this isn't a problem.

Quote:
In an 8 player game would the GOO even ever come out? If the only time a doom token can be placed is when mythos card lists a gate that's already open and you have players keeping every gate closed


Imagine a 1 player game the doom track would shoot up. Don't forget though 3-5 is the recommended number of players, the further you move from that the more the rules seem to become stretched.
Brian M
flag
Avatar
Quote:
In an 8 player game would the GOO even ever come out?


Yeah, I can see an 8 player game not working well with this, since you would have so many people to close gates. We've been playing with 4 characters (usually with 2 people playing two characters each) and I can't judge it for anything outside of that. The one game we played with 6 players (by normal rules) made us hesitant to even try it with that many players again - just too much down time, not really enough for that many characters to do.

I suppose you could always make their be a cost of 1 or 2 clue tokens just to close a gate, which would make it less trivial to do.
Satanic Warhamster
flag
Avatar
I am suprised that you are able to seal that many gates to have a problem. In most of the game I have played, clue tokens are a very valuable commodity (esp. when playing against Hastur). Are you really getting that many clue tokens/Elder Sign cards that it is trivial to seal gates?
Sinister
flag
Avatar
Ok here's my thought on gate closings. This should make the seal the gate game more difficult.

2 gates for:
Hibbs, Silver Twilight, science, historical society

These should take 5 clue tokens or an elder sign

6 gates for

graveyard, black cave, unnamable

These should take 6 clue tokens or an elder sign and a clue token

10 gates for

Woods, independance square, witch house, unvisited Isle,

These should take 7 clue tokens or and elder sign and 2 clue tokens.

I think this would increase the difficulty nicely.