Let's Play: Arkham Horror

[willpell]

Once again, I've decided to play a boardgame by myself while journaling it to the Internet, as an excuse to pass the time and a way of keeping better track of the complexities. This time, it's a long-time favorite of mine whose extreme play-length has kept me from indulging in it at Game Night for several months: the Fantasy Flight version of Arkham Horror, which I have enjoyed many times in the past, and finally now own my own copy of courtesy of a Black Friday discount. I barely have enough room on my little card table for the board, and none at all for the various decks of cards, so this will be a somewhat onerous experience, but at least it'll be an experience. I'm not sure I've ever actually played the single-player version of this game (it takes anywhere from 1 to 8 players, but is questionably balanced at the extremes of that range).

Since he's on top of the stack that comes in the box (this is as good a selection criterion as any), I'll be playing the character of "Michael McGlen, the Gangster". He starts the game with 3 Sanity and 7 Stamina, so he can handle himself in a fight, but is a simple man with a simple mind which is easily disturbed by "impossible" experiences. He's even more of a tough guy than other 7-Stamina characters, though; he reduces all Stamina losses by 1! Thusly, getting beat up by a weak monster won't even affect him, and even the nastiest monsters (excluding those which kill you outright) are unlikely to finish him in fewer than three hits. Combine this with the fact that he starts the game owning Dynamite and a Tommy Gun, and he's rather well set-up to "take care of dese mugs what are musclin' in on our racket". As for the boss of the other outfit, the bottom of the stack of Great Old Ones (they come together in a bag and I don't feel like fishing out the whole stack) is Yig, the Father of Serpents, one of the weakest Great Old Ones and thus a tolerable opponent for a lone Investigator. Yig's "doom track " has a mere 10 spaces, making him the single easiest-to-kill "Ancient One" (FFG, the publisher of this version of Arkham Horror and also of the Call of Cthulhu CCG, coined this blanket term for what were previously called "Great Old Ones and Outer Gods", with no terribly clear divide between the two categories). However, by the same token (heheh), Yig's short lifespan in a battle also corresponds to him being the fastest AO to awaken, and that will be merciful as I bumble my way through this game, constantly referencing the rules and juggling components I don't have room to lay out.

This game takes longer to set up than some games take to play....I start by putting a "Clue token" on each of the game's "unstable" locations. These are "creepy" parts of town, where "gates" to other dimensions sometimes open and disgorge Monsters; the clue tokens represent discoveries about these alien threats, which are useful in dealing with them. There are various reasons to want to collect Clues, which will be discussed as this Let's Play proceeds. I then shuffle a stack of sixteen "Gates", large circular tokens which correspond to the eight "Other Worlds" of the basic game, two identical copies for each and several more than can be open at once (there are 11 unstable locations in Arkham), since the players try to close these gates and thereby gain the tokens as "trophies", which can be spent for various purposes or kept to win the game. Additionally, you must create the "monster cup", by putting all 55 of the game's monster tiles (excluding five that are only used for a particular Ancient One, who isn't Yig) in a container - ideally this is supposed to be opaque, but I don't have anything handy to serve the purpose, so I'll just use the transparent Ziploc bag that the game board came in, and just try not to look while grabbing them out of it.

In addition to his weapons (both of which are classified as "Common Items", not because every man on the street has them, but simply becase they're not arcane or otherworldly), Michael McGlen starts the game with one random Unique Item from the deck thereof (which is one of the larger decks of cards in the game, along with the deck of Spells). I figure that he's assumed to have stolen this artifact during the "Foreman job" referred to in his backstory (which is printed on the back of his character sheet - this game positively drips with fluff text). The item I've drawn for him is "The Silver Key", which allows the wielder to automatically Evade monsters three times without having to roll. He also gains the skill "Stealth", which helps him reroll Evade checks. Well, that's a bit redundant, but oh well, it means he will have a fairly easy time getting away from things which he can't f@$#%ng blow away with his Tommygun or Dynamite. (While both of these are very good weapons, they don't gain much from being combined since both are "2-handed" weapons; you can only use one or the other, and Dynamite is one-use and only slightly deadlier.)

Each Investigator in Arkham Horror has three tracks which govern six paired statistics: Speed and Sneak, Fight and Will, and Lore and Luck. Michael is pretty terrible at Lore and Luck, and not great at Sneak and Will, but he excels in Fight and is pretty good with Speed; since his Silver Key auto-succeeds on some of his Sneak checks, he'll start the game at his maximum Speed of 5, which corresponds to a Sneak of just 1. He doesn't need his immense Fight rating though, since the Tommygun will take care of that, so he sets the minimum value of 3 Fight (which is the maximum value for the game's weakest characters), and has a Will of 4. Since the benefits of Luck are unpredictable while those of Lore are largely tied to using Spells, which don't tend to interest a character with 3 Sanity, Michael starts at 0 Lore and 3 Luck. All of these paired values are marked by sliders, and each turn a character can adjust the sliders to alter their stats, raising one of the pair by 1 and lowering the other by 1 (in the majority of cases; a few characters are weird). They may do this a number of times each turn equal to their Focus, which in Michael's case is 1; each track has four spots on it, so if Michael decided during gameplay that he wanted Lore 3 and Luck 0 instead of the reverse, it would take him 3 turns of Focusing to become a hard-Luck Loremaster, assuming he didn't move his other two sliders during those three turns.

At last, I've finished setup (it took at least 45 minutes, though that's largely due to my having to unbox the game and blogging about it; with a properly sorted-out set, it takes more like 15 or 20), apart from creating the initial Mythos threat, which is enough of a gameplay action that I'll save it for the next post. So it's finally time for the game to begin!

[willpell]

So at last, Michael the Gunman's one-man war against the forces of slightly-great-evil can begin. The first thing that happens in what I think of as the "play" part of the game, even though it's technically the last part of setup, is resolving the first "Mythos Card". There's a very large deck of these cards, which dictate the local goings-on in troubled Arkham. The first one to turn up this game is a "Rumor", and the game can't start with these, so I replace it with a "Headline": "Family Found Butchered!" This disturbing event raises the "Terror Level" in Arkham to 1, one of the game's twenty "Ally" cards, representing useful residents of Arkham who might end up on your side, is removed from the game (this can happen up to ten times). The randomly chosen expatriate this time is "Anna Kaslow", a highly knowledgeable individual who could have granted the Investigator who gained her allegiance +2 Luck and 2 Clue tokens. Instead, she moves to Anaheim, Azusa, or possibly Cucamonga, she hasn't decided yet, but hopefully a place with fewer gruesome murders. (One might call this slightly premature, since no Mythos threat has yet become evident; certainly Michael doesn't see what's the big deal about some folks getting whacked.)

Actually, I did that out of order, but left it that way for the sake of a joke. Really, when you resolve a Mythos card, the stuff that it says it does comes last; first, you open a Gate. On the "Family Found Butchered" card, the gate opens at, appropriately enough, the Graveyard. When the Gate opens, it destroys a Clue token (there's not much point in gradually piecing together anecdotal evidence of the strange local happenings anymore, not after a hole in the sky opens up and something slimy and toothsome drops out of it), and it places the first Doom token on Yig's track. He's 10% awake! Then one Gate token is drawn and placed over the Graveyard location; in this case, it's a gate to the "City of the Great Race", one of the marginally less nasty Other Worlds. From this gate, a Monster then emerges...this is one of the few parts of the game which I don't feel is ideally implemented, because even though the gate goes to a particular other dimension, any sort of monster can appear from it. In this case, it's a "Formless Spawn", a gelatinous creature which is immune to physical weapons (even Dynamite!), so Michael will not want to tangle with it. After that, there's a possibility that monsters move, but this particular card doesn't move this particular monster. Meanwhile, a new Clue Token appears at the "Unvisited Isle" location; monster movement, if any, happens after clue token placement (though I'm not certain the distinction matters), and then you go on to resolve the effect of the card.

So, a gate has opened, an innocent family has died, and Michael can finally take his turn. With his Speed currently set to 5, getting all the way across town in one move is no problem; having started at "Ma's Boarding House", he moves once into the streets of the Southside neighborhood in which it's located, then performs a move akin to that of a Knight in Chess to reach the Merchant District neighborhood, which is located by the sea and thus contains the Isle. One more movement point gets him into the Isle itself, and he instantly gains the two Clue tokens there (one just created and one from the start of the game). Now that Michael has moved, he has an Encounter; each neighborhood in the game has a deck of 7 cards which dictate possible encounters there. Shuffling the seven cards in the green (my favorite color!) deck for the Merchant District, I draw one and look at the text listed under "Unvisited Isle". (I accidentally looked at "The Unnameable", another location, instead...and remind me NEVER to freaking go THERE.) According to this, some guy bumps into Michael while walking on a path around the isle, and Michael's arm goes numb with cold from the fleeting collision; Michael spins around to see who this cool-as-a-cucumber weirdo might be, and possibly teach him a lesson about bumping into and unnaturally chilling a "made man", but the guy has vanished in a split second and Michael is left with nothing but a sense of confustication. The frosty sideswipe automatically inflicts 1 Stamina loss, but Michael is tough enough to shrug this off; however, he must then make a roll to avoid losing Sanity.

So now would be a good time to discuss how rolls work. The game comes with five six-sided dice (d6es), which is an insultingly small number (even right out of the box, Michael can have a Fight rating of 6, but when his Tommygun is factored in, he's capable of rolling as many as 12 dice), but of course most gamers can find some extra dice laying around; in order to make a roll with any of your stats, you roll a number of d6es equal to the stat in question, with many of the cards specifying a bonus or penalty to the roll. Case in point - Michael's urgent wracking of his tiny, feeble brain, wondering where Mr. Sub-Zero could have gotten to in such a hurry, calls for a Will-1 roll, so Michael uses his current Will of 4 and subtracts 1, leaving him with 3. (His Will and Fight always total 7, so if he was currently set to 6 fight, he'd have 1 Will and would fail this roll automatically, unless he got extra dice somehow.) Rolling the resulting 3 dice, Michael succeeds if he manages to roll a 5 or a 6 on any of them; lower numbers are failures, and the roll happens to be 4, 4, and 3, so Michael is indeed deeply disturbed by the logic-defying encounter, losing 1 of his mere 3 sanity points. (Apparently, making a career out of murdering random people for money is bad for your mental health, who knew.)

With his encounter completed, Michael ends his turn; if there were other Investigators, they'd go on to take turns, each one first moving and then each one having an encounter. But single-hero games are fairly straightforward - one investigator turn, then one Mythos turn. The next Mythos card opens a gate at The Unnameable, destroying its Clue token; the gate goes to "Another Dimension" (also not terribly nasty), and it vomits forth a very nasty monster called a Gug (which is most famous among Lovecraft afficionados for appearing in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", and most famous among less Lovecraft-respecting Call of Cthulhu players for demonstrating that Lovecraft had serious issues with women). The card is of the third type, an "Environment", meaning that it goes into play and has a lasting effect; it also deposits a new clue at the Woods, and does not move either of the Monsters out into the Arkham streets. Yig is 1/5 awake, and "No One Can Help You Now" (the name of the Environment card)...one of the major strategies for winning the game is to "seal" the Gates, and that can't be done as long as the card is in play. This early in the game, it's not likely to affect play much, but many an Arkham Horror player has bemoaned the appearance of this particular Environment later on, when the team was pushing for victory and this card made it harder to achieve.

That's one entire round completed, so let's move on....

[willpell]

Back to Michael's turn, and the first thing he does is Focus; he plans on going to the Woods this turn, and they're 4 spaces away, so he sees no need to keep his fifth Speed point and trades it for doubling his Sneak rating. (The Stealth skill lets you reroll a failed Evade check, but that does you little good if you have only one die at best to roll, and there's no sense in wasting the Silver Key on avoiding an easy threat, if you don't need the extra Speed that you gain by sacrificing stealth.) Arriving in the Woods, he collects two more clues, and then draws a card which states that he stumbles upon a still where the Sheldon Gang are making illegal moonshine (the game is set during Prohibition). Michael chose a good time to gain a bit of Sneak, as he now has to roll a -1 check with it (and unlike when monsters are involved, this doesn't count as an Evade check, just the straight Sneak rating, so his cards can't help him...nor, apparently, can his Tommygun). He has just one die to roll, but he manages to get a 5 on it, so he isn't beaten up by the Sheldon Gang (again, one has to wonder why the Tommygun doesn't help with these situations).

It's Mythos phase again, and this time, we get a Rumor; these cards are nasty enough that you're not allowed to start the game with one in play. Like Environments, they linger in play, but they have more complex effects. This particular Rumor card, "The Great Ritual", opens a Gate in the Graveyard, but there's already a gate there, so instead, it creates a "monster surge" - one new monster emerges from every open gate on the board! There are only two gates, both with monsters on them, so the monster population of Arkham doubles as a Ghost and a Cthonian appear. (Cthonians are giant burrowing tentacle-worms who cause earthquakes; they were invented not by Lovecraft but by his latter-day imitator Brian Lumley, and IMO they aren't a great contribution to the Mythos, but the writer of the original Call of Cthulhu RPG apparently liked them enough to include them, and they keep popping up in related works.) Since the Ghost is physically immune just like the Formless Spawn, Michael's player chooses to put them together, while the Cthonian shares a flat with the Gug in the Unnameable House for now. However, the Formless Spawn and the Gug immediately move out according to the "monster movement" part of the card, so it looks like Michael is finally gonna see some action - whether he wants to or not.

The Rumor doesn't create a Clue token; instead, it goes straight into play, improving the combat prowess of several types of monsters which don't currently exist. However, more relevantly, the Ritual is apparently meant to summon Yig, and if it succeeds, the rate of Gate opening will double in 5 turns; to prevent this, the players must discard 3 Spell cards, and this number is not any lower because there's only one player. Since Michael doesn't exactly specialize in Spells, he's ill prepared to defeat the Ritual; he is right next to Ye Olde Magick Shoppe (located in the upscale Uptown district of town, along with the Woods full of moonshiners), and you can buy spells for $5 each there, but three such spells would cost $15 and Michael had only $8 at the start of the game. Not giving a damn about Spells anyway, Michael would probably rather just ignore the Ritual instead of trying to get involved...if nothing else, it'll end the game faster.

Moving on to round 3. Michael decides he might as well give the Great Ritual thing the old college try, and moves over to the Magic Shop, after Focusing his Sneak up a bit more since he doesn't need to travel far. In this "stable" location, he chooses not to take Magic Lessons just yet, instead having a normal encounter with the location to see whether he can gain Spells for free, or earn money somehow. He is promptly thrown out by the shrieking shopkeeper, "Miriam Beecher", who claims "they've marked you!" (presumably "they" in this case are the Ritualists he was vaguely planning to thwart; so much for that idea), with the disorienting incident leaving him out in the Uptown streets and costing him 1 of his remaining 2 Sanity points. Not even a roll to avoid it this time; coises! "Well ferget youse, lady; I doesn't even believe in dat voodoo hoodo stuff!" Looks like the Great Ritual can proceed without a hitch.

The new Mythos card is an Environment, so it will replace the existing one (this is how they differ from Rumors, which are not so easily gotten rid of, but prevent the emergence of new ones; Headlines of course are just one-time effects and don't stay in play, so they never interfere with each other). It is the third card, out of four resolved so far, whose Gate is at the Graveyard, so it causes another Monster Surge...but this time, we've already got 4 monsters in play, and this is the "monster limit" for a 1-player game (it's always 3 plus the number of players). Thusly, there's no room for more monsters to enter town right now, and the two new monsters (one of which happens to be a Formless Spawn; I won't bother to identify the other one, since it can't affect the game anyway, I'm just remarking on a coincidence with the first one) are placed in the "Outskirts" of town. The Outskirts has a much more generous capacity (8 minus the number of players; thusly, the total capacity of both town and Outskirts is always 11, with a twelfth one going right back in the cup as soon as you draw it). A new clue appears at the Unvisited Isle, and none of the currently extant monsters move. Tragically for poor Michael, no spells can be cast during the current Solar Eclipse, making his unjust exile from the Magick Shoppe all the more poignant; on the plus side, since the old Environment was removed, Someone Can indeed Help Him Now, and so it's again possible to seal Gates. The Great Ritual gets the first of the 5 tokens it needs to succeed, and that's that for round 3.

[willpell]

For his fourth turn, Michael decides he needs to do something about his flagging mental fortitude, but unfortunately he can't get across town without some level of incident, because monsters are blockading both the Rivertown and Merchant District streets, leaving no safe path through the center of town. Focusing back up to 4 Speed, he walks north from Uptown through Miskatonic University (it's very weird that South and North are where they are on this board, given that it means the Docks and the Unvisited Isle are on the west side of this east-coast town; it must be located on the inside of the "horn" of Massachussets), then strolls through the Merchant District and uses the Silver Key to automatically Evade the Gug, not wanting to deal with the bother of fighting it (or, more likely, being driven insane by it) right now, letting him continue to the Downtown streets and then into Arkham Asylum, where the gangster checks in for a brief session of psychotherapy. (Insert the entire first act of Analyze This.) Rather than drawing cards to Encounter this location, you can just acquire some Sanity; you can regain 1 point for free, or refill to max for $2 (rather a lot of money in 1926, hence why even a prosperous gangster has only $8 to his name). Though it chafes his hide to buy Sanity points at the outrageous rate of $1 each, time is of the essence, so Michael bribes his way into the Express Clinic and restores his Sanity to its tremendous original value of 3.

The Mythos takes advantage of its prophesied nemesis's distraction to open a third gate and finally bring Yig up to three Doom tokens; he's feeling sleepier than usual this game, thanks to all those Graveyard draws, but at last he's gotten 30% serious about this whole "destroying the world" project he's been putting off. The new gate (it leads to Yuggoth, by far the nastiest of these three locations, and it would be guarded by a Dark Young which even Michael's arsenal is hard-pressed to deal with, had this not immediately waltzed off to the Outskirts) appears at Hibb's Roadhouse, a speakeasy located in Easttown (there isn't a Westtown in Arkham, and Easttown is almost as far north as Northside...obviously the mapmakers hadn't spent enough time in the Asylum); a clue appears at Independence Square, conveniently near where Michael already is, and no monsters move. Probably because it's Raining Cats and Dogs, and what self-respecting monster would want a ball of fur and claws to land on their face? But seriously folks, this new Environment ends the Solar Eclipse, reduces Investigator movement and penalizes Speed checks, but adds a bonus to Evade rolls - you can walk right past a monster in the rain, and it might not see you through the murk of the storm. The Great Ritual gets its second token out of the needed five, and it officially becomes impossible for Michael to stop it by going to the Magic Shop with $15 and then going to the Rumor's site, so it probably won't be stopped at all.

Michael of course strolls right over to Indy Square and harvests two more Clues, after again going to 3 Speed and 3 Sneak with his Focus; even through the rain, he can travel into and out of the Downtown streets with this much movement. Once there, he encounters this historic location; apparently there are members of the Romani ethnicity camped in the park, and stereotypically enough, they are "master thieves". With his Luck still at 3, Michael has one die with which to try to stop them, and he utterly fails, so he loses one of his Items. Since I already observed that the Dynamite is mostly redundant, the hitman decides to donate that to the Gypsy League Against Defamation's impromptu fundraiser; I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not he lights the fuse just before they lift it from his pocket.

Further mythos activity comes in the form of a gate at the Witch House, awakening Yig to 40% consciousness; a fourth monster goes to the Outskirts, a clue fails to appear at Hibb's Roadhouse due to the Gate, and monsters move. The Gug apparently has an inkling that something got past him, and tracks the scent back into Miskatonic University, from which Michael came; meanwhile, the Formless Spawn, which Michael really doesn't want to deal with, trickles down to French Hill so it can check out the Great Ritual that's already half done - and so that the pair of them can continue to act as a two-creature blockade across the entire city, cutting off Southside and Uptown from easy access by people who don't have Silver Keys. In addition, the Cthonian has been ordered to "move" for the first time, but instead of roaming around the board, they just swim through the bedrock underneath and shake things up a little. This means there's a half chance of all Investigators losing 1 Stamina, and I rolled the other half, but I didn't really need to bother rolling at all since Michael ignores 1-point Stamina losses.

So, with all that business attended to, we can move on to the Headline for the day; it reads: "Temperance Fever Sweeps City!" Prohibition is being enforced a little more vigorously (if you can't crack down on the monsters or the mobsters, you can always take it out on the harmless and amiable drunks), and Hibb's Roadhouse is closed for the turn due to the excess scrutiny - thus making it impossible for Michael to deal with the nearest Gate. And the rain is making it hard for him to travel any distance, though it apparently doesn't prevent the Great Ritual from coming to 3/5 completion. Time for him to take his sixth turn...as soon as I take a short recess from what is already a three-and-a-half hour game.

[willpell]

It's round 6! And Michael has 6 clue tokens, which is an important number. He focuses his Speed up to 4, which is really more like 3 in view of the rain, and heads into the Downtown streets, then to the Merchant District, and finally right into the place I said I'd never go, The Unnameable. Ending his turn in the space with the Cthonian, he has to Evade it or fight it, but it's easy to evade, with an "Alertness modifier" of +1, meaning it's easier than usual to Sneak past, and the rain makes it easier still (one of the reasons I consider Lumley's Cthonian creations pathetic is that he decided they're deathly allergic to water, so the flavor makes a bit more sense in the game in this instance, even if it was rather sad for the story). With his Sneak currently focused to 2, he actually has 4 dice to evade the thing, and a reroll if he fails! Getting two successes on the initial roll (a 3, 4, 5, and 6; what exactly are the odds on such a "dice straight"?), he needn't even "exhaust" (turn to indicate that it's been used; it un-exhausts at about the same time you Focus on the subsequent turn) his Stealth skill; he just strolls on by unmolested, then enters the Gate to Another Dimension.

Now it's time for you readers to find out about the Other Worlds of Arkham Horror. Unsurprisingly, these have their own deck of cards, just as most everything does in this game; they vary in specificity, with Another Dimension being among the most generic (along with The Dreamlands). To resolve an encounter there, you need only draw any one card from the deck and resolve it; in other Other worlds, the process is a bit more complicated. The card I drew has specific incidents for The Dreamlands and Yuggoth, but if drawn when exploring any other World, you use the "other" section of the card, which in this case dictates that Michael has come upon a cache of supplies in this nondescript extraplanar tourist trap. He draws one random Common Item, which turns out to be....a Bullwhip? Well, that's pretty useless when you already have a Tommygun, though I suppose it can't hurt to have a spare in case of more thievery.

Mythos time again, so Hibb's Roadhouse reopens and the Great Ritual nears completion; the card dictates a Gate at the Unnameable, which already has one, and so a somewhat more impressive Monster Surge occurs this time. (I forgot to specify before that the Witch-House gate goes to the Great Hall of Celeaeno, a location less dangerous than Yuggoth, but more so than Another Dimension.) Four new monsters are generated, which fills up the Outskirts; they are cleared again, returning all 8 surplus monsters to the cup, and the Terror level rises. The next Ally to leave town is one Eric Coult, who would have been handy for mentally-frail Michael to have because of his ability to prevent certain automatic Sanity losses, but whose Speed bonus would have been semi-superfluous. A clue appears in the Woods, and "Blue Flu" (I'm not sure whether that's a fictional disease or a metaphor for opposition to the police) ensures that no Investigators can be jailed for the subsequent round, not that there are any in Arkham who could be. The two mobile monsters head south again, now blocking only access to the Southside and Uptown locations (including the Woods, where a clue just appeared), and it's back to Michael's turn.

You normally spend only two turns navigating an Other World; Michael now moves from the left half of Another Dimension to the right, and draws another card. Again, his encounter would be individualized in The Dreamlands (or the City of the Great Race), but is generic here; he is "terrified" by "unending blackness" (which was actually caused by a lazy writer not wanting to describe what the Other Dimension looked like; all we know about it is that they have bullwhips), and must roll Will-1 or lose 1 Sanity (normally also 1 Stamina, but Michael's physical hardiness is proving incredibly useful this game). I only now remembered that I'd planned to have Michael Focus up his Fight rating this turn at the expense of his Will, and if I had just drawn a card that allowed me to roll Fight, I wouldn't allow myself to retroactively get more dice for the roll by correcting my error, so I won't correct this error either even though it works in my favor. So he still has his Will at 4, and rolls 3 dice to resist the Sanity loss, getting 1, 1, and 5. Thus ends an Irish racketeer's extremely uneventful voyage beyond the boundaries of reality itself.

While it's been Raining Cats and Dogs for several turns, only now do the Headlines admit that a Big Storm Sweeps Arkham. This has absolutely no effect on the current board position...it would have been quite handy earlier, clearing out the Outskirts to delay the next Terror increase, but at the moment it does nothing, since nothing is in the Outskirts (nor in the Sky, a part of the game that may well never have any effect in this session). Still, the Mythos phase is by no means completely uneventful; a gate opens at Independence Square (no doubt this fact will be blamed on the Gypsies), leading to the godawfullest place in the cosmos, R'lyeh, and this half-awakens Yig as well as putting a Monster into the Outskirts...which is immediately removed by the Big Storm since it happens afterward, as I stated before. So I guess it didn't do quite nothing, but the situation is grim nonetheless - especially given that the Grand Ritual just completed. A Clue fails to appear at the Unnameable, and nothing moves, so it's back to Michael, who Focuses his Fight up and then returns to Arkham.

Now it's time to find out how you close Gates, and thereby eventually end the game. On the turn that Michael returns to Arkham, he need pay no attention to the Chthonian standing just outside the gate - he's come from inside it (the gate, not the monster) and gets to take a crack at it before anything happens. To do this, he rolls his Fight rating (not adding Weapons or other Combat bonuses, just the straight Fight; you can also use Lore if you're better suited to that, but Michael of course never will). Where I've described gates as "safe" or "mean", it refers vaguely to the sort of encounters you tend to have there, but very specifically to how hard they are to close; as a relatively harmless place, Another Dimension is easily gotten rid of, and so Michael uses his straight Fight rating of 4, needing only 1 success. (He rolls three; go figure.) He takes the Gate as a trophy, then spends five of his six Clue tokens, and the Gate is "sealed" - new Gates can no longer ever open at The Unnameable, which means you might be able to name it after all. (Alas, it's too late for Michael to get the Clue which would have appeared here if the Gate had closed one turn sooner.)

A new Mythos card is drawn, and...it shows Independence Square, so there's a monster surge. Four gates remain open now that Michael has closed one, so four monsters go into the Outskirts; that only gets to happen one more time before the Terror Level goes up once more. (One of these is a Chthonian, whose harmlessness to Michael means I rather wish it could have gone into play. I'm fairly certain that a Chthonian in the Outskirts does not earthquake, though I can't find anything in the rules that specifically clarifies this; it'd be rather unfair if a monster could affect players while they're incapable of moving to its location and attacking it, but then Call of Cthulhu games are all about being unfair to the players.) This card also causes a Clue to appear at The Unnameable, so it goes right into Michael's hot little hands. No effective monster movement is caused, and the new Environment, "Dreams of a Sunken City", has fairly negligible effects on Michael. But at this point, I discovered that I'd forgotten to deal with the Great Ritual completing last turn, so I was supposed to draw two cards and ignore most of the first; since I've already resolved this one, I'll ignore most of the second instead this time. The one thing which does happen on the second card is the gate - which is Independence Square. Actually I begin to suspect that I shuffled poorly, because this card also gives a clue at The Unnameable, and it has a more interesting effect than the Sunken City Dreams one, so I'm going to resolve it instead; the Great Ritual's effects are properly applied after all! This Environment is called "Blood Magic", and it allows the character to go stand in the Rivertown streets and open a vein, gaining 3 clue tokens if they don't kill themselves in the process - and, by a strict reading of the rules, Michael can't possibly die in the attempt, and if interpreting the rules somewhat generously, isn't hurt by them at all! I guess he does believe in some of dat voodoo hoodo business after all....

I'm going to go ahead and have Michael traipse out to Rivertown and engage in Blood Magic after all, if only because the clue tokens will propel me toward finishing this game. Rolling 7 dice, any other character would lose 3 Stamina with the roll I got (three 5s and a 6, plus a 3 and two 2s), but depending on how you interpret Michael's stamina-loss-reduction as applying to this roll, he either loses 2 or none, and I'm going to choose to believe the latter just so I can avoid making change with his Stamina tokens. So he just gets 3 clue tokens, at the price of having not had any other encounter this turn; there aren't even any Monsters close enough to make him sweat about this. Oh, and he Focused up to 3 Sneak since he only needed 2 Speed to get there.

The Great Ritual's bonus gate opens at the Black Cave, a location right here in Rivertown next to the Graveyard, and Yig is 60% awake. The clue token there is destroyed, and the gate opens to Celeano again. The rules on the Great Ritual card aren't clear about whether the new gate gets a monster, but I think it does, so that monster goes to the Outskirts (it's a Ghost; lots of duplication this game). The second card is also Black Cave (again, I suspect I failed to shuffle); the fact that five new monsters are added this time thanks to the new Gate doesn't matter, because the Outskirts has overflowed. (Actually I'm not sure if the monsters are added 1 at a time, "popping" the Outskirts when number 8 appears, and then continuing to refill it from 0 thereafter; I'm trying to download the FAQ for the game so I can check, but my connection is being uncooperative, so I'm just going to rule for the sake of simplicity that they all go out, and then it pops and puts them all back in the bag.) The Terror level rises to 3, the crooked fence Ryan Dean is eliminated from the Ally Deck, and something new happens - at 3 Terror, the General Store in Rivertown closes for the rest of the game, as Arkham has just become too dangerous for people to need groceries and household tools and such anymore (though they're still happy to buy mystical trinkets from the Curiosity Shoppe). Members of the Silver Twilight Lodge have let 2 monsters loose in the French Hill streets, from which they instantly fled to the Outskirts because they were muscling in on the turf of existing monsters. Both of the Black Cave gates put a clue at Hibb's Roadhouse, where it can't exist because of the R'lyeh gate, and the second card doesn't move any monsters, although the first one would have. So round 9 is finished.

Oh, but the FAQ did download, so let's find out....okay, yeah, the monsters are added 1 at a time, so let's see, there were 4 monsters in the Outskirts after the first Independence Square monster surge, and I just discovered that I forgot to resolve the second one, so yeah, that would have filled up the Outskirts in one turn, so the General Store has been closed for a full round. Oh, and while I'm rewinding time, I forgot to roll Michael's Sneak to get away from the Cthonian when he went to do Blood Magic, so even though he still had tons of dice on the roll despite the Rain ending, we'll assume he used the Silver Key, which is down to one "charge" left. So anyway, it in fact did matter that the monster surge at the Black Cave was five monsters, because that means the two from the Silver Twilight shenanigans filled the Outskirts up again; the terror level now goes to 4, obliterating Tom "Mountain" Murphy, the bouncer who gives you +2 Fight and who has an ability that is completely redundant to Michael.

The FAQ also reveals that a rule I thought I remembered, but couldn't find in the rulebook, does actually exist - the Ally deck is not supposed to be all 20 cards. One of the expansions added more Ally cards, but introduced a rule that you're supposed to use only 11 Allies per game, which makes some sense given the loss of one Ally every time Terror increases. I won't change how I'm dealing with Allies this game, possibly not at all until I get the Expanion in question; I don't entirely like the rule, and am suspicious on the whole topic (the original rulebook doesn't even tell you to shuffle the ally deck at the start of the game, so I'm thinking there was some confusion about the role Allies were meant to play, given how often the encounter cards instruct you to get specific ones, which would interact strangely with the expansion rule about stripping the lineup). While I'm checking errata, it seems that Michael McGlenn does indeed lose all but 1 of the rolled stamina for Blood Magic, so I'll go ahead and take 2 away from him now. Also, it's confirmed that the Great Ritual does spawn monsters from the extra gates (and that going to Ye Olde Magick Shoppe hoping to bum free spells off the management is a bad idea).

[willpell]

This game is dragging on so long...maybe I should shut up and just finish playing. But I've always been the "in for a penny, in for a pound" type, so I'll keep going. Since Michael did in fact lose Stamina getting those 3 clue tokens, he's not going to try and hold out for 3 more; he's got enough to seal a Gate as long as he finds a Gate, so he steps into the new Celeaeno one (though it's harder to seal than the one to the City of the Great Race, he can't get to that one without dealing with a Ghost, and Tommyguns work poorly on the already-dead, so ultimately Celeano is the lesser obstacle). Being sucked through to the Great Hall, he has an Other World encounter, and unlike Another Dimension, Celeano has certain specifications for what encounters you can have there. The OW Encounter cards come in four colors, and every OW other than Celeano and the Dreamlands is assigned two of these colors; Celeano has Green and Blue, so if you draw a Red or Yellow card, you don't apply its "Other" effect, but discard it and draw again until you get the right color. Mike has to do this three freaking times before he gets a blue card, but it's Celeano-specific, so let's see what happens.

In the Mythos canon, Celeano is an intergalactic library with extremely unfriendly guardians, where nobody is allowed to remove a book on pain of death (it's probably not quite as lame as it sounds, but it's definitely not one of the more imposing facets of Lovecraftiana). On this card, the traveler has found exactly the document he needs in the library, but must make a Sneak-2 check to palm it undetected, and lose 2 Stamina if he fails. Though he has no real use for spells, I don't think Michael is allowed to opt out of making the check (I'm not going to try to look up this answer, since I have no idea how to phrase the question for an effective Google search), so he makes the roll using his current Sneak of 3 (I forgot to Focus again), fails, and loses 1 Stamina as he's roughly escorted out of that section of the library. "Hey youse mugs, leggoame y'hear? I shoulda known this wuz da wrong time ta start readin' books...."

With Michael's encounter out of the way, we get back to the Mythos phase. The Black Cave gate hasn't closed yet, so its reopening is a monster surge (and yet again comes with a clue at Hibb's Roadhouse, where there can't be one; I'm beginning to suspect that all the cards feature the same gate/clue pairing). Five monsters go into the Outskirts, and then comes the headline: "Feds Raid Arkham!" All the Monsters in play go back to the cup! In retrospect, I kind of wish I'd had Michael attack that Gug, as we haven't had any actual combat yet. Oh, but wait, I forgot the Great Ritual, so Headline doesn't happen and the monsters stay where they are; we get another Mythos card, which hits the Witch House and creates another Monster Surge, as well as dropping a clue at the Black Cave to be swallowed up by the Gate. The new Surge boils the Outskirts over (and since I'm actually paying attention this turn, I choose to sequence them so that the nastiest two monsters from the five are trapped in the Outskirts, while the weak ones return to the cup with the boil-over). Terror goes up to 5, and for the first time we lose an Ally who isn't just somebody's Call of Cthulhu character, but Richard Upton Pickman from the original Lovecraft stories. (He'd be very nice to have too, as he eliminates Physical Resistance from monsters such as the Dark Young, making the Tommygun fully effective against anything that isn't completely immune to it.) The existing monsters continue to not move, and the Gangs ("Mah boys!", Michael gleefully exclaims) Clean Up Easttown, returning all 0 of the monsters there to the cup. (Apparently The Gangs are much less efficient at monster-hunting than The Feds.)

Back to the hitman with a sudden fondness for books. First he Focuses up to 5 Fight, wanting the best crack at the Gate when he returns next turn. Crossing to the return leg of his Celeano trip, he draws another blue card, this time with no particular text for this Outer World, and reads the Other part. It reads that the portal is closing of its own accord! The gate is closed, but he must succeed on a Speed-2 check or be "Lost in Time and Space", a status which costs you your turn (or, in a one-player game, effectively plays an extra Mythos card before you continue your turn normaly). This is bad enough normally, but when Yig is the old one, it spells really bad news - when an investigator goes AWOL from the universe in this fashion, Yig gains another 10% consciousness. So, having not known or thought to focus up his Speed, Michael has only one die to roll - and when it fails, he chooses to burn clue tokens, giving up his chance to seal the gate permanently, so that he can at least have a chance to close it temporarily without helping awaken Yig. Why is he giving up clue tokens? I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but on any roll you consider important enough to spend one of the game's most vital resources on, you can pay 1 clue token to roll 1 extra die, even after the original roll fails. So Michael does this now, fails, pays 1 more clue token, rolls a third time, fails yet again, pays again, still fails, pays, and finally succeeds (the die landed on top of the Gug token, amusingly enough). So he's lost all but 1 of his clue tokens, but the gate is closed and he's back at the Black Cave. (Normally, when you finish exploring a gate and the other gate to that OW is also on the board, you can choose which one to exit through, but this blue card automatically dictates that you must return through the gate you entered.)

My poorly-shuffled Mythos deck produces another Black Cave card, so for the first time, Michael is sucked into a Gate which opens on top of him, instead of choosing where he wants to go - but he's not in terribly bad shape, because it's a gate to the Dreamlands, a dimension so innocuous (by Lovecraft standards, mind) that you actually get +1 on the roll to close it. Michael's place in the world we know is taken by a Zombie, which of course goes to the Outskirts, and Yig gets a new Doom token since a gate opened, even though there had previously been a gate closed in that location - the game is getting close to ending one way or another. Another Mythos card is then drawn, and yet again it's a Black Cave card with a Hibb's Roadhouse clue which doesn't happen; the surge of 5 monsters clears the Outskirts, and the Terror Alert rises to Orange. I'm not just being cute; the 6 space on the Terror Track is colored orange, just as the 3 was colored purple, to match the colors of first the General Store and now the Curiositie [sic] Shoppe. The latter of these establishments has now closed, though the Magick Shoppe will remain open for a little while longer. The weather in Arkham is now Sunny and Clear, and no monsters move; Sneak checks in Arkham are penalized, while Will checks are improved by the weather.

[willpell]

I'm officially shuffling the Mythos deck a few more times to try and stop the run on Black Cave cards; more unique gates opening will probably make Yig wake up and moiderize Michael, but I am past objecting to this. During this twelfth turn of Michael's, he doesn't get to move on from the first half of the Outer World, since he didn't move to get into it; when you get sucked into a Gate, you're "delayed", marked by laying your character's little standee on its side, and on your next movement, you stand back up in lieu of any other movement. So Michael promptly encounters the Dreamlands, where every single card is a valid encounter regardless of color, and he gets a card whose "Other" text mentions "pinkish rays". Rolling a Sneak check with his current Sneak of 3 (the penalty to Sneak checks from sunny weather only applies while in Arkham), he gets no successes and loses 1 Stamina instead of 2, because in the Mob you get singed with death rays all the time and it stops bothering you after a while.

The Mythos cards this time first trigger a monster surge at the Witch House, then open a new gate at the Miskatonic University Science Building (damn physicists always building their Large Hadron Colliders in the future and retroactively puncturing spacetime!). This gate leads to the City of the Great Race, obliterates a clue token, 80% awakens Yig, and puts a sixth monster into the Outskirts (which is a Formless Spawn). A clue bounces off the Witch House, the Formless Spawn in play and the Gug move (passing each other on the street with a nod and a wave, and occupying each other's former positions in the Southside and Uptown streets), and then "Bizarre Dreams Plague Citizens!" (how fitting that Michael should be in the Dreamlands at the time; maybe the citizens are dreaming about him, he's certainly bizarre enough). This causes the Gug to return to the cup, since it's one of the more terrifying monsters of the Dreamlands and has now gone back there, but in the process it raises the Terror level to 7. I forgot to mention when it hit 6, the Ally that was lost at that time was "Duke" the dog, who improves your maximum Sanity and thus would have been really useful to Michael; he is now joined in absence by Thomas F. Malone, who gives you a Spell, and of course Michael wasn't interested in that, so it all balances out.

Michael focuses up his Fight (this being the first time in many, many turns that I remembered to do this while trying to close Gates), proceeds to the other half of the Dreamlands (I'm guessing there's REM and non-REM), and gets a Dreamlands-specific encounter. Exploring the "perfumed jungles of Kied" (I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be Kled), he finds an Ivory Palace, succeeds a Luck-1 check, and finally gets a Spell which he can refuse to ever cast, called the Dread Curse of Azathoth. (It would let him get +3 more combat than the Tommygun, as well as getting around physical immunity, but he'd have to make a Lore -2 check, thus having at most 1 die, in order to successfully cast it, and he'd lost 2 sanity for trying whether or not it worked. So he really has no incentive to bother.) If he had failed the luck roll, he'd have been caught snooping around and had one Item confiscated, which of course would just cost him the Bullwhip and he wouldn't really have cared.

A new gate now opens in the Woods, and a Clue vanishes into Independence Square. This is a gate to one of the two remaining Outer Worlds we haven't seen, The Abyss, and it's the home of the Formless Spawn, so if Michael ever gets around to it, he certainly wouldn't mind closing the thing. Since the Gug disappeared, a new monster actually enters Arkham for the first time since about turn 3, and it is a Flying monster, so maybe the Sky will actually do something this game after all. Yig is now so nearly awake that he essentially just has one eyelash folded shut over each of his eyes; what's more, the newly spawned Nightgaunt moves, so it vanishes into the Sky (which still counts as a part of Arkham, unlike the Outskirts), and the Gug would move too if it was still around. The Formless Spawn moves back the way it came, which is extremely inconvenient for Michael; because Yig is about to awaken, Michael needs to find religion fast if he wants to have any chance of beating the not-quite-Biblical Serpent. So he's going to need to get past the Formless Spawn in order to reach the Church, where he can convert one of his Gate Trophies into a Blessing...this will counteract the Curse that Yig places on the Investigators when he awakens, and a Curse halves your successes by making only 6es count, so beating him without having been previously Blessed is damn nigh impossible. (And keeping a Blessing while fighting him is actually so, unless there's some card effect which allows it somehow. Blessings are nice to have because they make 4s count as successes, thereby increasing your chance of a success from 1/3 to 1/2, but that's just one of many aspects of the game which won't really enter into today's session.)

Once all the moving has occurred, the Headline reads "Manhunt in Arkham!"...all monsters in Locations (not Street areas) are returned to the cup! Except not, because I yet again forgot that last card was just 1 of 2 from the Great Ritual. The actual Mythos card is a Witch House gate, so it's a monster surge, involving a whopping 6 monsters this time! They go into the Outskirts, which is boiled over by the second one, so I put back the relatively harmless Maniac and Byakhee, and dump the rest into the bag. Terror goes up to 8, and the Stamina-boosting Sir William Brinton disappears. But you know what? This Environment is a Planetary Alignment, and it makes Spells free to cast! So that Dread Curse of Azathoth might actually matter, if the game lasts for three more turns so Michael can Focus his Lore to max in order to have a chance of casting it, and the Environment doesn't go away in the meantime.

Round 14 now begins with Michael focusing up his Lore and returning to Arkham, still at the Black Cave. He rolls a whopping six dice to close this incredibly wimpy Gate, and gets three 5s, so it's another gate trophy for him (he still has yet to blow any monsters away with his tommygun, though he can apparently kick the butt of Reality itself hard enough to make it stop fraying at the edges). In closing a Dreamlands gate, he gets to do an extra cool thing - all monsters that hail from the Dreamlands are returned to the cup! So the Nightgaunt goes away, as would the Gug if it were still around (though of course the Nightgaunt would have been outskirted in that case, and probably lost in the last boil-over), and it moves on to the Mythos phase.

A monster surge hits Independence Square, with one of the monsters actually entering Arkham to replace the Nightgaunt, another remaining in the Outskirts after it boils over, and the last four being boiled over along with the four we have there; I get to choose what happens. Drawing six monsters (including a Cultist, who are very nasty under Yig, though fairly harmless when an Ancient One doesn't improve them somehow; I've drawn Cultists before but always when the Outskirts were the only possible option, but I'm not hesitating to put him there now even though I have a choice). Of the available choices, it makes the most choice to quarrantine the motionless Dark Young in the R'lyeh gate, which Michael is unlikely ever to get around to; the incredibly dangerous Dhole stays in the Outskirts, and everything else goes away. And then a gate opens at the Unvisited Isle, and Yig awakens. Michael doesn't get a chance to go find God after all...a being that some would consider a god has just found him instead.

[willpell]

Environments are destroyed when the Ancient One awakens, so Michael never gets to try his hand at spellcasting after all, nor has he had a chance to heal his several injuries. All of Arkham fades away into insignificance, as only the battle between Earth's lone defender and it's newly-arisen conqueror matters anymore; it is presumed that they manage to find each other without further distractions.

"Hey, you scaly bastard; nobody sucks the life outta this town but the O'Bannion Gang, you dig?" buddabuddabuddabudda

Most games don't end with an Ancient One waking up, because usually there are more Investigators running around and closing Gates; with enough of them, the game is practically "solved". But all by himself, Michael never stood that good of a chance, and luck hasn't exactly been on his side. Though Yig isn't capable of damaging Michael's Stamina at all, inflicting losses of only 1 each turn, that doesn't matter much because he also hits Sanity, so Michael is on a pretty short clock - and he's Cursed, so his awesome 6 Fight plus 6 for the Tommygun amounts to roughly two successes per turn. How many successes does he need to kill Yig? Well, only 10 actually...if there were a second player in the game, it'd be 20, and it's likely that player would contribute less than Michael to the fight. So Michael actually has a pretty good chance, and he Focuses up to 6 Fight on the first round of combat to ensure his chances are their best.

Rolling his 12 dice, Michael does indeed score two 6es, so Yig falls to 8 doom tokens. Yig then counterattacks by...wait a minute, I missed something, I knew it seemed too easy. Every Ancient One applies a penalty to your attacks, and Yig's is -3, so Michael was only allowed to roll 9 dice (averaging 1.5 successes). So trying again, the hitman gets no successes at all this time, and must simply face Yig's counterattack - he rolls Speed+1, currently 4 dice, to avoid a poisonous bite which causes madness as well as crippling pain (the latter not affecting Michael, but the former being more than enough to destroy him). He nails the first roll and the first round of combat ends uneventfully.

Michael shoots again with his 9 dice, after first focusing up his Speed by 1; each round, Yig applies a -1 penalty, so the Speed roll will keep being 4 dice until Michael hits his maximum, at which point it will steadily diminish. This round's attack has an insulting number of 5s but only one 6, so Yig loses his 10th doom token, then counterattacks. Michael again manages to dodge.

Michael hits his max Speed with this Focus, and shoots again; two successes this time, so Yig is down to 7 health. The gangster again manages to dodge the deadly bite.

Having nothing better to do with his Focus now that his Speed and Fight are maxed (the second stat in each pair is entirely irrelevant against most Ancient Ones, and Lore only matters if you're casting spells), Michael increases his Lore to 2. His attack again exceeds the statistical mean for 9 dice and gets 2 successes; Yig is down to 5 health and is beginning to debate whether it was worth bothering to get out of bed this millenium. But Michael now only has 3 dice to try and dodge the attack, and he does not succeed. Losing 1 of his 3 Sanity, he gives up the possibility of casting his spell as a last-ditch effort (absurdly unlikely, but it'd have made one heck of a story to tell at the bar if it had worked), and can survive only two more hits. It no longer matters whether he Focuses; his Lore serves no further purpose in any realistic scenario.

Michael fires again. One hit. With only 2 dice, he is unable to dodge and loses one Sanity. Just one brain cell left...serves him right for drinking and breaking the law.

In what is probably his last attack, Michael scores 1 hit. With a 1 in 6 chance of not dying, he manages it.

In what is unquestionably his last attack, Michael remembers that he's had one Clue token left this whole time, in the wake of his disastrous encounter with the Black Cave. He could use this to try and get another roll, but with only a 1/6 chance to succeed, it's not worth it; he instead rolls a tenth die on his final attack. As with the end of Inception, I should probably leave it to the reader to decide what happened...but that's not how I roll, literally or otherwise. Nope, Michael gets two successes, and Yig has 1 health left when he finally kills his opponent.

Humanity is doomed...all because an Irish mobster didn't have a loyal dog by his side to keep him sane. (On that subject, I don't know where I got the idea there were 20 ally cards; I just counted and there are indeed only 11.) That's the game, folks, all seven and a half hours of it. (Not counting clean-up time.)

[willpell]

Played another solo game today - it went MUCH quicker without me blogging, less than 3 hours and I was distracted often or it wouldn't have been that much. However I have officially decided I'm done with single-hero AH, as it's just not good that way (something I tended to assume before, but had not confirmed to my satisfaction until now).

The setup for this game was almost as fitting as "gangster vs. serpent cult"...it was "a doctor versus Yog-Sothoth". I decided for obvious reasons that the character, Dr. Vincent Lee, was simply "the Doctor", and he spent a fair amount of time gallivanting about the Other Worlds as he should, but due to bad luck and shortages of Clue Tokens, much of this energy was wasted. Yog-Sothoth requires you to have Gate trophies when he awakens or be instantly killed, and the only two Gates Vincent closed before his luck ran out were used to head off a Rumor which would have accelerated the Terror Track, which was filling up plenty fast as it was due to the constant parade of monster surges. Finally the Terror Track hit ten from a single Surge which left enough monsters to go into Arkham that the previous monster limit was doubled...the original rulebook mentions nothing about this, but FFG has errata'ed that this event awakens the Ancient One. So Yog-Sothoth showed up, demanded to see the Doctor's travel papers, and ate him when he couldn't produce any proof of his extradimensional journeys.

With a limit of four monsters on the board and the constant filling-up of the Outskirts, combined with the fact that a new gate opens about every two turns (the intervening one averages out to be a monster surge) but you need a bare minimum of three turns to close one, nevermind collecting the Clues to seal it - you just can't really ever hope to get any momentum. The Doctor did manage to seal two gates in the early game, and gained several turns of relief when the Mythos card hit these sealed gates, but it was all for naught, as he wasted time (and Gate trophies) chasing down two rumors, took two trips through the City of the Great Race without managing to even close the gate, and ultimately just wasn't able to contribute. The fact that the monster overrun victory even exists, let alone that it happened so easily, is proof of a degeneracy in the 1p game that I'm entirely done with. Next time I want to play "solo", I'll run two Investigators and see if that's any better - 3 to 5 players is supposed to be optimal.

[ThroughTheWell]

Yes, if you are willing, I'd like to see a 2 player game. Also, I'd like to see how the player gains one of these allies that were constantly slipping away. You said several would be useful. Well, you have to get them first, and I'd like to see that. Seriously, there has to be a better way to win than galavanting around dimensions closing gates slower than you need to. If thaat is guarenteed to be slower than needed, then do something else. Shoot, use metagame info to prepare for the particular GOO.

Arkham seems fiddly. By which I mean it sounds like the players have to manage the game board moving lots of monsters about, drawing bad event cards, drawing bad dimension cards, etc, all before they get to do something with their character.

Oh, I did not track the games to your turn by turn level, but I recently played Yedo twice, if you care to hear my general impressions of it.

[willpell]

Yes, if you are willing, I'd like to see a 2 player game.

Well aside from taking even longer to play, let alone to blog, I'll also have to clear my table off to get room for two character sheets, since I barely had a place to keep the one before.

Also, I'd like to see how the player gains one of these allies that were constantly slipping away.

I did manage to gain an ally during the second game (the one I didn't blog, but just quickly summarized), and I had an opportunity to gain another one except that he'd been lost to the terror level. They just happen randomly as a result of location encounters; each of the allies is found in one particular location (probably a different one in each unstable location, though I haven't confirmed this), and if you pay some cost or make a roll or something, you get the ally if they're available, or otherwise a consolation prize of some sort. The one I got was Sir William Brinton in the Misk U. Science Building, who improves your Stamina the same way Duke the dog improves Sanity (+1 to the max, or discard to heal completely); you get him by agreeing to arm-wrestle him, which makes you lose 2 stamina, and he joins you if this doesn't knock you out (he appreciates good sportsmanship, I guess, even though nobody can actually beat him). I forget the exact details of the other one but I believe he was in Hibb's Roadhouse, and he'd left town so I had the option of taking the consolation prize, but I believe it wasn't worth the cost to me at that point.

Seriously, there has to be a better way to win than galavanting around dimensions closing gates slower than you need to.

Nope, not really. The only way to win other than closing and sealing some number of gates (there are two different conditions related to this) is for the Ancient One to wake up and for you to defeat it. Which is definitely not faster than dealing with gates (at minimum it will take 8 turns in a 1-p game, less for more players but I think 4 is the minimum with 8 players), and much less likely to work since the Ancient Ones are deliberately designed to be almost unbeatable (a gangster with a tommygun shooting at Yig in 1P is probably about as easy as it gets). The vast majority of games are won by one of the two gate-related mechanisms.

If thaat is guarenteed to be slower than needed, then do something else. Shoot, use metagame info to prepare for the particular GOO.

Enh, you could do that I suppose, but I think it kind of cheapens any possible victory. Why bother to play if you've gamed the system to almost guarantee that you win?

Arkham seems fiddly. By which I mean it sounds like the players have to manage the game board moving lots of monsters about, drawing bad event cards, drawing bad dimension cards, etc, all before they get to do something with their character.

That is definitely a fair cop. Your character does something, but it's a pretty small something, and the game definitely has a lot of moving parts that you have to deal with. I really would rather it was computerized, but the board is so huge that this would be tough to do...they might actually have a computer version, I don't know. If they do, it's probably for hardware more modern than anything I have.

Oh, I did not track the games to your turn by turn level, but I recently played Yedo twice, if you care to hear my general impressions of it.

Never heard of that one, what's it about?

[ThroughTheWell]

Yedo is living as an up and comming clan in Shogunate Tokyo (1600's). It is a worker placement game described as a bit meatier than Lords of Waterdeep with which it is similar except for a difference in setting. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/117915/yedo

I highly doubt that live players hide the particulars of the GOO they are fighting from themselves. My point being, it is a game and playing to win is different than roleplaying your character in ignorance. Shoot, you had your mobster do a few things he had no reason to do other than advancing the game already. He also avoided areas for reasons he should not have known, but you as player knew looking down at the board. So why stop there? Why not try to beat the GOO? Will you need more magic than guns, or more sanity than stamina, an extra weapon or ally instead of futily closing that last gate since the GOO is already on the way, etc? And if you have a 2nd player, cooperate, even though that results in at-a-distance 'telepathy'. The alternative seems to be nearly guarenteed to recreate the loss random people would experience at the hands of GOOs invading real life for which they have no preparation. The game already mimics sanity loss and stamina loss, let that be the limit of the consequences and play the rest with meta-knowledge.

[willpell]

I've glanced at Lords of Waterdeep, but I'm not certain it's my type of game, and taking the D&D out of it does not increase my interest. If anything, I'd be more interested in checking out the actual-D&D boardgames (Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, and Legend of Drizzt in about that order of interest)...had they been $5 cheaper, I would probably have picked one of them up along with Arkham, since I was doing a 3-for-the-price-of-2 buy, and thus needed them all to be the same MSRP. Since they were $5 more, I went with "Legendary" instead, despite having a fairly mild interest in it...with the sale, it was effectively $10, and certainly worth that price, but I would have to be very rich to have paid the full $60 for it, whereas with Arkham I'd been talking myself *out* of buying it at that price for months, and Black Friday gave me an excuse. (Though I might have refrained if I'd realized, both how poor I was going to end up being this month, and that the Arkham box contains only seven goddamn cards for each location! I really thought there were more than that, but I guess they were all from expansions.)

Yes players know what GOO they're fighting, but according to the strict rules, they're not supposed to choose their characters at all; the official rule is that you're dealt a random character, and while the rulebook does say players can choose characters (and for that matter a GOO) instead, the implication is that the reasoning here should be something like "Oh, I've already played this guy and he's boring", not an increase in win percentage. It seems unsportsmanlike and contrary to theme to try and assemble a crack team of specialists to "go take care of this Cthulhu doofus". If a game is not sufficiently difficult, one proves little by defeating it; if I were playing with other players and they all wanted to stack the odds in their favor a little, I'd probably approve of it, since at least then we'd be accomplishing socialization. But without that, why play at all, if I'm going to all but cheat in order to try and win?

You have a point that there's more "game" than "story" in the game as it is, and I'm not really ambitious enough to "correct" that fact, but I tend not to want to move more in that direction. If I were more ambitions, I would in fact add additional rules to try and create a more simulationist experience and avoid things that break the SOD, but at that point I might as well just play Call of Cthulhu (except of course that a 1-player roleplaying game works poorly, since you can see behind the GM screen).

[ThroughTheWell]

I did not say choose a char, or choose a GOO. But I do think the player knows what GOO they are up against and can do things like find the ally that helps them the most.

I've played Castle Ravenloft... It is a co-op, and at least the 1 game I played did not seem particularly challenging. Monsters have 'programmmed' actions, so players run them according to those rules. There is a sense of bad stuff keeps happening, since IIRC every time you enter a new room another monster spawns, and then also something bad happens if you wait around too long too. I don't know how different the different monsters feel, I recall a bit samey. I've read Drizzt has stronger PCs. Ravenloft seemed like it had a high set up time, particularly if you count punching out all of the cardboard the first time. ATM I''d not turn down a game of Ravenloft, but I'd rather play Yedo. Yedo's missions all have fluff, and the stuff you need to do matches the fluff text. I can't say I got immersed in it; I was still playing a game, but the fluffy flavor was nice. Yedo is competative, yet the game can be close at the end. Yedo, if you bag things well can set up and take down quickly. I hope to try Drizzt someday. Those D&D games are 4e, so you have things like healing surges. Very hack and slash, with less reward.

[willpell]

Played my third solo game with this Arkham Horror set, which reduces the cost I paid for each of those games from $30 apiece to $20. *facepalm*. Had a pretty good bout of three investigators versus Ithaqua the Wind-Walker, who was trying to turn Arkham into a glacial wasteland; sometimes a set of monsters or a gate or something would seem particularly thematically appropriate, and I took some delight in those moments, but was slightly bothered by the ones that were less fitting. I might enjoy the game more if I took the randomness out of it, and instead picked encounters and monsters and such, giving it more of a story feeling, instead of the variable challenge of random gameplay. Running three characters was way too hard, though, and I ended up screwing up one time too many and quit the game.