What's the Arkham Horror board game like?

[Man_Over_Game]

I am loving the Arhkam Horror Card Game. It plays like an RPG, it has a lot of mechanics that feel exactly like a horror movie should ("I'll head over here and distract them so they don't attack you". 1st Action: Engages with enemy, 2nd: Try to Evade, but fail. 3rd: Try to Evade, but fail. Turn ends, still engaged with enemy, another enemy jumps in and kills you). It has a lot of choices you have to make each turn (a lot of risk/reward decision-making, and 3 actions per round means lots of potential strategy), and it regularly rewards teamwork.

But it does seem kinda limited. The scenarios are mostly defined by what scenario cards you have (which are generally very rigid), and replaying the same 3 scenarios can get kinda dull. I could always buy more scenarios, but that feels like throwing more money at the problem that another game wouldn't have to deal with (as other card/board games can create random scenarios).

The Arkham Horror Card Game basically plays a lot like a tabletop game, like DnD, where you have unique powers to contribute for the team, but have very limited resources to utilize those powers, and most of the general strategy boils down to estimating the odds vs. the punishment for failure and the current cost of gathering resources. Sometimes, you have to spend everything for a roll you can't afford to fail, and other times you spent too many resources for a roll that could have just been redone with 1 out of 3 of your actions.

So how does the original board game version compare?

[Eldan]

So, short tangent first, there's a first edition of the board game, from before Fantasy Flight was a thing. The one people usually talk about is the second edition. (I can't speak about the new third edition, haven't played it, but from what people tell me, it's not great. Very streamlined, but also super limited.)

Anyway. It's a real love it or hate it affair.

First of all, it's an unwieldy monster. Easily takes an afternoon, even with few players. With more players, be prepared to put in six hours occasionally. It has a million components and far too many fiddly rules that are occasionally forgotten.

The story. Imagine if all your story in the card game was delivered by drawing random story bits from the encounter deck. That's exactly what the board game is like. You draw an encounter card for your location, and that has a two sentences of story on it. So one player is talking to a witch in her house, another is trying to join the Silver Twilight Lodge, and a third is battling Mi-Go in the woods. There's no attempt at making a coherent story. All the story bits from every expansion are wildly mixed together and you draw from all of them. You can also encounter every monster with every old one. Cthulhu is just as likely to be served by Deep Ones as Cthuga and Nyarlathotep has as many children of Shub-Niggurath as anyone else. Every game is also won in one of two ways: closing gates or shooting the old one in the face. Closing all the gates can occasionally feel very anticlimactic, because you're preventing the boss fight from happening and it's usually the result of getting a few lucky draws and being very on top of all the problems.

It's also quite random, or at least can feel like it. Some cards do nothing. Others just kill you, with very little in the way of defence.

There's also much less character customization. You have a series of stats that only vary a little between characters, and one power. On top of that, there's equipment, spells and allies, but every character can use all of those and most are just stat bonuses.

Honestly, it's kind of amazing the game is as much fun as it is. Because it really is. It can feel quite immersive, despite all that. But it scratches a different itch from the LCG. It's much more a board game and much less an RPG.

(One of my dream games, if anyone ever made it, would be an Arkham Horror Fourth Edition that uses the board from Arkham Horror 2nd, and 95% of the rules from Eldritch Horror, which was basically an attempt to "fix" Arkham Horror Second Edition. It has scenario specific decks of story cards, enemies and objectives, a doom track that shows you how close you are from the world ending and more ways to predict where gates will show up, plus a lot of general streamlining.)



Also, if you've only played the Core in Arkham Horror the card game, you should really buy a cycle and play a campaign. It's on an entirely different level of quality from the core set only. The deck building actually gets amazing once you have more cards, the scenarios get much more varied and mechanically interesting, and the longer campaigns give them a million more ways to develop the story and do interesting things with it. Including, in some of the later campaigns, branching story paths.

I know it costs a lot of money, but the core set for the LCG is basically a long tutorial. The mechanics of the scenarios are still pretty simple, the story is basically linear and there's almost no deck building possible.

[Man_Over_Game]

I remember trying to learn the board game, and I vaguely remember a lot of what you described. Lots of very incoherent rules, combined with most benefits being not much more than a stat buff that you don't know the value of until you've already played it. It all felt very arbitrary and confusing.

I'm glad I went with the card game, then. It already has a lot of various rules on timing (Enemies spawn after the Doom Counter is placed and checked for the Agenda Advancement, and enemies only Engage when they spawn rather than their standard Engage+Attack, both very important and easy-to-miss rules). We actually played through our entire first full run after missing the rule that you were supposed to draw a resource and a card each turn (which generally cost an Action each), which would explain why the "tutorial" difficulty was so friggin hard!

If I made those kinds of mistakes on the card game, I can't imagine what something like that would be for the board game.

[Eldan]

IT's been a while since I played the board game, but yeah. The card game is a model of simplicity and coherence ruleswise, compared to the board game.

Let's just say that the fans rewrote the rulebook and it's recommended to play with that fan rulebook and several cheat sheets.

[BRC]

Arkham Horror 2nd edition, the one people usually talk about, is a fun game, although if what you're looking for is a story generator to capture some of that tabletop rush, it's not going to do especially well. There's really only one story, You run around, fight the monsters, close gates, get new items, equipment, and spells, and, if you have to, have a big final showdown with the Ancient One at the end.

As far as a good way to spend an afternoon playing a board game, it's a pretty good time, however, the game has a bad habit of taking your turns away from you. The main decision you make each turn is where to move, but diving a gate (one of the main activities in the game, and possibly the most important) means spending the next 3 turns, at least, not getting to move anywhere, and it's possible for a gate to open up under your feet, dropping you into another world and locking you into three rounds of slowly progressing through it.

It's also a punishingly difficult game, if you're not the sort of person who can enjoy spending 4 hours on a board game that you eventually lose, don't play Arkham Horror. Because you will lose, a lot.

I also don't know how easy it is to find.


Arkham Horror 3rd edition, the newest one, is a pretty big departure from 2nd, and I don't like it. It has some genuinely brilliant design elements, but The stats are imbalanced, rather than chasing clues and diving gates,cool, exciting things, you spend most of your time playing a mediocre version of pandemic, making lore roles to "Ward" and area and remove arbitrary Doom markers, which from a narrative standpoint is far less gripping than closing gates. They have a complex "Codex" system for choose-your-own adventure style scenarios, but, at least the base scenarios we played didn't make much use of it.

In my view, the best of the games is Eldritch Horror, the global-scale version of Arkham. It simplifies things a good deal, gets rid of most of the "You lose your next 3 turns" style game mechanics, and rather than having a set victory condition of "Seal X gates OR defeat the ancient one", gives each ancient one a set of "Mysteries", of which you must solve 3 to win the game. In Arkham, the ancient one is often a passive effect and a statline for their cultists, in Eldritch, the different Ancient Ones have a bit more presence on the board. However, It does lose something from Arkham. Eldritch's slower movement and board size mean that it really only takes off at 4 or more players, otherwise you spend all your time just trying to get from point A to point B, and removing the "trophies" mechanic from Arkham means that fighting monsters and closing gates is mostly an exercise in Not Losing, without the additional reward that Arkham brings to the table.


Arkham Horror 2nd is a nice complex puzzle for somebody to master

[Eldan]

Eldritch is a good game, but it loses a lot of immersion by moving from one small town to the entire world. On the one hand, it makes the threats feel actually global, instead of making you wonder why exactly these cosmic beings are attacking all the time, and it means that there aren't a dozen monsters in one street, instead of a few monsters being scattered all over the world, but spending your turn walking down the street to the curiosity store just feels nicer than spending your turn taking a ship from London to Buenos Aires, with nothing happening on the way.

[BRC]

From a narrative standpoint, Arkham has a very tight storyline.

You are scrambling around the streets of Arkham, fighting monsters, getting clues, and closing gates in order to prevent the ancient one from awakening. It can fall apart a little bit when you go and grab a slice of pie at the diner while a parade of shoggoths and ghouls storm through the streets outside, but if what you're looking for is narrative immersion, it all fits together quite nicely, a single horrible night, or perhaps a few days, of investigation and struggle against the forces of evil.


Eldritch is a bit of an odd duck, each encounter card is usually represented as a microstory of it's own, which can clash when you're playing a street urchin who suddenly finds herself petitioning the japanese imperial navy for aid against a monstrous incursion in the heart of africa. With each "Turn" representing anything from days to weeks of time, the sense of playing out a single cohesive narrative story doesn't really come up. You might be going to investigate rumors of occult activity in Rome (There's a clue token on Rome that you want to pick up), but on the way you're brushing up on your debate skills in Istanbul, or offering your services to Scotland Yard.

The other thing about Eldritch is that the game really needs a few expansions to get going, specifically Forgotten Lore, which is hard to find IIRC. It adds a bunch of new Mysteries, as well as the crucial "Focus" mechanic, which the game desperately needed.

[Man_Over_Game]

The other thing about Eldritch is that the game really needs a few expansions to get going, specifically Forgotten Lore, which is hard to find IIRC. It adds a bunch of new Mysteries, as well as the crucial "Focus" mechanic, which the game desperately needed.

From what I've read, Mountains of Madness came after Forgotten Lore, and Focus wasn't introduced until then (and has since been included with every expansion after MoM).

[BRC]

From what I've read, Mountains of Madness came after Forgotten Lore, and Focus wasn't introduced until then (and has since been included with every expansion after MoM).

Hrmm, that sounds right, sorry for the misinformation.

Forgotten Lore adds replayability by adding more mysteries, Mountains of Madness adds Focus, which the game really needed (Something to do with spare actions, plus a way to get rerolls without spending clue tokens. The initial designers seemed to view clue tokens the same way Arkham did, when they're far more valuable and harder to get than an Arkham), but if you know how Focus works, it's pretty easy to just use pennies or something as Focus tokens and put it into the game.

Mountains of Madness was the first big-box expansion, and IMO the weakest. The Elder Things are pretty easy ancient ones, Antarctica makes the board a lot bigger (A frustrating problem at low player counts), but it's spaces are extremely powerful, having inbuilt actions to get rewards that normally require succeeding on encounters. The other big-box expansions, the Dreamlands and Pyramids, are a lot smoother IMO.

[Narkis]

I'll just +1 everything Eldan said here. Arkham Horror used to be one of my group's favorite games. We even printed and played fan-made campaigns from the forums. And we're still playing it from time to time. But it just pales in comparison to the LCG. Especially if you're playing the proper campaigns from the expansion packs, Core really is nothing but a tutorial.

[BRC]

Really, outside the bang-pow-punch a Shoggoth take on the Cthulu Mythos, plus some presentation stuff (Characters, art style, ect), and the general conceit of a complex rules-heavy co-op game against a malevolent cardboard AI, the two games are apples and oranges. They're both very good, but I wouldn't say that enjoying one means you'll enjoy the other.

[Man_Over_Game]

Man, have I been playing the game wrong. The game doesn't seem to have a clear breakdown of how each individual element works in sequence, so we were playing with the idea that an enemy engages you as part of their "turn", and then attacks if they're engaged with someone, and attacking someone requires your own engagement.

So the first boss, with two players, that has 10 HP, needs a 4 to hit or evade, deals 2 Damage and Horror on hit, has Retaliate (missing him allows him to attack you) seemed impossible when our turns were either:

Action 1: Engage (since we're already in the room)
Action 2: Evade (to make him Exhausted so he doesn't murder with Retaliate)
Evade again if failed, otherwise Attack.

Then do this until your 1-3 damage per action somehow manages to finish him off.

I guess I just need to reread the rules again. Before, since we assumed that an enemy only Engages just before he attacks, it wouldn't ever help to attack anything since it required a 2nd action to Engage with that enemy (which I guess is also not a requirement to hit them).

[Eldan]

Yes, if you are in the same room as an unengaged enemy, he automatically engages you. (Unless it has the aloof keyword.) So that's one action saved.

Also, when you exhaust it, it readies in the enemy phase and re-enages you.

And you don't have to be engaged to attack.

So, with two players, the play to go for with the Ghoul Priest (I assume that's what you mean) is to evade him every turn. Unless you can finish him in one.

If you don't have a fighty character, you also don't have to kill him. One of the best things about this game is that many scenarios have more than one solution, and the campaign usually still continues even if you lose. Running away is an entirely viable course of action in many cases.

[danzibr]

Arkham Horror is my single favorite board game of all time. Co-op, lay the smack down on eldritch horrors. Difficulty is moderately balanced. Plenty of expansions to pick and choose from. We did a fair bit of house ruling though.

[Man_Over_Game]

Yes, if you are in the same room as an unengaged enemy, he automatically engages you. (Unless it has the aloof keyword.) So that's one action saved.

Also, when you exhaust it, it readies in the enemy phase and re-enages you.

And you don't have to be engaged to attack.

So, with two players, the play to go for with the Ghoul Priest (I assume that's what you mean) is to evade him every turn. Unless you can finish him in one.

If you don't have a fighty character, you also don't have to kill him. One of the best things about this game is that many scenarios have more than one solution, and the campaign usually still continues even if you lose. Running away is an entirely viable course of action in many cases.

Ah, I see now. The monster engages you at any point when it's possible to. If there is ever a point that the monster isn't engaged and not Exhausted, it needs to Engage whenever possible. It's not necessarily a factor of a "phase", but a triggered effect that is constantly checked whenever things change (like tracking death). Attacking/Moving/Readying are all phase-based.

Hmm..Does the enemy Exhaust itself from an attack? If it doesn't for any reason (like through Retaliate), and the enemy kills a player while another one is in the room, does it automatically Engage with the second player?

[Eldan]

No, it doesn't exhaust from attacking. That also means that a player can take more than one attack of opportunity a turn from the same monster.

And yes, monsters are always engaged if possible. If one player goes down, the next is engaged.

[Gauntlet]

Regarding other board games in the same setting, I quite like Elder Sign. It has a bit more story/fluff than Arkham Horror (each encounter is its own little story, which may or may not include punching the monsters) and the expansions are quite good too.

[Psyren]

Regarding other board games in the same setting, I quite like Elder Sign. It has a bit more story/fluff than Arkham Horror (each encounter is its own little story, which may or may not include punching the monsters) and the expansions are quite good too.

Two things I don't like about Elder Sign:

1) The clock advances faster if you have more players (because it advances after each turn rather than each round.) This makes it harder the more people you have, which is not only counterintuitive, it's compounded by:

2) No meaningful way to cooperate - no item trading, and the characters with "helper powers" are pretty weak. It's a dice rolling game, so characters that grant rerolls, bonus dice or extra items are much more valuable than ones that can heal a single point of vitality or sanity each turn.

We ended up houseruling both of those and it felt a lot better.

Elder Sign does have an mobile app version though (Elder Sign: Omens) which you can play solo and has really cool sound/graphics.

[plopfill]

1) The clock advances faster if you have more players (because it advances after each turn rather than each round.) This makes it harder the more people you have

I don't think that's right, because progress (towards the required number of Elder Signs) is also made at a per-turn rate, so it should roughly even out.

[Man_Over_Game]

Got the Dunwich Legacy for the Arkham Horror Card Game. Played through the first encounter (picking the starting point as the university instead of the gambling den), loving it so far. It was actually a much easier scenario that I thought it should be. It focused heavily on artificially stalling the players and implementing really bad juju the longer you took (which it did in the form of milling your deck over time and afflicting you the larger your discard pile was). Then the darn thing took a massive left turn at the last minute in spawning a Massive 7 + (3x number of players) HP monster to patrol the halls of the university until it murders you and/or all of the students.

Unfortunately, we were not aware that rescuing our target meant that the monster was free to massacre everyone left in the university. Oh well, trauma for tomorrow I guess.

So far, my largest complaint with the card game is just how imbalanced the encounters are in this game. A weakling monster might have 2-3 HP, a "midboss" that rewards experience might have 5 HP, and then the last boss of the scenario almost always has like a ludicrous 10 HP and a bunch of other stuff that makes it impossible to deal with conventionally. It's like every scenario has to end with the optional, extra-hard boss that most players don't actually fight in JRPGs.

Thankfully, you don't usually have to kill the bastard, but often times you do (the Ghoul Priest in the core campaign's first scenario was like this).

[BRC]

Got the Dunwich Legacy for the Arkham Horror Card Game. Played through the first encounter (picking the starting point as the university instead of the gambling den), loving it so far. It was actually a much easier scenario that I thought it should be. It focused heavily on artificially stalling the players and implementing really bad juju the longer you took (which it did in the form of milling your deck over time and afflicting you the larger your discard pile was). Then the darn thing took a massive left turn at the last minute in spawning a Massive 7 + (3x number of players) HP monster to patrol the halls of the university until it murders you and/or all of the students.

Unfortunately, we were not aware that rescuing our target meant that the monster was free to massacre everyone left in the university. Oh well, trauma for tomorrow I guess.

So far, my largest complaint with the card game is just how imbalanced the encounters are in this game. A weakling monster might have 2-3 HP, a "midboss" that rewards experience might have 5 HP, and then the last boss of the scenario almost always has like a ludicrous 10 HP and a bunch of other stuff that makes it impossible to deal with conventionally. It's like every scenario has to end with the optional, extra-hard boss that most players don't actually fight in JRPGs.

Thankfully, you don't usually have to kill the bastard, but often times you do (the Ghoul Priest in the core campaign's first scenario was like this).

The final boss is supposed to be a major challenge. A bog standard level 0 guardian can usually deal 6 damage a round (firing 3 times with a +1 damage weapon), and allies can pitch in for a bit more damage.

The Experiment is supposed to be basically unbeatable if you do the School first.

Spoiler

Show

If you do the School second, you can recover a superweapon Alchemical Concoction that makes it far more killable.

[Eldan]

A well-prepared guardian can, as mentioned above, do anything from 6-8 damage a round on level one. Get another player helping with a knife or baseball bat or similar, and the experiment becomes, well, not easy, but doable

[Man_Over_Game]

The final boss is supposed to be a major challenge. A bog standard level 0 guardian can usually deal 6 damage a round (firing 3 times with a +1 damage weapon), and allies can pitch in for a bit more damage.

That's assuming a 100% success rate. You're more likely to have a ~50% success rate, considering even a combat specialist character would probably have about a 5 base roll to attack after gear, needing 4 to hit, and most of the Chaos Tokens counting against you.

As the zealot enforcer, I could only take 6 Sanity damage, and the boss would deal 2 per turn. Assuming I managed to get rid of every possible encounter that came up each round without losing more sanity or actions, you're still looking at a pretty risky chance in a 2-player game.

[BRC]

That's assuming a 100% success rate. You're more likely to have a ~50% success rate, considering even a combat specialist character would probably have about a 5 base roll to attack after gear, needing 4 to hit, and most of the Chaos Tokens counting against you.

Well yeah, but for a scenario boss, part of the extra effort is pitching some cards to get those numbers up. Or spending some resources on Physical Training, having a Beat Cop out, ect. My group usually rolls by getting up to succeeding on a -3 for all important tests when possible, depending on how the bag looks.

As the zealot enforcer, I could only take 6 Sanity damage, and the boss would deal 2 per turn. Assuming I managed to get rid of every possible encounter that came up each round without losing more sanity or actions, you're still looking at a pretty risky chance in a 2-player game.

Be sure to bring some allies along to provide extra horror soak. Admittedly, I play with a 3-player group, (usually running 1 Monster-fighter, 1 Investigator, and 1 Hybrid/flex). In a 2-player group, especially if you split pure Investigate/Combat, things can be a bit more iffy.

A couple tricks for dealing with those nasty endgame bosses
1) Evade. Evade is usually a suckers strat (At least in the early campaigns), but against nasty late-game enemies, a single successful evade check can buy you an extra turn to chew through those high health pools. Since many scenario bosses are Massive, you don't need to spend an action engaging it first. Once again, you'll probably want to pitch to maximize your success chance.
2) have your non-fighter pack a few damage dealing events (Such as I've Got a Plan, which I think is in the base set). Most classes have at least a few events that can deal damage, not enough to make them a monster-fighter, but enough that they can pitch in against a boss, especially if they've had a whole scenario to draw them.
3) Throw wave after wave of your own men (Allies) at them. Allies are a great way to soak damage, and damage and horror is assigned simultaneously. If an ally has 2 health and 1 sanity, and you take 2 and 2 from an attack, you can max out the Ally's health and sanity, and only take 1 horror to your character. Usually, you want to preserve your allies, but getting them killed off is one of the many ways to Escalate your effort against a boss.

Zoey (The Zealot) in particular is good at running the "Big Money" strat, using cards like Physical Training to boost herself into success when need be.

[Psyren]

I don't think that's right, because progress (towards the required number of Elder Signs) is also made at a per-turn rate, so it should roughly even out.

My understanding was that everytime someone completed their actions, the clock advanced 3 hours (quarter circle.) Once it does that 4 times (one revolution), you risk an omen. I'll take another look later this evening after work though, it's entirely possible I misread the rulebook.

[Narkis]

My understanding was that everytime someone completed their actions, the clock advanced 3 hours (quarter circle.) Once it does that 4 times (one revolution), you risk an omen. I'll take another look later this evening after work though, it's entirely possible I misread the rulebook.

No, that's exactly right. Every player's turn advances the clock by 3 hours. Every 4 turns the clock strikes midnight and a Mythos card is revealed. What I think he meant is that since a player also (hopefully) finishes a quest during his turn, it doesn't matter if it's 3 or 7 players, you still get 4 missions done per day. I do agree it's harder with more players though, because the rewards are more spread out and each player is less prepared to take on the hard missions that give out Elder Signs.

[Psyren]

No, that's exactly right. Every player's turn advances the clock by 3 hours. Every 4 turns the clock strikes midnight and a Mythos card is revealed. What I think he meant is that since a player also (hopefully) finishes a quest during his turn, it doesn't matter if it's 3 or 7 players, you still get 4 missions done per day. I do agree it's harder with more players though, because the rewards are more spread out and each player is less prepared to take on the hard missions that give out Elder Signs.

Exactly - glad i didn't misunderstand.

Whereas if you have one investigator, they can load up on spells and such. You just need one with a strong ability, like that detective that turns every reroll token into two, and you can solo most of the GOOs. (He's my go-to in the mobile game as well.)

[Man_Over_Game]

I've discovered that I'm actually quite bored with Zoey (specialized Guardian). Her entire schtick is about killing enemies and getting lots of money. I'm leveraging her high Guts and her versatile deckbuilding restrictions (she can take any 0-experience Non-Enforcer cards) to equip her with spells so that she solves her Non-Fighting rolls with her Guts skill, but it's still pretty dang dull. Run into a fight, kill it, or I die. My wife is playing Rex (specialized Seeker), who's biggest strength is Investigating, and biggest weakness was monsters.

But between the expansion and the core set, my options to solving her monster problems were:

• Roland, a Guardian with some Seeker (and I didn't want the redundant Seeker)
• Skids, a Rogue with some Guardian (and I hated playing him the first time, seems really weak and limited to combat)
• Agnes, a Mystic with some Survivor (and is really circumstantial in combat, as you're required to have the right tools at the right time)
• Wendy, a Survivor with some Rogue (mostly revolves around adapting, but we needed a bit more combat focus)

And then Zoey, the new Guardian in the expansion. I considered playing Agnes, just not sure how comfortable I am gambling on drawing the cards I need to fight something, considering my partner is literally the worst combatant in the game.

[BRC]

I've discovered that I'm actually quite bored with Zoey (specialized Guardian). Her entire schtick is about killing enemies and getting lots of money. I'm leveraging her high Guts and her versatile deckbuilding restrictions (she can take any 0-experience Non-Enforcer cards) to equip her with spells so that she solves her Non-Fighting rolls with her Guts skill, but it's still pretty dang dull. Run into a fight, kill it, or I die. My wife is playing Rex (specialized Seeker), who's biggest strength is Investigating, and biggest weakness was monsters.

But between the expansion and the core set, my options to solving her monster problems were:

• Roland, a Guardian with some Seeker (and I didn't want the redundant Seeker)
• Skids, a Rogue with some Guardian (and I hated playing him the first time, seems really weak and limited to combat)
• Agnes, a Mystic with some Survivor (and is really circumstantial in combat, as you're required to have the right tools at the right time)
• Wendy, a Survivor with some Rogue (mostly revolves around adapting, but we needed a bit more combat focus)

And then Zoey, the new Guardian in the expansion. I considered playing Agnes, just not sure how comfortable I am gambling on drawing the cards I need to fight something, considering my partner is literally the worst combatant in the game.

What are you looking for as far as engagement? "Run into monsters, kill them" describes combat in the game pretty well. There are some investigators that change up the style and format in different ways, and others that are more versatile, but if you don't like the idea of killing monsters, I don't know what to tell you.

Especially in a two-player game where your partner is dedicated seeker. You really have to be a primary monster-fighter of some sort in that scenario. If you both went with more of a hybrid build, it could work.

When my group (3 players, 1 primary Fighter, 1 Primary investigator, 1 flex is our usual setup) played through Dunwitch, I played the rogue, Jenny Barnes. She has access to lots of money, and rogues have access to lots of guns. It's a pretty similar "Big Money" build to what it sounds like you're playing as Zoey, only you have access to Rogue tricks and weapons instead of guardian. Plus, you're more reliant on having Money on hand to feed your engine, since you're using cards like Hard Knocks and Physical training to boost your Combat on basically every hit.

[Eldan]

I've discovered that I'm actually quite bored with Zoey (specialized Guardian). Her entire schtick is about killing enemies and getting lots of money. I'm leveraging her high Guts and her versatile deckbuilding restrictions (she can take any 0-experience Non-Enforcer cards) to equip her with spells so that she solves her Non-Fighting rolls with her Guts skill, but it's still pretty dang dull. Run into a fight, kill it, or I die. My wife is playing Rex (specialized Seeker), who's biggest strength is Investigating, and biggest weakness was monsters.

But between the expansion and the core set, my options to solving her monster problems were:

• Roland, a Guardian with some Seeker (and I didn't want the redundant Seeker)
• Skids, a Rogue with some Guardian (and I hated playing him the first time, seems really weak and limited to combat)
• Agnes, a Mystic with some Survivor (and is really circumstantial in combat, as you're required to have the right tools at the right time)
• Wendy, a Survivor with some Rogue (mostly revolves around adapting, but we needed a bit more combat focus)

And then Zoey, the new Guardian in the expansion. I considered playing Agnes, just not sure how comfortable I am gambling on drawing the cards I need to fight something, considering my partner is literally the worst combatant in the game.

Part of that might also just be Rex? Rex was for a long while considered the strongest character in the game, outside of Solo. Because finding clues is something you always need to do in every scenario and he's the best character at that by a mile. Like, we played Dunwich with four people, back when, and it basically turned into the "Rex finds all the clues, while the rest of us keep him save" show. Later on, I think, he managed to find something like eight clues a turn pretty regularly.

As for Zoey... she is a very focused character. Thing is, if you have Rex, who is going to find all the clues, you kind of need someone else to deal with monsters, the one thing he can't do easily, especially not with an early-expansion card pool.

So, my first recommendation would actually be to switch around from playing Guardian/Seeker as your main pairing. Try any two of Rogue/Mystic/Survivor and try to make two all-rounders.

Agnes is a very efficient monster slayer, if you play her right. Her signature card, the heirloom of hyperborea looks underwhelming at first, until you remember that there's event spells. With a bigger card pool, I've seen her play three spells a turn and draw three new cards. There's also a lot of ways of screwing around with dealing yourself horror, if you take survivor into account.

Jenny is a very fun all-rounder. Probably a bit easier to make into a fighter than a clue-finder, at least until you get cards like lock picks from later expansions, which make any rogue into a great clue finder.

Wendy is one of the stronger characters around, but very hard to pilot. There even was a character build early on in the game's life cycle that got pretty famous, called "Wendy saves the world" or something like that, that could be shown to consistently beat Umordhoth to death with a baseball bat.

Jim... I honestly haven't played him much. Seems more of a support character. Probably ways to make him interesting.

And Duke, with his friend Ashcan Pete... a perpetual favourite of the community. Very versatile. Best doggo.

Skids I honestly can't recommend. Probably the weakest character you have access to right now, and very hard to make work.


As for ways to make Zoey more interesting than just slaying monsters... hard to do without a huge cardpool, sadly. Guardians are extremely focused with the early expansions. Killing monsters is just what you're going to do. That said, she has five off-class cards at will. Just use those to get some fun tricks that have nothing to do with monster-slaying, if you're bored of that. Rite of Seeking can actually work decently well with her. Or any number of survivor and rogue cards.