Shub-Niggurath makes things hard…
So, how did it go?
That could be the question you might ask after reading the previous post and the answer would be – well we didn’t finish the game. it was interesting, very interesting.
So tonight we added the Dark Pharoah expansion to the Arkham Horror game to add some more fun, and for the most part it increased the variance somewhat and added a slim layer of toughness which was appreciated – almost.
There was an issue…
Shib-Niggurath is a bugger!
Yep. The infamous Black Goat of the Woods (and one wonders how that expansion will affect him) is a real bastard. He adds an interesting element, he ups the toughness of every creature by 1. A single digit, a miniscule change one might think – well no, not really – it really altered the dynamic of the combats somewhat.
Then there were the poor roles!
Yep. Tonight we also decided to have a raft of low roles meaning lots of failures – Zombies were causing an issue, needing only 2 successes and having 9 dice to achieve it and almost failing is very daunting.
Chuck managed to lose his Blessing 3 times, Linda twice and Leigh twice (though she had a safe card for one of them).
We fought a metric bucket load of creatures – I ended up with 41 toughness of creatures (19 separate monsters in my hand) at the end of the game – I had fought a total of 25+ of them over the course of the game – and Steph couldn’t have been far behind me. We closed a total of 12 portals and had 5 fully sealed before we had to call the game a “draw” as it had gotten too late. With only one open portal and several safe locations and 2 places left on the doom track we had a good chance of winning. But time was not our friend.
We will have to play another game with a full random bevy of Old Ones to see how the DP has really affected the game – it may have made it too tough, I personally think the game is meant to be hard and this was just a case of a hard opponent and poor roles.
Still, it was great fun 
yup – we didnt get much chance to play with the new exhibit items, although the added variance in the location cards i think has helped. Once again we had a very different game and we were on the brink of losing (and technically did but for a miscount and misread by yours truly in charge of the rules – ahem – sorry bout that) but we battled back supurbly which i think shows great things for the game – most other games dont allow you to battle back from the brink as a team as we did. And we definately had him/her/it/thingy – we just let him/her/it/thingy go!