Tip of the day

[chrisvenus]

Don't go to bed at 1AM and decide to just read the beginning of a pratchett book you've not read. It results in you putting the book down having just finsihed it at 7AM.

Yes, today was something of a write off for getting much of anything done. I got up at around 2. Did... I dunno. Stuff. Then played some of this cthulhu board game that belongs to the downstairs housemate and gave up in disgust over the terror level maxed out and the entire city overran with monsters to the extent that I almost ran out of spare monsters to put on the board. I decided that being unable to move around the city without being jumped by at least five monsters meant that I was going to get nowhere so I just gave up. Long live Hastur!

Then I watched the end of last seasons smallville in preparation for tomorrow's new series. And now I'm just mooching though I do need to go see taigne to give her an old mobile phone handset that she might be able to trade in for cash.

Should phone her and do that now really...

Comments

[irrumator.livejournal.com]

Aaah, sweet sweet Arkham Horror. We played that the other night and got well and truly creamed by Nyarlathotep. And yes, if you were fighting Hastur and the terror level maxed out then giving up was probably a reasonable idea. Have played the game quite a bit and had a reasonable success against most of them, with the exception of Cthulhu of course.

[chrisvenus]

I was playing on my own. When the damn grand ritual went off before I could do anything I was opening two gates a turn and that's why it became totally overrun.

Looked like it would be a fun game with more people though doing the proper teamwork thing. :)

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Were you playing on your own with one character or multiple?

One of the things I was wondering from a game design point of view was whether it would work with just a single character, as I had some doubts about the balancing.

[chrisvenus]

On my own with just one character. Did I miss somewhere that said for one player I should do it differently?

But yes, it did seem rather unbalanced. If I ended up lost in space or time or something the missing a go is severely painful because another gate opens (or more usually in this game tried to open in the woods where there already was one) and so doom or more usually lots of monsters (and thus terror) happened. In my particular case the first mythos card played was the grand ritual whihc required me to have 3 spells within five turns to stop it or I drew two mythos cards each turn but only did the gate on the first one. This made missing a turn all the more fatal.

I figured it was going to be this unbalanced at the beginning but I was interested in the way it worked and so wanted to have a go. I must actually look through the mythos cards to see what the spread of gate openings is. I figure that with 20 or more locations that I must have been unlucky to only ever pick about 6 of them out of the hat when I was going through the 20+ mythos cards that I must have got through. I think I would have been luckier to have more gates opening and just see the unspeakable horrors take over the world, saving me the laugh of giggling as I realise that there are 30 monsters roaming the streets of Arkham. :)

[zandev.livejournal.com]

You didn't miss anything; playing multiple characters with one player is just one of the semi-official variants I'd found on the web. See http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ah_houserules.html for some comments from the designer, and various board game sites have more.

[childofatlantis.livejournal.com]

Ahoy! :)