The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So I’m reading up on the rules for Dunwich Horror. Looks great, as a fan of Arkham Horror. Just more stuff all around, and some really harsh “kick them when they’re down” sort of effects that could really screw us over in the right situations, or be perfectly fine in others. I love it. We rarely have trouble with the base game with Curse of the Dark Pharaoh mixed in. I’d like more challenge.
In any case, this makes me go and look up about the other small card expansion, the King in Yellow, that’s out. It sounds pretty awesome too, I will admit, and it introduces these things called Heralds, which are alternate sets of rules for a greater challenge in which there’s a great monster or being whose appearance heralds the appearance of an Elder God. These Heralds are extra-deadly if combined with a certain Elder God, but really annoying otherwise… so they have the Herald The King in Yellow in the box of that one, and they’ve put more, free Heralds on their website for The Dunwich Horror and the Dark Pharaoh, to be used with those two expansions if you have them and want that extra challenge. Those almost look a little too hard, though. We’ve got plenty to get used to here, first.

Anyway, the reason I was rambling about this was to get to the point where I was looking up reviews and information on Board Game Geek, which is a site that could really be set up better but has a lot of info. Everyone on there was talking about how they don’t mix in the cards from the little expansion and find it much more enjoyable to use them from time to time using the “Traveling show/exhibit” rules in each set, and that just mixing them all in and playing with everything they found to be a really bad experience.
Now, all this is certainly personal preference, but I don’t get that at all. We tried playing Curse of the Dark Pharaoh in that “Traveling Exhibit” mode, and it kinda sucked. It sort of just removed all of the base stuff from the game that we liked, and replaced it with these other mechanics, not to mention a ton of these Exhibit Items, which, besides Parchment of Elder Sign and that one bell thing, all really kinda suck. Now, as something you get occasionally, those items are fine. The kickassness of getting lucky and getting a Parchment of Elder Sign is awesome, and the various masks don’t feel as useless when you only have one instead of 3 or 4. But basically, everyone decided “Let’s never do this again” and we mixed in all the cards and have been happy since.
Using these small expansions by themselves doesn’t really fix the one thing that I’m buying expansions to fix, and that is repetition. You’re playing with a much smaller card pool than the base game when you use these things in “Traveling” mode. Maybe it’s just the way we play, but it is not hard for us to flip through an entire deck of encounter cards in a game, so when you have even LESS encounter cards, you get repeat encounters, which just sucks. I want MORE things that can happen. That’s why I want more cards. I want to draw different things every game, and be surprised, having forgot about this or that when I pull it in a future session. By mixing all the cards in, I get that.
I guess the real issue is one of storytelling. If you use just the small expansion decks, you are telling a clear story. It’s not a vague Elder God threat, it’s “Cultists are stealing Egyptian artifacts, and bringing a curse upon Arkham” or “An evil play has come to town, and is driving all who see it crazy.” There’s a definite narrative involved. I can appreciate a narrative, and I could play for a narrative, say, in a position where it’s an almost full RPG experience, where we are telling stories to connect the encounter cards as we play. That could be cool, though the question then becomes “Why aren’t we just playing, like, the Call of Cthulhu pen and paper style RPG?”
That wouldn’t happen, though. That’s not how my friends roll. That’s completely fine. But that makes this more a game than a storytelling experience, and the gameplay is more fun if there is less repetition. Thus, mixing everything in is a “good thing”.
Man, I really rambled a lot just to say that, huh?