Month: September 2024

Intro

We know very little about the upcoming Drowned City campaign aside from the old tentacle-face itself finally making its appearance, but one thing we know is that flood tokens are going to make another appearance. This is a mechanic from Innsmouth Conspiracy that I enjoyed a lot, so I felt like this would be a good mechanic to do a little deep dive on. How does it work, how was it used and what are possible angles the designers may want to explore in Drowned City?

Flood Tokens

The Innsmouth box came with 15 special double-sided flood tokens and so will The Drowned City. These are put on locations by effects on cards to mark them as either “partially flooded” or “fully flooded”. As long as a flood token is on a location, that location counts as “flooded”, no matter which side it’s on. Flood tokens by themselves have no inherent effect, they rely on other game text to give them meaning. That game text can refer to either of the four states a location can be in: partially flooded, fully flooded, flooded, unflooded. That makes it mechanically wide open, flooding can be used for a lot of things.

Let’s take a quick look at all the different card types that interact with the tokens before getting more specific:

Act and Agenda

All Innsmouth scenarios that involve flooding feature a Forced effect on the act or agenda that simulates what happens if a player stays too long in fully flooded locations. That can either be something that happens if the player ends their turn on such a location or it can use the “struggle for air” mechanic. In those latter scenarios, the players that start their turn in a fully flooded location need to set foot on a partially flooded or unflooded location during their turn, otherwise they suffer 5 direct damage which will likely lead to a quick defeat if they can’t find a safe spot soon.

Locations

A major part of the flooding mechanic is of course the locations themselves. Many of them have something that lets them interact with the tokens in some way, giving them an extra layer. Some locations get flooded as soon as they are revealed. Some can’t be flooded or at least not fully. And yet others become harder or easier to investigate depending on their state.

Enemies

The primary enemy type in Innsmouth is the Deep Ones, who have a natural home advantage over the players when it comes to moving around in flooded caves. It is surprising then that enemies barely interact with flood tokens. There are just enough enemies that showcase what could be done: Being stronger in water, coming into play exhausted in unflooded locations or only being able to move between bodies of water. But with just four enemies with flood-based abilities across the whole campaign, this is definitely an angle that could be explored better.

Treacheries

Thankfully, there is however a solid amount of treacheries engaging in flood-related shenanigans. Treacheries that act as enablers for the mechanic, manipulating the flood levels of locations exist just as well as those that provide a pay-off through having effects that scale off of these flood levels. One of the campaign-wide encounter sets, Rising Tide, is even focused on flooding as a mechanic and used a decent amount over the course of the Innsmouth Conspiracy.

Story Assets

The final piece of the puzzle. Using flood mechanics on player cards wouldn’t work well because player cards are supposed to be relevant in every (or at least most) campaigns. As a result, Innsmouth isn’t shy about giving the players a variety of story assets, thus allowing players to interact with flooding from their play area.

So, as we can see, Flood is a rather multilayered affair that influences or can be influenced by most other things in the game. But what is it actually being used for? There are two main roles that flood plays in the game: That of area denial and that of a clock.

Flooding as Area Denial

The Innsmouth campaign as a whole is really about locations mattering. Locations are shuffled randomly among each other, the keys are distributed randomly among those locations. This creates a dynamic playing field that changes from play to play. Most of the scenarios also have some additional location-based special rules that further add to the feel of an ever shifting board that needs to be explored. As a result, Innsmouth is incredibly replayable in spite of its completely linear (and to be frank, boring) campaign structure.
Flooding adds yet another layer on top. By making some parts of the map gradually more dangerous, the board gets even more strategic depth. Decisions on where to move and priorities may shift after some flood tokens are added to certain locations through an untimely treachery or agenda flip.
Crucially, the Flooding never completely shuts off sections of the board, but just makes them more dangerous.

Flooding as a Clock

Like almost every scenario, the ones in Innsmouth also are timed by the amount of doom allowed by the agenda thresholds. But Flooding can act as a parallel timer, threatening to drown the investigators when they find themselves without any safe locations to catch their breath. What’s neat about this particular implementation of a clock is that it isn’t a binary win/lose condition that doesn’t do anything until a certain point is reached, but steadily increases the pressure over time. Doom on the agenda by itself doesn’t do anything before you hit a threshold. But flood tokens make life harder at that location, as enemies become more dangerous, chaos tokens less forgiving and treacheries more impactful. These are all small increases that from turn to turn build up to put the screws on the players.
When time runs out on players in the Innsmouth campaign, it will usually be due to drowning before the agenda runs out of doom.

Part of what makes Flooding a really successful mechanic in my mind is how different it impacts the scenarios in the campaign. There is a lot of variation in how it is executed and how it feels. So next i want to take a closer look at the scenarios in Innsmouth to point out some of these scenario specific differences.

Pit of Despair

The first scenario immediately goes hard on the flooding mechanic, using it liberally to create a very tense introduction to the campaign. The advancement of the flood is tied primarily to the agendas, with each agenda flip increasing the flood levels all over the relatively small and interconnected map. On top of that, the Rising Tides set will cause some locations to even be ahead of the tide.
For the players, there is no escape from the water, they are forced to interact with the mechanic in a big way right out of the gate. The only reprieve is a pair of locations in the Tidal Tunnel set that can not be fully flooded. Where those two locations randomly sit in the layout can have noticeable consequences for how the scenario plays out.

The Vanishing of Elina Harper

This scenario plays only in the town of Innsmouth itself, at a time where there is no flooding yet.

In Too Deep

Like Pit of Despair, In Too Deep also features rising waters tied to the agenda advancement. But unlike Pit which raised the water all over a small map, the flood rolls in from the right here while the investigators try to cross a very large layout. The players need to try to stay ahead of the tide until they can make their escape. The random extra flooding from the Rising Tides set is much less of a factor here, but it does get some backup from the Tidal Alignment treachery. Two of the four enemies in the campaign that care about flood levels are specific to the In Too Deep scenario, highlighting the dangers of when the waters catch up to you.
The flood controls not only much of the pacing for the primary goal of the scenario (reaching the exit) but also the backdrop for the risk/reward behind its many sidegoals. Especially getting the final key will usually mean having to wade back and fight the Mob while standing in dangerous water where treacheries hit harder and enemies gain bonuses.

Devil Reef

In Devil Reef, the flood mechanic is used quite differently. While there is a possibility of being caught by an untimely Rising Water treachery while exploring the islands, this is much less dangerous than it is in Pit of Despair or In Too Deep. The mechanic is instead primarily used to simulate the ocean locations that the players have to traverse.
The doom clock takes back the role of the primary timer for the scenario, the flooding is mostly static and the players get the fishing vessel as a tool to interact with it. Treacheries and enemies can pull players out of the boat and potentially into the ocean. Movement is more difficult there in addition to the risk of drowning. Oh, and there’s the kraken too.
Overall, this scenario uses similar building blocks as the others that combine Flood, Tidal Tunnels and Deep Ones… but in a very different way.

Horror in High Gear

This is the other scenario that doesn’t feature flooding at all.

A Light in the Fog

In Too Deep had flood roll in from the right and players ran from away from it. Light in the Fog has the waves come in from below and the players go towards it. Drowning is back as a major threat. The agenda introduces the idea of investigators being pulled down into the deep if they end their turn in fully flooded locations. Many treacheries care about the flood levels relevant to the players that drew them. The boss enemy of the scenario gets stronger in flooded areas. Notably, the two locations from the Tidal Tunnels that can’t be fully flooded are removed on setup here. So there are no safe spots in the tunnels under the lighthouse unless you create them.
But at least the investigators can make use of the story assets earned during Devil Reef here to interact with the flooding in a more favorable manner, too. Flood is used to gate some locations and the players need to clear it through the use of the pump room which can divert water from one cave into another.
So again, the mechanics get used differently with new ways of interaction.

Lair of Dagon

Lair of Dagon does have some flood interactions, but is not overly concerned with the mechanic. This is the first of the scenarios using flood tokens that doesn’t feature the Rising Tides encounter set, leaving just the two copies of Tidal Alignment to provide some extra variance to flood levels. The one flood-related oddity about this scenario is that it is known to become very difficult if the Lair of Dagon location and the one leading into it both get flooded. When that happens, it becomes almost impossible to avoid triggering the 5 direct damage penalty from the agenda while still making progress on finishing your goals in the Lair. This is where the Teachings of the Order can come in clutch, if still available.
Aside from that one thing, flooding isn’t really a notable part of this scenario though.

Into the Maelstrom

The finale hinges its win condition on the flood mechanic. Or, more appropriately, on reversing the flood mechanic. The investigators have to remove the flood tokens from the board through an ability on the act.
Like Lair of Dagon, Into the Maelstrom doesn’t use the Rising Tides set, but it does have its own scenario specific treachery, Treacherous Depth, to make up for it. Many locations start in play fully flooded. As a result, the flood basically works the other way round than before: Instead of starting with relatively dry locations that flood up over time as the agenda advances, we start with everything under water and see it dry up over time as the players make progress. Instead of advancing a timer, the treacheries that raise flood levels merely push back against the players progress instead. The doom clock takes over as a timer again, with the additional threat of waking up the two Old Ones.
One final time, the players potentially also gain story assets that interact with flooding, in the form of diving suits that let them ignore it for a while until they can get a foothold in the underwater city.

The Drowned City

So overall, the Innsmouth campaign had flooding in six of its eight scenarios. One of those, Lair of Dagon, didn’t really care too much about it. But that still leaves five scenarios, each of which used flooding in a very distinct way. That proves how much depth (heh) there is to this mechanic and of course it makes me wonder how the designers will keep iterating on it for The Drowned City. Considering the name of the expansion and the fact that it actually does ship with the flood tokens, i don’t expect flooding to be only a small part or a one-scenario gimmick either. Maybe not quite as prolific as it was in Innsmouth, but I’d be surprised to see flood tokens in fewer than 5 scenarios of Drowned City in some capacity.

One thing i would’ve liked to see more in Innsmouth would be enemies that interact with flooding. Enemies that get stronger in water, enemies that get weaker. Enemies that cause flooding? That could absolutely be a thing to explore more in the upcoming expansion.

Where else can we go with the mechanic? I suppose one way could be to go completely off the rails and start putting flood tokens on other things than locations. But i find that unlikely.

The announcement article doesn’t give us a whole lot to speculate on so far. It mentions that Cthulhu himself will cause flooding to happen at every location he touches. We also get a look at the unrevealed side of a couple of Arkham locations, about half of which can’t be fully flooded. It also mentions that we are going to explore R’lyeh itself and that doing so will involve “tons of seawater”… yeah. It certainly looks like flood is going to be a major mechanic again. And I am here for it!

Intro

Marion Tavares is The Trawler, one of the new investigators from the upcoming Drowned City expansion. Now, i am aware that i am a bit early with this. We don’t have her deckbuilding yet, but that didn’t stop me the other day from trying to visualize some decklists for her, to check out how that would look. So uuuh… here’s an early deep dive into Marion.
Note that we know little about the rest of the Drowned City player cards so far, so we might very well get more cards tailored towards her in the set.

Skills and Soak

Marion almost has the same statline that Roland and Tommy have, with just the agility and willpower swapped. So the first impression is that she is supposed to fight, but also to leverage her intellect in a meaningful way. The 3 in agility gives her another venue for enemy control and some resilience towards a part of the encounter deck. That being said, she is the only Guardian investigator aside from Carson that doesn’t have a 3 or 4 in willpower, a skill that Guardian is traditionally rather strong in.
Overall, this statline makes her out to be a flexible investigator to build decks for, with capabilities beyond just punching or shooting enemies.
The 8 and 6 in health and sanity are a very common sight in Guardian. Notably, the 6 sanity in combination with just 2 willpower are a thing to stay aware of. We have known this combination to be dicey since Skids O’Toole in the Core Set. A Marion deck will likely need to adress this weakness or risk getting clobbered by back to back Rotting Remains (or equivalents) or just wearing out over the course of a long scenario.

Adressing her Weaknesses

So, let’s start with the elephant in the room. She only has one handslot, which is a rather big drawback. Even event-focused decks usually use both hands for supporting assets, like an Obsidian Bracelet and Survival Knife. Guardian in particular does have a wealth of two-handed guns available which are all very awkward to use for her. There are ways around this drawback through cards that give additional handslots (like Bandolier), but how good of an idea that really is remains to be seen. I expect that this will not be the way to go, except for decks that REALLY want to put Boxing Gloves on her. Instead, we will likely want to just live with that restriction, make the best out of the handslot we have and get our value out of playing as many events as we can. That restricts us to one-handed assets with Marion, but thanks to Tinker (a cheap and fast event!) we can at least make that slot pull double (or even triple) duty … or well, we could. If Guardian ever gets a onehanded Tool Item worth playing.

Her low willpower and sanity are a liability, but luckily Guardian has a much easier way of working against that than Rogue has, so Marion shouldn’t be troubled by this as much as Skids or Tony are. Skills such as Steadfast or Take the Initiative can temporarily shoot our willpower from 2 to 5, which can be essential in not getting Frozen in Fear or affected by any of a wide range of other debilitating treacheries. Guardian is the class with the best healing and as an event specialist, Marion may want to look at a couple of healing events to make sure her sanity doesn’t bottom out. Soothing Melodies (from the Hallowed Mirror) are going to be excellent for this and maybe Absolution needs another look as well. If we are fighting through events, i could even see a case to be made for Book of Psalms. Of course, additional soak from Something Worth Fighting For or a heavy duty ally like Girish Kadakia can also go a long way.

Her signature weakness card, “I’ll do it myself”, is potentially a very tough cookie to swallow. We just talked about how her sanity is a bit of a weak spot, so getting told to take a horror for every single event we play sounds incredibly punishing and not like something we are able to do long. Getting rid of the weakness requires the discard of three events from our hand, a condition that has a huge influence on how we want to build our deck. We are going to want a lot of card draw to offset the cards we lose here, basically 4 dead draws are forced on us here: The three cards we discard and the weakness itself. While the weakness doesn’t cost us an action, that is still a very significant amount of value to give up. Marion can play the Improvised events that can be played from the discard pile to mitigate this cost somewhat, but it’s still going to sting quite a bit.

Abilities

So how good is her investigator ability and is it able to stack up to all the weak spots we just mentioned? Well, i believe it is very good and easily worth the hoops that we have to jump through. If we manage to trigger her investigator ability every round, that’s one extra action taken and one extra card drawn every turn. That’s incredible and even outpaces other high value investigator abilities like Carson’s or Monterey’s. Even if we miss a few turns where we have to reload our hand or deal with the weakness, we are very likely to gain more from this ability than from most other investigator abilities.

To trigger the ability, we are going to need two events that we want to play. If that is the case, we can tack these two events together, play them in the same action and draw a card. Then still have two more actions to go for the turn. To do that every turn, our deck will need to consist of a large amount of events and we are going to need the card draw to get those events into our hand. Similar to how Nathaniel works when his boxing gloves are out, Marion’s innate card draw ability will already help with keeping the events going. But we will want to add more card draw on top anyways to make up for all the non-event draws we make. And of course to offset our weakness which undoes a whopping four instances of draw.

Marion bucks expectations by her signature card not being an event, but a skill. Actually, two copies of a skill. They go a long way towards making her flat statline more usable, especially when it comes to the intellect and agility. We can have two of these in our hand at the same time and they return there as long as they are being used on (successful) tests for events. This seems pretty powerful, but it does also mean that your hand size is effectively reduced by 2 while holding these. This is likely not a huge issue in practice, but who knows. With all the cards she draws, it might become a factor.
These skills introduce an interesting dynamic to how she plays as she will experience two spikes to her capabilities at undefined points of a scenario, one for each time she draws Determined and thus giving herself a virtual +1 to a lot of her tests. Marion with double Determined in hand is a lot more capable at using something like a Winging It than Marion is on turn 1. The skills might even turn out to be worth mulliganing or specifically searching the deck for.

What Events Are We Looking For?

There is a solid amount of events available to her and the decision on which ones to play is going to determine most of the deck. No matter which role we see Marion in (fighter, seeker, flex to varying degrees, support) we can categorize events into basically two groups for our purpose: Events that allow us to “Do a Thing”, that basically do what other investigators would use assets for. And events that give value, that we can pretty much always play for profit. We are going to want enough of the first group so that we are able to fulfill our role in the game, but if we have too many of them we might find ourselves unable to use our ability because we are out of targets or out of need to use those events. This is when the other group can come in. Events that draw cards, heal damage and horror or gain resources can be used pretty much in all situations, but of course having too many of those can leave us without anything more productive to do.
Playing a lot of events can potentially also drain our resources really fast, so we will want to make sure that most of them are cheap enough that we can stick to our plan of playing two per turn.
The investigator ability only works during our turn, so while we can certainly play events like I’ve Had Worse, Fool Me Once or On The Hunt, they might end up impossible or hard to use as fodder for the ability.
One interesting part of the ability is that it allows playing a Fast event and tacking a non-Fast event onto it, basically turning both of them Fast in the process. This can be useful to avoid attacks of opportunity or just simply to play two events and still have three more actions to go. I would therefore want to include at least some events that have Fast (and can be played during the investigator phase without too many conditions) in my deck.
While we are on the topic of rule interactions with the investigator ability:
Events with the Bold trait can only be played as our first action. That means they can not be tacked onto another card, even when that card was played as the first action. They can however be played as usual and then another card be tacked onto them.
Events with the Double trait have an additional action cost to the one that is innate to playing any non-Fast event. Tacking a Double card onto another will mean that you still have to pay that extra action.
Neither trait is particularly helpful in combination with the investigator ability, but doesn’t really stand in the way either.

Staple Events for Marion

Alright then, let’s talk specifics. Here’s a bunch of events that i think work particularly well for Marion, no matter her role.

Stand Together: I don’t see a Marion deck where you don’t include this, unless it’s true solo. We are limited in what resource generation we can play and this is one of the best ones in Guardian. It’s the perfect card to tack onto something else for value.
Tinker: Seems fantastic for Marion. It’s cheap and it’s fast, making it a great “carrier” for another event. It also mitigates her primary weakness of having only one handslot by letting one of her assets no longer take up that slot. Comes with the requirement of having a Tool in your hand however. I think the card is good enough to consider this requirement during deck building… if we actually get a one-handed Tool that Marion can use. So far we didn’t but it’s something to keep an open eye for.
Hand-Eye Coordination: Another cheap and Fast event. Does have a condition to be usable however, is basically another reward for fulfilling Tinker’s condition.
Galvanize: Very similar to Hand-Eye Coordination, but with a different condition.
Glory: Has a specific point when it needs to be played, but if you didn’t use your ability at that point yet, can do a solid job of carrying another event for you. But even if you just play it straight and on its own, it’s good and cheap card draw. And that is going to be essential to making Marion perform at her peak.
Ready for Anything: The same thing that goes for Glory goes for this new card.
Hunter’s Mark: Fast event that does something very relevant. The only question is if we play this in addition to Vicious Blow or if we use this as an opportunity to crowd out another skill out of our event deck.
Soothing Melody: Requires running the Mirror to get these into the deck, but the payoff seems worth it. Unless we require the accessory slot for something else, we will likely want the Melodies.
Tempt Fate: A “free” card that completely replaces itself. Generally considered not worth it as it slightly tips the chaos bag into the negative, but maybe being a vessel to make something else Fast gives it enough of an edge? I am skeptical for now as there are probably better options to achieve that, but i think this card is worth keeping in mind.

Of these, i think Stand Together, Glory and Ready for Anything will just straight up end up in every Marion deck. Hunter’s Mark and Hallowed Mirror will at least be a very, very common sight.

Events: Marion as a Fighter

These are the events that i see as worth using when trying to fight through events. She is lacking the +1 damage that Nathaniel gets on each event, so anything that deals less than 2 damage innately is probably not going to make the cut unless it really impresses on another front.

Toe to Toe: Already a great card in any Guardian, but as a 0-cost event it’s the perfect thing to tack something else onto.
Sweeping Kick: +3 from the agility is very good. Another workhorse card that is already proven and will just work great in here as well.
Fang of Tyr’thrha: I mean… if we don’t play it here, then where? I think this is preferable to a high level Dynamite Blast, for whatever that is worth.
One-Two-Punch: One of the few ways to deal 3 damage with an event in Guardian without being Nathaniel. Seems like a shoe-in to me. Obviously the upgrade is fantastic, too… but is it better than Fang? Seems like we are going to end up with an XP-hungry deck!
Improvised Weapon: The signature weakness pressures us pretty hard into taking the Improv events, but that doesn’t seem like a huge cost. These events are quite good and with the new upgrades for them, they’ll end up even better.

Events: Marion as a Seeker

The other side of the coin. As we’d expect, there’s fewer of these than combat events, but maybe it’s enough to build on?

Scene of the Crime: A workhorse of a card that has been doing a great job in Guardians that want a couple clues since forever.
Breach The Door: Allows us to plunder one location. Seems pretty good.
Evidence!: It’s a card for a clue, basically a blue Deduction that we can possibly use for our investigator ability as well. Solid enough.
Lesson Learned: Starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel here. But for what it’s worth, it does work on attacks of opportunity and could in those cases be used for the investigator ability.
Winging It: I adore this card. It’s quite good, a valid way to use her intellect and works either as mitigation for her weakness or to play twice into her investigator ability.

The Hand Slot

From the above, it seems to me that a pure event-focused build in the style of Diana or Nathaniel isn’t really the way to go with Marion. Instead we will want to make use of that hand slot to gain either more investigations or attacks. Doing this has the advantage of also unlocking a bunch of useful events like Tinker, Hand-Eye Coordination or Reliable. Also, since we are only able to use our investigator ability once per turn, it might be beneficial to avoid playing fighting events when we can’t double up on them. Here are some options i think are worth talking about:

Machete: The default one-handed weapon in Guardian. Can be upgraded into a Blessed Blade(4) down the road.
.45 Auto: There is a good number of firearm-specific events around that look promising enough to carry a build. What doesn’t carry a build however is this pitiful excuse for a weapon. I’ll talk about the firearm build in a second, let’s just leave it at the .45 not really being an option next to Machete.
Survival Knife(2): If you are leaning more towards support or seeker than fighter, the upgraded Survival Knife has been proven to do a good job as a sidearm.
Obsidian Bracelet: A fine way to mitigate your own sanity shortcomings while also lending support to the team.
Book of Psalms: This basically solves the sanity issues. Does eat into your actions, but Marion might not care as much as other Guardians do.

Stick to the Plan

It’s no secret that Stick to the Plan is an amazing card that will help any Guardian to get a jumpstart into the game. I feel like Marion profits from SttP particularly well though. With an extra three events available right from the start, she can make sure that she doesn’t fall prey to bad mulligans. Just something simple like Toe to Toe, Sweeping Kick and One-Two Punch as the set aside cards means that she basically can’t fail to “draw her weapon” and instead is ready to go from turn 1. The events in her hand can then be added to the cards she plays from The Plan, triggering her ability effectively without decreasing the number of cards in hand. That sounds to me like it would let her setup incredibly well.
Cards from SttP can be played “as if” in your hand, which means you can play them tacked onto other cards as well.

The Vanilla Build

Alright, so with all of that said, how does a Marion deck actually look? I suppose it would look something like this:

A small number of impactul assets, a dash of skill cards. And a smattering of events, about half of them covering fighting and seeking and the other half card, health and resource economy. Stick to the Plan for a headstart, then each turn either kill a thing or find some clues with events. Use the other actions move, to play or use assets or whatever else needs doing. Since we are event-based, we don’t spam attacks or investigations, we do few things with high impact and use the rest of the turn for support. Discard other peoples weaknesses. Heal. When the hand gets too full, of course feel free to spike in activity and just take a bomb turn or two before rebuilding your hand again.
I put Vicious Blows into this deck, but (and this goes for the other following decks as well) feel free to upgrade them into Hunter’s Marks for even more event density and another Fast cheap event.
This list and the support build both assume she can take Guardian level 4. If she should end up with only up to level 3, then Girish needs to be replaced, for example by Grete Wagner.

The Support Build

If we are spending a good amount of time on support anyways, we might even lean more into this and invest considerable amounts of experience and deck slots into it:

Starting our Stick to the Plan out with cards like Ever Vigilant(4) and Prepared for the Worst(2), we are going to be the darling of the whole table before we even played our first Stand Together(3). Thanks to a few high impact fight events, we aren’t even carsoning this game out, we can even be productive members of the team besides all the support.

The Gun Build

Oh Guardian. All these gun focused events and no guns to go with them. Check out this decklist:

This is a great skeleton for a deck that would allow Marion to play an incredible Gun-Fu deck that chains firearm-related events into one another while voltroning up a superweapon with Custom Mods and other upgrades. Get some Extra Ammo and One in the Chamber in there as well and you start cooking. Fingers crossed that Guardian will one day get another firearm, because i am not going to do this with the .45 and the .32.

The Bless Build

Don’t have enough of bless tokens yet? There are enough bless related events around that we can do something with that as well.

Pity that Guided by Faith uses willpower to investigate, this could’ve been a solid home for a card that just barely misses the mark. Oh well.
I don’t think this is quite there? Depending on where her deckbuilding ends up, this could look either better (if she gets access to some of the good survivor bless events) or worse (if she doesn’t get Blessed Blade(4)). Let’s wait and see on this one, my gut right now is telling me that there’s not enough reason to play this in Marion over Tommy.

Conclusion

Marion is easily the investigator from Drowned City that i am most hyped for. There are some investigators that are particularly fun to build for, some that are particularly fun to play. Only very few of them score high on both ends and she looks to be one of them. Even at a pessimistic estimation of her deckbuilding she has great options open to her. If she does indeed end up being able to play Tactics like Hornet’s Nest or Act of Desperation, things get even better. If i get to play Flare, you can bet your sweet behind that i will do Sled Dogs with her based on that, Motivational Speech and her card draw :D

In any case, i hope you liked this early look at Marion. The article kinda grew out of my own interest in her. Looking forward to revisit this once we have the full picture!

EDIT: BUT WAIT! There’s more!

Shortly after i hit Publish on this article, Nick posted a 50XP Marion deck which looks like this:

This tells us some things about the deckbuilding. For one, i am happy to see level 4 and 5 Guardian cards here, so no early cutoff on the mainclass like some other investigators have. No weird decksize either, it’s 30 cards. But Glimmer of Hope, Improv Weapon and Honed Instinct? That’s wild. Notably, the Honed Instinct needs to be at least level 2 to have 3 copies. No trait overlap between the three cards and they are from two different off-classes. So what does that mean? Something were three traits are specifically called out (Fortune, Improvised, Gambit?) Or maybe something like “Up to X survivor and/or rogue events level 0-2”?

Can i put Easy Mark into her deck? Holy crap :D

Anyways, there are few things that can me more exciting for an investigator i am already having the hots for than the prospect of putting green cards into their deck.

Intro

Last week, i went over some of the ways that the stats and abilities of enemies push us towards either engaging them or defeating them. Some enemies are designed better than others in this regard and today i want to pick out some examples of particularly well done enemies (and a few that i think are a bit of a misstep).
So let’s get right into it.

This dude uses a lot of text to invert how doom enemies are usually handled. Since you can’t really let doom stick around on the board, defeating any cultist you come across is just what you have to do. The Frenzied Explorer punishes you for doing so and instead mandates that you evade him … which will then lead to it being discarded. It’s all a bit unwieldy and reads forced, but the card does certainly do a great job of forcing players out of their comfort zone. It’s astonishing how much of a problem 2 evasion can be when you aren’t prepared to evade anything.

There are two encounter cards everyone remembers from Innsmouth. One is Deep One Assault. The other one is the Bull. This guy is really well done. His health and fight are high, but not high enough to really be a roadblock for a fighter. But high enough to take away a full turn. His evasion is invitingly low, allowing you to just spend one action on him instead of three. He has a movement ability, but not even “real” Hunter. There’s the threat of the Forced effect mattering again, but a non-random card isn’t too bad. It’s all just right on the edge of where things are a bit of a pain, but you can convince yourself that evading him will be fine. Surely. And then, when you evade him, he impacts all further decisions when facing other Deep Ones. One of my favorite designs in the game. The article by MJ that i linked in the intro last week has a whole paragraph on this enemy too, if you want to read about it directly from it’s designer.

I see what they were going for with these two, but i don’t think they quite hit the mark.
These two Zoogs mirror each other, one of them telling you in no uncertain terms that it wants to be evaded, the other that it wants to be fought. There’s a whole lot of text on these two dudes, but let’s just be honest here for a second. Effectively, Furtive Zoog is a 3/2/1 with Retaliate and Stealthy Zoog is a 1/2/3 without a textbox. Stealthy Zoog is guaranteed to just eat a bullet (or get punched to death by Daisy), making all that text on it utterly superflous.
Furtive Zoog works a bit better. As a non-Hunter with Retaliate, evading it is a solid option. I’ll probably still end up killing it more often than not, but at least the text on it does something.

This guy is just great. Especially anyone using ammo or charges for fighting will dread getting swarmed by Vengeful Serpents, as their Vengeance mechanics will turn 3 encounter cards into what is basically 6 enemies to defeat. However, this number can be reduced if you can wait to kill the Serpent before more of them have been drawn. Whether this is worth doing is going to depend heavily on the party composition, the current board state and the scenario that is being played. Not all of them afford the leasure to just evade the Serpent and run away from it for a bit.
So what Vengeful Serpent ends up being is a highly contextual enemy that requires different approaches depending on the situation. Or you can tech for it with something like Storm of Spirits. Or you can just try and brute force it with a melee weapon, although that might very well backfire. I adore this card and how much of an impact it has on the feel of the scenarios it is in.

Looking at the list of enemies with Victory on them, it’s pretty difficult to find one where letting it live is much of an option for most people. In general, Arkham players are rather precious about their experience points and will go through great length to secure any Victory enemy they can get their hands on.
Here are two examples of enemies that i do skip relatively often though. Vengeance is a powerful deterrent all through the Forgotten Age. I particularly enjoy the cards that have both Vengeance and Victory on them as they do offer a tradeoff. Having played TFA often, i know about certain thresholds for Vengeance that i don’t like to cross if i can avoid it. While I’ll gladly clear the Chamber of Time whenever i can during scenario 2 when not much Vengeance accumulated yet (hopefully…), i have a much clearer picture of where i stand with Vengeance by the end of Boundary Beyond. And if i think it will help me to stay below 10 Vengeance until Depths of Yoth, then i will skip both the VP and the Vengeance on both Padme Amidala and the Techno-Serpent and try to finish the scenario without defeating them. TFA has an experience curve where missing 3XP won’t be too bad and making sure that Depths of Yoth goes your way is worth it.
The Moon-Beast comes out of the encounter deck at any point. And more often than not, it’s just at very inconvenient times. There even is a reward for killing it beyond the victory, but at 5 combat, 5 health and Retaliate it puts up enough of a fight that the 1 evasion looks very, very tempting.

Here’s an enemy where i wish it didn’t have Victory on it. This thing shares its statline with the Deep One Bull and similarily comes out of the encounter deck at any point. But where the Bull offered various tradeoffs that make you weigh your options, the Victory on the Presage pretty much does the decision for you. Unlike TFA, Scarlet Keys isn’t really generous enough with the XP that you want to miss a Victory enemy.
At the same time, it also has an “on defeat” trigger that allows taking back some of the set-aside hollows… but only if you give up the Victory. That doesn’t seem like a worthwhile trade at all. If this enemy would not have the VP on it, then this would have been a neat enemy: Evade it relatively easily and leave it behind (it doesn’t have Hunter) or go the extra mile through 5 health and regain some hollows. It’s still no Deep One Bull, but that’d been a really solid decision to make. As it is, the VP does pretty much answer these decisions for you though.

I’m on record as considering the Deep Ones from Innsmouth as some of my favorite enemies. That being said, Carcosa had the Maniac (and the Psychopath) way before Deep Ones were a thing and did some really interesting things with the engagement mechanic. On drawing him the first time, he hits both the player and himself for 1. Still at 3 health afterwards, he’s not trivial to kill in one strike. The very low evasion and the lack of Hunter invite evasion. If you do have to re-engage him, he’ll drop to 2 health, suddenly much easier to defeat than before. You might even decide to do this intentionally, evading it with the purpose of defeating him the turn after he re-engages.
It’s closest equivalent in the ranks of the fishpeople is Lurking Deep One, who doesn’t leave open for interpretation how it’s meant to be dealt with. Even as a 2/2/2, we would have ended up defeating it 90% of times. But with a 4 in evasion, this is all but decided for us. That being said, i wouldn’t call Lurking Deep One a bad design or anything. It’s simply a straight-forward card that doesn’t pretend to be more than it is (unlike, for example, Stealthy Zoog) and as the most basic enemy of the Innsmouth campaign that’s perfectly fair. And for what it’s worth, it does play well with the Deep One Bull if you are trying not to trigger its movement ability as the Lurker will make that particularly difficult.

Final notes

That was ten cards, let’s call it a wrap. As you can see, there is a bunch of potential between just a few numbers and some keywords and seeing the designers explore it is genuinely fascinating to me. I particularly enjoy it when some enemies force players to consider their options and not hand all decisions to them on a platter. This is obviously not required for every single one of them (the Lurking Deep One is a good example for a simple enemy that works just great), but having some of them around just lends itself to the sort of emerging gameplay that ArkhamLCG is so good at.

Wake me up inside

That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even The Drowned City announcement article may finally find its way to us. Well then, time to get our game face on then. The investigator expansion is going to hit stores in February, the campaign expansion one month after that. In the meantime we can expect to slowly be fed previews of cards. Mostly of the investigator expansion, but i suspect we are going to get something important about the campaign one as well before the year is over.
In any case, as with the previous two expansions, I will post regular spoiler roundups that pull together everything we got to see in this place. Both as a way to offer peeps that don’t want to hunt around the internet for where the cards are previewed and as a way for me to force my unfiltered and unqualified first impressions on you. Hey, it’s a two-way street.
If that sounds understandably insufferable to you, let me also take this opportunity to point you towards the Visual Spoiler where you can find all card images and some other images of note in one place without any enlightened commentary.

Alright then, let’s get into the initial wave of card reveals from the announcement article, card fans on store pages and box images. Oh, and the minigun.

The investigators

The box has six investigators in it, one of which is Gloria Goldberg who previously was only available with alternate signature cards alongside a book. We are getting her here in her proper (but probably just as broken) version with the “canon” signatures and weaknesses. The other five include Michael McGlen, George Barnaby and Agatha Crane who have been around other Arkham Files games before. The final two are Marion Tavares and Lucius Galloway, both of which are completely new.

Oh, i see what you did there. That’s one way to give us an event Guardian without us immediately reaching for the Boxing Gloves. Now i feel like i have to Bandolier her and do it out of spite :) All jokes aside, i really like this. I enjoy event based play in general and this just looks like a great thing to build around. Not only does the extra card drawn per turn really help with keeping the events coming, but the extra play of an event is also really powerful. Notably, it allows you to play one of your non-Fast events after a Fast one, allowing it to squeeze into certain player windows where you’d usually not be able to play everything. It’s limited to your own turn to stop it from really going off the grid, but that still looks cool. Her statline is a bit wonky, but i’m sure we can do something cool with her. We don’t know her deckbuilding, but we know she can run level 2 Improvised Weapon, which points towards access for either Survivor, Tactic, Improvised or events in general. I am hoping for Tactic, we just had Improvised on a Guardian last set. We also know from the article that she gains two of her signature skills, a self-recurring +1 wild. That does a lot to make her statline more attractive and the two copies she has can even go into the same test. That being said, drawing a tentacle on a test with both skills in it will suuuuuuuck. The weakness looks threatening and interesting, i like it. She is weak in horror soak, so the horror per event will not be something she can bear a lot. The weakness also pushes her to put a lot of events into her deck so she can keep three in hand as fodder while still having the opportunity to use her double play ability multiple times. What are we looking at here? Fifteen events? Eighteen? More? Sounds fun.

The front is all we’ve seen from the set’s Seeker so far, it’s on the back of the investigator box. Everything about him screams being the long missing Seeker 5/Rogue 2, however. If that is indeed what he ends up as, he looks incredibly good. Bonus clue per turn, fantastic statline, incredible card pool. I just want to play Breaking and Entering(2) every turn with him. [EDIT: Actually, B&E doesn’t work with his ability. Autosuccesses do not oversucceed.] I expect greatness, but before we go completely heads over heels here, let’s wait for the confirmation of his backside sometime during the spoiler season. Maybe we’ll get to know more when the novel “The Forbidden Visions of Lucius Galloway” releases in November?

That’s all we got from Mr. McGlen so far, but it’s looking promising. 5 combat, solid defensive skills and a dump stat. A min-maxed fighter that doesn’t just keel over from drawing treacheries either. We can’t make out his ability, but it says something about ammo, firearms and about gaining stuff when interacting with those. I am on board with all of this.

So, Agatha has two investigator cards and you can choose either of them. Depending on your choice, you have different deckbuilding. The Mystic version cares about spells, the Seeker one about Insights. Supposedly you gain just a bit of the one you didn’t pick, too. She has a statline that gets things done, just all around solid. Her ability is another one that cares about playing events, something that i immediately have to approve of. At the cost of removing the event afterwards she gets to play one event per round from her discard pile. That’s pretty good as it’s both recursion and a bonus action. However, to be able to do this, she needs to do something related to tokens every turn: Seal, Ignore or Cancel. That’s a pretty tall order and usually requires some fairly specific tech in the deck to do reliably. My first instinct was going blurse, but neither the yellow nor the purple Covenant trigger her ability. We can probably expect a few extra enablers in the player cards. One way to get her ability to fire is the signature, of course. This thing seems really powerful, providing a constant stream of Premonition-like effects. Her weakness sounds horrible to me, but maybe that’s just me overreacting to “shuffle back” weaknesses.
Overall a solid investigator? I think i want to see some extra enablers for sealing and canceling tokens in the set for her to really excite me. I’m potentially very on board with the getting someone that finally cares a bit more about those TFA cards that seal stuff that nobody really uses much. I’ll also wait to see the actual backsides of her investigator card before i make up my mind about the gimmick with the two classes. I mean, we had investigators with a choice of traits or classes they care about before without requiring an extra card. I hope this pays off more here than it did with Hank whose extra investigator cards felt a bit inconsequential and gimmicky to me..

George Barnaby, the Lawyer, being a Survivor? That truly was on nobody’s bingo card. Like with Lucius, the front is all we’ve seen so far. But what we see here is just wild and i am having a real problem wrapping my head around how this plays. So let’s just go through it step by step. You start with 5 cards in hand, right. But your max hand size is equal to the cards beneath him, so zero. Unless you want to drop to zero cards during your upkeep, you need to get something beneath him ASAP. That means discarding something from your hand. But only once per phase, so you may want to look into having ways to discard during fast player windows to make use of the mythos, enemy and upkeep phase as well as the investigator phase. As a reward, you will draw a metric ton of cards though – one extra per phase. If you manage to hit all four phases, you draw and discard as much as Patrice.
Now why aren’t you playing Patrice instead? Because George can commit those facedown cards to tests which will finally let them end up in the discard. So you get to discard for profit.
We are doing all of this with a much more flexible statline than Patrice has as well. Intellect on Survivors is looking really good these days, and thanks to the Derringer the 3 combat are always solid too.
I am really, really curious to see the rest of the cards for this guy. He looks like a super fun puzzle to crack. I like a lot of what i am seeing here, sort of like a more generally useful Patrice that also has a bunch more dials to his ability than she has. But i really feel like i need to see the full puzzle before i get deeper into this.

Guardian

Aside from the investigators, we got one player card for every class. This one is meant to complement Marion and even has her on the artwork.

That is so good. Thanks to Glory and this, you can now draw two cards when the enemy comes in and another two when it goes out. And heal a horror along the way. It’s not terribly attractive to play without having drawn an enemy, but for Marion specifically it can even work out just fine as a vehicle to tack another event onto even then.
This is a workhorse card and i expect to play it a good bunch.

Seeker

This one was presented in context with Agatha.

Placing charges is still kind of special, so i could see this card have a very solid niche there. For secrets, it has direct competition from Truth from Fiction which is both more consistent and has better icons, so i don’t see it winning that comparison often even despite being cheaper and tacked onto an investigate. For Agatha, this has the cool extra feature of being able to cancel a token for her ability and that’s definitely where you start getting a solid amount of value out of this. Overall… seems fine. Probably has a niche and home, but it’s not a card that immediately tickles me. Big bonus points on continuing the sciency way of doing tests that was introduced in the previous expansion, though. That’s super appreciated and i hope there’s more.

Rogue

The one card we’ve seen before this week, the Gatling Gun was previewed in a recent FFG Live stream.

I love the BAR. This is a better BAR. And unlike the BAR, it’s much better without having to throw a bunch of support at it. It’s also in the right class, where it immediately is paired up with the mass ammo events (Swift Reload and to a lesser degree, Contraband).
Even at its most generic and boring, it can shoot for 2 damage and +2 fight six times, same as a Tommy Gun. Now, that’s obviously not what we want from a 5XP card, but as a worst case baseline that’s actually pretty good. Four attacks at +3 and 3 damage? Now we are looking at a better Chainsaw. 3 attacks at +4 and 4 damage? One ammo less than a Flamethrower, but a) the flamer is arguably the best gun in the game and b) the Gatling makes up for that with flexibility. So yeah, i like the numbers a lot, actually. Even before talking about bursting down 5 or 6 health enemies in one action.
So how much of a drawback is the rest of the text on the card then? If there are multiple enemies at the location, then we need to add all their combat together for the attack which can potentially even make the gun practically unusable. As someone that only plays 2 player games, this doesn’t really phase me much. Even if i have to kill two things in one go, then that would justify throwing the 6 ammo for +6 fight into the test, so that would still work out. Worst case is swarms, i guess. So i suppose don’t bring a minigun into Dream-Eaters?
In any case, this looks like a marvelous weapon to me. Works both as a fantastic build around that you center your whole deck on or as a high-impact singleton that you keep in your Backpack until you need it. I often put a singleton Beretta into some of my rogue decks, for when i need everyone on deck and add to a big fight. The gatling can fulfill this role just as well, probably even better. So I foresee Bob pulling this thing out of his hat many times from now on.

Mystic

Back to the article, here’s another card that was given us with Agatha.

I’ve seen some disparaging talk about this one, but I think this is actually really good. Insta-defeat of non-Elites is something that has been super useful again and again. The test is not using the enemy statline, but instead its horror value. So i’d expect the difficulty to land somewhere between 3 and 5, something that seems perfectly fair for a one-action defeat. And note that it’s an actual defeat, not a discard like some others. Also unlike other similar cards, Whispers of Doom is even extremely useful against Elites. Dealing 3 damage against them means it can jump into the breach when Spectral Razor fails to do the same thing. That is potentially huge. Granted, 3 cost is a bit of a pain, but if survivors can do it with Waylay, then i don’t see why Mystics can’t as well. Looks like a neat one-off in high-willpower mystics to me. If the potential to drop a doom scares you, String of Curses from Scarlet Keys can give you some peace of mind.

Survivor

This is actually the upgrade to a previously known card. Neat. In addition to being a swell card, we can base some solid guesses on what cards Marion can play because we know she has access to this one.

What a great upgrade! An extra card on recursion is pretty huge for this and turns it into a potential card advantage machine that recycles itself into the deck. The -2 fight value on enemies is also super relevant. The level 0 gets a decent amount of play in my decks, I can definitely see myself throwing 2XP at it more often than not.
What really gets me going about this however is the inherit promise of Winging It(2). I am already throwing Winging It + Look What I Found into all sorts of decks, getting a better Winging It is going to be sweet.
Impromptu Barrier is the redheaded stepchild of this group of cards. I am not sure this upgrade really puts it on the radar, but if nothing else it at least gets relevance when trying to do something with Exploit Weakness. Imp Barrier(2) + Exploit Weakness *does* get rid of a Deep One Bull or many similar enemies.
Now, technically the Winging It(2) and Impromptu Barrier(2) aren’t confirmed yet. But if they are, then i do think that this is a more impactful line of upgrades than the one for Razor, Runes and Form in the previous set.

Neutral

This set is going to have more Neutral cards than usual. The reason for that is that there is now a new group of cards called Specialist cards. While neutral in class, they can only be used in investigators with specific traits. Sure, that sounds interesting enough. I enjoy deckbuilding in this game and any additional layer is welcome.

Usable by: Amanda, Daisy, Harvey, Kate, Kohaku, Mandy, Norman, Rita, Agatha, Lucius
Allows putting a Tome from your hand into play for a turn, at no action cost. At the end of the turn, the tome gets back under the deck instead of your hand or the discard. Pretty neat way to get value out of Tomes without having to spend resources on them. Obviously rather strong with any that don’t exhaust on use. So you could dump all the secrets on a Grim Memoir in one turn. Or all on the Necronomicon. The combo with Scroll of Secrets which can grab cards from the bottom of your deck to your hand is fairly obvious and probably quite good.
Strong card for sure, but to be honest, Tomes as an archetype are so strong that this barely even moves the needle. Will absolutely see play.

Usable by: Wendy, Jenny, Pete, Calvin, Luke, Mary, Silas, Lily, Amina, Wilson, Alessandra, Kohaku, Stella, George, Marion
A zero cost event that grabs a clue and draws two cards? Sure, that seems pretty good. The heal might occasionally be valuable, but overall i’d hope to get the two top modes out of this one most of the time. Will i find deck space and 2XP for a card that is just pure value? I doubt it in most cases, but Marion will definitely appreciate this one. It’s also a solid way to deal with Leg Injury, Arm Injury, Panic and Stupor from the Edge of the Earth random basic weaknesses.

Usable by: Skids, Wendy, Jenny, Pete, Finn, Calvin, Tony, Luke, Silas, Daniela, Bob, Kymani, Wilson, Alessandra, Nathaniel, Winifred, Marion, Michael, George
That is a really good enabler card. +2 skill to any Tool tests is huge, not just for Wilson but also for anyone investigating using Thieves Kit or similar. This can even do a good enough job of finally enabling that Tool access for Kymani who was let down by their statline when it came to using those tools so far.
And on top of that you also gain something if you should fail. That’s pretty spectacular, as is the long list of investigators that can use this card. Sweet card.

Usable by: Rex, Minh, Mandy, Amanda, Carson, Darrell, Kate, Kohaku, Hank, Agatha, Lucius
I don’t really see it. Spending secrets as money seems fine and all and i can definitely see a cool deck coming out of it when you devote yourself to it. Maybe even something slightly concerning that involves Insights that generate more secrets than they cost.
But 5XP? I get that he basically refunds himself with the secrets on him, but even if he does generate a good deal of money then that by itself didn’t really raise the ceiling on your deck either. 5XP is Chuck Fergus, Agency Backup, Michael Leigh and Black Cat territory. Sadly, I don’t see Archibald close to any of those.
Looking forward to someone to prove me wrong on Mr. MacVeigh here, but in my first impression from what we have so far for Drowned City, he’s the one card that looks like a bit of a miss to me. Not even because of his effect, his textbox is quite interesting. But 5XP just seems 2 or even 3 too many to start cooking a deck built around two copies of him.

More

Hey, flood tokens are back! I like those, they did a great job of creating a more dynamic map in Innsmouth. Interested to see how they iterate on the concept. Also… a Cthulhu board? I assume this comes into play for the final confrontation somehow? Intriguing.

The article talks about changes coming to Arkham and promises to elaborate later. It even specifically mentions changes to the game line. There’s some speculations about changes to the distribution model, but i don’t really subscribe to that. My thought is that so much effort went into establishing this new model of investigator expansion + campaign expansion that there is little chance that it gets changed anytime soon. Little reason as well. So i don’t know. I suppose we’ll just have to wait until something gets announced. To just throw a theory out: Maybe a big retraitening in the FAQ? Traits have been playing a big role lately (and are continuing to gain more importance in this campaign, it seems). So a big errata to all the inconsistencies (Fire Axe not a Tool? Lightning Gun isn’t Science?) could be a notable shakeup to the game.

And back to sleep we go

That was a very promising first glance at the new set for sure. Still half a year to go until we got both boxes in our hands, though. When we learn more, there will obviously be more spoiler roundups like this one. Not for a single card (maybe unless it’s an investigator), but as soon as we have a decent amount to talk about. The Visual Spoiler will get everything as soon as I see it though!
Unless we are getting any surprise reveals (BusterCon this weekend?) i don’t expect much in terms of spoilers before the actual spoiler season starts with its multiple cards per week until close to release. Can’t wait, should be hype.

Anyways, that’s it for today.

Cheers o/

Intro

About a third of the cards in a typical encounter deck are enemies, making them a major part of the game. Setting aside a few specialized mechanics or player cards for now, dealing with these enemies is usually going to mean that you’ll either have to defeat them or evade them. Different enemies will be more vulnerable to one approach to the other and it’s valuable to recognize which enemy features might favor which type of enemy handling. As a player, it’ll help with decision making while in the scenario. As a content creator, writing about it can help you procrastinate from doing more worthwhile things. As a homebrew designer, it’ll help you with setting up the appropriate challenges you are going for.
So clearly there are good reasons to go over this.
This article does of course assume that there is a choice between the two in the first place. If your scenario objective is defeating the monster, then you can not really handle the enemy with evasion, merely stall it for a bit. Evading cultists with doom on them won’t do you much good. A good bit is investigator specific as well. If you are playing Kymani, then evasion will usually be your default assumption while the opposite will be true for Leo. Of course, there might be reasons to not follow that default and possible reasons for doing so are what we are interested in this article.
Also, let me link you an article by Maxine Newman herself in which she explains some of the things i touch on here: Behind the Curtain – Enemies (bewaretheblackcat.com). There’s likely going to be a solid amount of overlap between her article and what I am going for, but let’s hope i can add something to the discussion.

Enemy statline

And of course it makes sense to start with the most obvious feature of enemies, their statline. Three numbers, one for combat, one for health and one for evasion and they are all relevant to what we are talking here in a straightforward way.

Combat: It sets the difficulty for the player’s attempt to successfully attack. Higher value discourages fighting them, low value invites it. A high value might make us look for alternate ways of handling the enemy than defeating it, which might very well mean evasion.
Evasion: Same thing here. Low value invites evading the enemy, high value does the opposite and makes you want to defeat it instead. Not worth dwelling on. Onwards.
Health: Determines how many attacks are required to defeat the enemy and is therefore directly linked to the Fight option. If an enemy has high health, it can take multiple actions to take out, possibly even more than are available in the player’s turn. Meanwhile, evading will ignore health and have its effect in full no matter what. It follows that low health encourages players to defeat the enemy to get rid of it permanently while high health makes the temporary solution of evasion to just get it out of your hair for now more attractive.

In light of this we can easily see why not even Finn or Kymani would evade a 1/1/3 Swarm of Rats. All the numbers on the Rats point towards the same preferable way of dealing with the creature: defeating it. It even has Hunter to drive the point home. Meanwhile, the Flesh-Eater in The Gathering’s attic can put up quite the fight (especially if actually played on a core set card pool) and might be better off left evaded while you quickly finish your business in its location. The evasion option is regrettably underrepresented in the early lifecycle of the game, which means I had to go all the way to Dream-Eaters to find an enemy that truly wants to be evaded, no questions asked: The Lumbering Gug is tough to fight, hard to kill, easy to evade and even stays down longer when exhausted. There’s plenty of enemies around with similar evasion-favoring statlines, but they usually have Hunter, engagement effects or similar things that encourage killing it after all. Even the Ghoul i picked as an example earlier does have Victory, rewarding going with murder over finesse.
Clearly, the statline doesn’t tell the full story, so let’s move into the textbox.

Alert and Retaliate

Alert and Retaliate are keywords that grant their bearer a free attack whenever an evasion or fight attempt against them fails. This again is a very obvious deterrent towards that way of handling the enemy and often used as even more explicit signposts by the designers to tell players how they are supposed to interact with this enemy. As an example, just look at Stealthy Zoog. Everything about it screams at the player to defeat it, as it not only has the same statline as the previously mentioned Swarm of Rats, but also Alert to really drive the point home. (And then some Prey/Spawn instructions to make this design move from “redundant” to “comical”)
Strangely, these keywords often end up being redundant with what the rest of the enemy already tells you to do. A 2/4/5 like Corsair of Leng wouldn’t really be prime material for evasion even if it had a blank textbox. So the Alert only works to confirm this impulse. On the other hand, putting Alert or Retaliate on an enemy with a low associated stat can make the keyword look almost inconsequential. No fighter worth their salt is going to feel even slightly deterred by Retaliate on a 2 fight, 2 health enemy. In those cases this keyword ends up being relevant only for non-fighters. Like Daisy wouldn’t just want to punch the Thrall with skill 2 vs difficulty 2, but might try to evade it 2 vs 2 if the alternative is taking attacks of opportunity. Then you have enemies like Wizard of the Order, who is a 4/2/2 with Retaliate… but since the guy collects doom each turn, there is no way that you can let it live.

So while Alert and Retaliate appear to be fairly obvious keywords that can incentivize or discourage certain ways of handling an enemy, I found that often this isn’t actually what ends up happening in practice.

Hunter

This keyword however has a huge impact on the fight-or-flight decision and is one of the main reasons why combat is generally considered to be superior to evasion. Enemies with Hunter follow the players around and get a first hit in when catching up. This makes them quite dangerous to only evade as the players will risk getting slapped around by them at a later point.
Many Hunter enemies will feature low evasion values to goad players into going for that anyways, but in most cases this will be a bit of a trap. Enemies with statlines like Tidal Terror are very common, with high fight, high health and low evasion, but Hunter attached.
An enemy with low fight and health might have Hunter as well, but that will often appear redundant as defeating the enemy is already what the statline wants them to do. Skittering Nonsense is an enemy that deliberately invokes this effect by combining it with an effect on being killed, making it hard for the players not to set off that Forced effect. Between Hunter and an evasion of 4, it’s just way too tempting to simply shoot the thing.
Corpse-Hungry Ghoul from the Return to Gathering poses a similar problem to the players as the Flesh-Eater we looked at earlier. But where evading Flesh-Eater was a really attractive option to do, Corpse-Hungry Ghoul would be extremely risky to leave around as it not only has Hunter, but also deals a huge hit to both health and sanity of the unlucky player that the ghoul might catch up to a few turns later.
A scenario that wants to enable evasion as a way to handle a part of the enemies should probably feature a couple non-Hunters, preferably ones that have 3 or more health, so evasion can be a more action-efficient way of getting an enemy out of your face than fighting it to the death.

Victory

The other big reason why combat is usually considered the norm over evasion is this mechanic that specifically rewards defeating certain enemies with experience points. An equivalent mechanic for evasion does regrettably not exist.
Whenever an enemy has Victory printed on them, players will usually try to defeat it because those XP are valuable to gain. They are a direct measure of progression along the campaign after all. As a result, a point of Victory can (and often will) overwrite all other concerns about the card. We talked about Flesh-Eater twice now as an example for an enemy that is perfectly setup to reward evasion over combat… and yet that point of Victory is attractive enough that killing it is often going to be the way.

Vengeance (and other “on defeat” triggers)

We can’t really talk about Victory without also mentioning it’s dark mirror version from The Forgotten Age, Vengeance. Like cards with Victory, these are added to the victory display on defeat. Usually they will add to the campaign specific Yig’s Wrath tally which is going to punish the players hard at a later point if they killed too many snakes up to that point. This works very well as a motivation to avoid defeating enemies when necessary. TFA is the first campaign to really promote evasion for that reason.
And I can’t talk about Vengeance without also highlighting one of my favorite enemies across all campaigns, the Vengeful Serpent. While it does have Vengeance 0, killing it is ultimately fine, it won’t be adding to Yig’s Wrath. However, in doing so you create an opportunity for these things to swarm you as they return from the victory display into play. So unless you have the necessary firepower, you often end up evading these dorky 2 fight 2 health enemies with Hunter and wait with the killing of them until you drawn one or two more from the encounter deck and can just clean up in one go.
Vengeance specifically is tied to The Forgotten Age, but outside of that there are some enemies that have other triggers on defeat, like the Vengeful Witch from Circle Undone. These can do a similar job of creating an incentive to let them live.

Engagement effects

A rather common type of enemy ability, these get to do something when they enter a player’s threat area. This is used relatively frequently because it gives enemies a way to get an effect off without having to survive to the enemy phase. This was heavily used during the Innsmouth campaign, where it was established as the signature ability of Deep Ones. But there are plenty examples all over the game, like with the two examples from Carcosa and Scarlet Keys above.
These engagement abilities tend to favor defeat over evasion as a way to handle that enemy, as evading an enemy disengages from it, thus risking having to re-engage it at a later time and suffer the effect again. This is especially hard to avoid when Hunter is also on the card.

Massive

Massive is a keyword that is usually stuck on boss monsters, Elites and other high health enemies. It allows the enemy to attack every investigator at its location, making it more important to prevent those attacks from happening.
Evasion is often a great way to defuse these enemies for a turn while also stopping them from handing out attacks of opportunities to everyone.
Massive on its own doesn’t do a whole lot, as the Black Amanita from Hemlock Vale demonstrates. There’s no need to evade a 2 fight, 2 health enemy ever and Massive is just not going to matter on this thing except in the most niche of situations.
But when it gets put on something more chunky, it becomes a way to give that enemy more importance. The Experiment hits very hard and tanks a lot of attacks before it goes down. Luckily, its 2 evasion can be exploited to keep it down while the team beats down on it or pursues an alternative goal.
Beast of Aldebaran by contrast is fairly difficult to evade and a concerted effort to take it down in a turn might often be the better option.
Overall I’d say that Massive isn’t a huge factor in the decision of how to handle the enemies, it mostly amplifies what is dictated by the statline. But it does slightly lean towards preferring evasion.

Swarming

Swarming as a keyword has so far only appeared in the Dream-Eaters campaign and as a small feature in the War of the Outer Gods standalone, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it again in another campaign down the line. Swarming is interesting in that it promotes both fighting and evading at the same time, offering different benefits for either.
When a swarm attacks, every swarm card beneath it deals the same damage and horror as the host, meaning that a Cats from Saturn with 5 swarm cards beneath it will hit for a ridiculous 6 damage. Even a lowly Swarm of Spiders can hit for a chunk of damage while it’s at full strength.
Evasion will defuse the whole stack of enemies at the same time, both the host and all its swarm cards. This is of course a great way to buy time against these, similar to how evasion works against massive enemies. Attacking however will defeat swarm cards, thus bringing down the total attack power of the enemy for good.

Elusive

Elusive is a brandnew keyword from Hemlock Vale. The jury is still out on whether it’s going to be a campaign specific signature ability or an evergreen, but personally i am hoping for the latter. It does really do a great job of adding some more depths to enemies. It’s on enemies that you will want to defeat because of the effects they add to the board or the threat they pose, but does a good job of making this hard for you because the enemy will flee after being attacked. Evading the enemy is a way to stop Elusive from triggering, so what you end up are enemies that you want to defeat, but also evade first before you do so. This does of course test the enemy handling capacities of the team very well.
Looking at examples, we have the Thing in the Depths which does a very similar thing to The Experiment, where a low evasion value provides an achilles heel to exploit an otherwise rather terrifying monster. Cochleal Stag combines Elusive with Hunter and a powerful attack to beat down on investigators that attack the stag without disabling it first. And Miasmatic Shadow has just the right amount of health that killing it in one blow is possible… but when it fails, then Elusive and Aloof are one hell of an annoying combination of action wasting keywords.
I really like this one as it by itself already promotes both attacking and evading on the same creature, something that usually requires a combination of mechanics.

Notable Examples and Exceptions

Alright, enough of the keyword talk. Let’s check out some enemies that showcase what I was going on about and how it comes together (or not!) when put on an enemy card.
However, that is going to be a future article, this has gone on for long enough now. See you soon for part 2 where i go over some enemy cards that are worth highlighting.