| Set Size | 5 |
| Number of unique Cards | 2 |
| Role | Enemy, Stalling |
| Threat Level | Mid to High |
| # of scenarios | 2 |
My take: The star of the show here is of course the Persistent Construct, and it is indeed an enemy that you’ll want to be aware of when it’s around. Having a plan for handling it will make things go a lot smoother, while an inability to deal with an enemy that can’t die can even make the Construct the primary threat of a whole scenario. It clearly shares some design DNA with the Vengeful Serpent from Return to TFA, but ends up playing very differently. Vengeful Serpent creates spikes of danger when they return from the victory display in pairs or triplets, while the Construct simply creates a consistent low power threat that is very hard to deal with completely.
The other card, Infernal Machinery is more hit or miss in how much it really adds to the board. There will be times when you can ignore it completely, but when it is relevant, it can be fairly obnoxious.
Overall a very interesting set of cards. I think it works to the design’s advantage that they are only used twice all campaign, more than that and the Constructs would probably overstay their welcome and end up demanding too severely to be addressed by players in their deckbuilding. As is, they appear in only two scenarios, one of which has a built in way of leaving them behind and the other which can completely be skipped.
Threat: Mid to High
This is a menace and very hard to get under control. Your first Persistent Contruct of the scenario is just going to be a regular 2/2/2 enemy and no big deal… but once you have defeated one, you won’t be able to defeat another, at least not in a conventional way as that defeat will just spawn the Construct from the Victory display. Effectively, defeating the Construct just will let you evade it instead.
If you aren’t able to distance yourself from the enemy, this will cost you a lot of actions and the occasional damage from an attack by the Construct as you need to defeat or evade it several times. This does actually make it one of the more impactful enemies in the campaign and drawing two of them early in a scenario can really put a large strain on the investigators.
True solo and two player groups can get lucky and not draw a second one of these until late in the game, but for three and four player groups this is definitely something you have to expect to deal with. If you do draw a pair of these early on in a scenario, then small groups do get more heavily impacted by the action drain these represent though. So the variance on the random draw seems more pronounced to me with lower player count.
In the Grand Vault, the moving platform and the shifting location connections that come with it allow to strand Constructs in locations where they can’t reach you. This is something to be aware of for sure as it can solve a lot of headaches. The Drowned Quarter doesn’t give you an out like that, in fact its 3×3 grid of locations leaves little room to run away from hunters at all as paths are always rather short. Any sort of player card that can evade enemies and keep them exhausted for longer (like Disguise or Slip Away) is very useful here, as are more specialised tools that can shuffle back the enemy into the encounter deck (Close Call) or tie them down for longer (Fend Off). Finally, a way to have them all permanently go away is to defeat them all at the same time, for example with a Dynamite Blast or Storm of Spirits as that will not allow them to bring each other back.
Notably, the Forced ability on the Construct doesn’t replace the defeat, so any triggers you have for defeating enemies can be repeatedly farmed by wailing on these buggers. This means you can make up for the actions they cost you by triggering anything from Roland’s or William’s investigator ability over Ancestral Token to Microscope, even turn the Construct’s ability into a net gain for you. By the same token, if you gain momentum from evading enemies (Lucius, String Along, Pickpocketing) or oversucceeding (Lucky Cigarette Case, Antikythera), then you can turn the fact that you always have this thing around you into a positive, too.
Threat: Low to Mid
Infernal Machinery doesn’t have the same urgency as many other treacheries as it doesn’t immediately threaten you with anything harmful. It often doesn’t even stand in the way of working towards advancing your act. What it does however is hinder you from achieving your secondary objectives by locking you out of interacting with Glyph cards. The other people on your team still can, and sometimes that will be enough, but the requirements for the various skill tests on Glyphs are broad enough that you’ll usually find Infernal Machinery to be in the way of getting things done eventually.
It also stops you from taking advantage of your Artifact cards, which depending on the ones available to you can be more or less relevant. On a campaign that starts in the East, you won’t even have an artifact yet when you see this card in Drowned Quarter. By Grand Vault you may have picked up the Barrier Core or the Grisly Mask. On a campaign starting in the West, you are looking at having the Obsidian Claw or Shard of Y’ch’lecht disabled when you first get this treachery. Obviously, having the Obsidian Claw power down is a bigger deal than any of the other artifacts and is worth taking care of as a priority to regain the action advantage gained from the artifact.
With a difficulty of 4, discarding the treachery isn’t easy, but any investigator at the same location can do it. And we’d generally assume that someone on the team can pass an intellect(4) test.
