Combat and Actions, or: How To Win at Arkham, pt. 2

Intro

The “How to Arkham” series looked at how to stay alive first, and then also on the importance of not just finding clues, but also doing so in a timely fashion. This time, we are going to check out what the encounter deck tries to stop us from finding the time to do the clue thing. Mostly, this is about how the game wants us to waste our actions on doing something else than progressing the act. That “something” can be combat, but it could be other things as well. The player role of fighter (or enemy handler, if you want to be particular about it) has the job of making sure that the cluever isn’t impacted by these encounter efforts too much and of course we are going to check out how they can achieve that as well!

A Different Kind of Tempo: The Action Economy

The previous article looked at Tempo as a sort of yardstick to measure your success against the whole scenario. How close are you getting to finishing your objectives, do you need to pick up the pace or do you have some breathing room for a round or two? This time, we are going to zoom in on a single round and break down how we are spending our actions in it. You can look at this as another form of Tempo, where you are again being confronted with objectives that you need to solve under time constraints. They are simply more short-term. An obvious example would be an enemy coming down on you in the Mythos phase. You now have until the enemy phase to handle the thing, otherwise you have to face the consequences.

We have a good way to measure how much things we can get done per round, it’s the three actions that every investigator gets. If the Mythos phase didn’t exist, the investigators could just put those actions towards finding clues and moving across the map, easily finishing their objectives. The reality however is that the Mythos phase will take some of those actions away (either directly or in a more roundabout way), which then will lead to the situation where meeting that goal of finding a clue per investigator every round suddenly becomes a challenge.

You can actually put a fairly solid number on how many actions the mythos phase will usually cost you. If you’ve played the game for a while, you might be able to instinctively put a number by looking at these two fictional encounter cards:

The first one, which simply makes you lose an action, feels like a bit of a relief. Nothing major happened, you can spend your remaining two actions unhindered to progress the game, for example move and investigate to fulfill your quota towards the objective. If we drew this every round, the game would be easy. The second one however seems quite rough. Taking more than half of your turn away, without a test or anything? That seems genuinely mean. If we draw this every round, we will very likely lose.
These feelings are confirmed when we look at actual existing encounter cards like these two that narrow down where the design sees the value of an encounter card:

The cost to deal with Arcane Lock is one action, however there is a test attached which means it can fail. As a result, the average case for Arcane Lock is going to be higher than one action taken from the investigator. Unspeakable Truths costs two actions to deal with, however you aren’t forced to do it. You might be able to just ignore the treachery for the last couple turns which means on average this treachery will require fewer than 2 actions to deal with. You can go over many many other treacheries the same way and come to similar results, that the expected penalty of a treachery is going to be somewhere near the middle of 1 and 2 actions. Where exactly doesn’t really matter, we don’t need to argue about whether it’s 1.4 actions or 1.5 or 1.6… since we can’t spend fractional actions the game tends to round to the player’s disadvantage anyways.

Enemies do fit into this as well. We’ll take a more detailed look at the role of enemies and the enemy handlers shortly, but to just briefly touch on this: We generally assume that any capable fighter is able to deal 2 damage per action. That means that a Cantor of Flame will go in one swing, while a Hellhound will require two. Add some fuzzy maths about sometimes missing your attacks, sometimes having three damage swings available and also the ability to just evade instead of attack and you come to similar conclusions as before. There are definitely enemies like the Bat Horror that do trend towards taking more than two actions, but they are rare enough to not overly offset our assumptions here.

Of course not every effect is going to translate evenly into actions lost. You can’t equate cards discarded or damage taken straight into actions lost. But you can come to your own conclusions about how much 3 points of damage are worth to you. Let’s say you are at a location that allows you to spend an action to heal 3 damage. That sounds worth doing, right? What if it was two actions to heal 3 instead? A much tougher ask. Well, there you go, the value of 3 health is somewhere inbetween 1 and 2 actions apparently. Where exactly will depend on enough outside factors that it’s not worth fretting about for our thought exercise.

A Quick Note on Movement

There’s one more thing stopping you from just using all your actions on advancing the act and that is the necessity to be at the right place. In almost all scenarios you’ll need to plan some of your actions in simply for moving across the board. Sometimes that’ll be in a fairly linear fashion and you can just go over the locations one by one, grabbing clues as you go along without much backtracking. Other times the scenario will send you across the map back and forth. There’s also some treacheries and enemy abilities that will matter here, like an Elusive enemy fleeing after being hit and you needing to pursue if you want to finish it off.

You can soften the impact of the “movement tax” with specific player cards, the initial chapter 2 card pool actually puts somewhat of a spotlight on that with some very good cards in the Rogue and Survivor class in particular. But in any case it’s something you’ll just have to plan for as well. Moving towards new locations that you still need to scour can be understood as actions required to advance the game while backtracking or pursuing enemies into spots you’d otherwise would not go to would fall under the umbrella of action wasters.

A Rule of Thumb

So there’s your basic action economy. Time to break out the bold font again and note this rule of thumb down before we go deeper:

You get three actions during your turn. Half of those will be required to deal with the fallout from the Mythos phase, leaving you with just one or two actions to advance the game or even just simply move around.

Let me zoom out for a quick flashback to the previous article’s topic:
There’s an interesting bit of interplay between this look at tempo per round and the one from the previous article which was tempo per scenario. The doom clock gives you a certain amount of rounds to finish your objectives, but the turns you get each round aren’t created equal. You will have turns with 3 productive actions, some with two, some with one. Maybe even zero. They won’t be evenly distributed either. You might draw several back to back encounter cards that don’t matter much to you, allowing you to take three turns with 3 productive actions in a row, letting you gain tempo on the game. Or you might get two chunky enemies in a row, followed by autofailing an impactful treachery and you are barely able to leave your starting location. This ebb and flow will even out over time, but will create dramatic spikes in activity that you will need to be able to handle one way or another.
Alright, back to our zoomed in view.

Treacheries

I already went over the significance of willpower and agility with regards to passing your treachery tests when I talked about preventing the damage and horror that comes with them, so i won’t repeat that whole thing again here. Your investments into those skills will play double duty in the defense against action wasters and all sorts of other treachery effects, so even if you aren’t particularly worried about your health and sanity you may want to consider reading what i wrote there again and apply the lessons learned to your deck building. Seriously, those Guts and Manual Dexterity go a long, long way.

So let’s just forget about treacheries for now and go on straight to enemy handling.

Enemy Handling

We often refer to the player that has to take care of enemies as the Fighter… but that isn’t quite accurate as fighting isn’t the only way of getting an enemy off your back. If we wanted to include options like evasion, exhaustion or shuffling back into the encounter deck as well, then we’d probably need to call this role the Enemy Handler instead. But that’s a mouthful, so let’s just stick to Fighter, but while keeping in mind that the goal here is not to defeat an enemy, it’s to make it stop impacting you.

Superficially, the requirements for fighters are similar to the ones for cluevers. There’s tests to do, using one of your skills and you use cards to either improve your odds for those tests or the results of those tests. Or you can use testless options for guaranteed results. The tests are using combat instead of intellect now, the result is measured in damage dealt instead of clues picked up and the target number is the enemy health instead of a clue threshold on the act. In very broad strokes this mirrors the observations for cluevers from the previous article, but there are some very notable differences in how fighting works in practice.

Weapons are near-mandatory

A cluever can get by without finding a support tool, the innate payoff to a successful investigate test is worth the action spent. As we found out last time, the number of clues that the game expects us to find is generally lower than the number of rounds we have, thus resulting in it being perfectly fine to get one clue per round. For fighting and the more zoomed in timescale we are looking at, this is different. Enemies commonly have 3 health, which is equal to the amount of actions you have. Some have more health than that. Sometimes you’ll fail a test. So if you want to be able to take down enemies within a turn, you really need a way to deal more than one damage per action. That is why weapons are so important. No matter if it’s a firearm or a handful of events – if you plan on fighting, you don’t want to do it with your bare fists because it’d eat up all your time and more.
We don’t really want to spend two actions just punching a Cantor of Flame, just a bit ago we just found out that spending 2 actions on our Mythos phase is above average. And Cantor is a very weak enemy in the first place, it goes up from there pretty fast.
So if your job is fighting, then make sure that you are able to reliably put out 2 damage per action and you probably want ways to increase it to 3 damage a few times as well so you can handle particularly tough enemies or make up for failed attacks or other tight spots.

The timing with enemies is not flexible

With clues, you are usually afforded the option to not find any for a round or two as long as you make up for it afterwards, or if you already are sitting on a stash from some good earlier turns. With enemy handling, this usually isn’t the case. The enemy is there now, you need to fight it now. If you can’t, there are immediate consequences. You will need to have your weapon played in advance of the enemy showing up, not as a reaction to the enemy showing up. You can also not deal damage in advance, to cash in on an enemy when it shows up the way you can still stockpile clues even when the act isn’t asking for them right now.

This not only means that an enemy handler needs to be good at their job when it matters. There’s also the flipside to it that they need to be able to do something useful when there’s no enemy around. It’s a good opportunity to replay assets. Worst case, you can draw some cards and/or gain resources. But either way, you will probably want to at least think about what your plan is for this situation, maybe you can do something more productive than move and gain two resources here. If the fighter has two or three cards in their deck that can give them some capabilities to pick up clues as well or high agility/willpower to discard treacheries from other player’s threat areas, then that can be a great way to let your investigator propel the scenario forward even when enemies are currently all handled.

Tests are higher stakes

Failing the occasional investigate test is fine. Failing your enemy related tests isn’t. There’s many reasons for that. The smaller timeframe until you want to have the enemy handled. The reliance on weapons which often have limited uses or other costs. Enemy keywords like Retaliate, Alert or Elusive that punish you for failing. When you fail an attack, the result often goes beyond just a lost action.
Additionally, if you are hunting for clues, you get to pick your target to some extent. If you are currently at 4 intellect and fail to draw your assets that would bring you to 6, then moving on from your current 4 shroud location into the connecting one with 2 shroud is a perfectly viable plan. You can investigate there and while you are doing that, you might draw what you need to crack the more difficult place. As a fighter, that’s not really as much of a thing. The enemy is here, you need to deal with it.
For that reason, you will not only want to make sure you have access to additional damage on attacks, you will also need a better skill value to succeed than cluevers do. Having only 3 base combat for fighting is much more of a problem than only having 3 base intellect for investigating and needs to be compensated for.

Some notes on flexing

What all of this means is that it’s a lot easier and cheaper to flex some clue capabilities into a deck than it is to flex for killing monsters. Without taking up too much deckspace (and resources) you need to solve both the test and the bonus damage. Mystics and to a lesser degree rogues have it a bit easier here as they can funnel multiple roles through the same skill value, so if Dexter puts any willpower increases into play those won’t just enhance his use of investigation spells, but also combat spells. Others will often have to lean on particularly impactful events that give big bonuses to the test… or better yet, that are testless in the first place and just deal some damage. Good examples for that type of event are Spectral Razor, Blood-Rite and Toe to Toe from chapter 1. From chapter 2 we’ve not gotten anything quite on that level in the evergreen cards. Closest we got is probably Insidious Truths, anything more requires XP investments. Generally we’d expect most of our xp to go towards our main job, not the side hustle… but spending an xp or two on a cheap card like Unflappable(1) can be a good idea.

Thankfully, there are other ways of dealing with enemies than defeating them and those are often perfect as little splashes in your non-fighter deck as well. The concept of an “Emergency Evade” is one that i often consider for a deck as it allows a non-fighter to get out of an enemy’s grasp and keep on doing their own thing, even if the fighter is currently busy with another threat.

Evasion

When we are looking for alternatives to combat, then evasion is surely the first thing to mention as it’s one of the base actions that any investigator can initiate without any asset. Obviously, they need a good agility (or the enemy a particularly bad one) to have a chance to succeed. But any investigator with 3+ agility and a pair of Manual Dexterities in their deck has at least the capability to pull off a successful evasion.

But evasion is not just something for desperate situations or as a non-committal option for flexing into with cluever decks. It can also genuinely be the better option to handle an enemy than fighting it.

Bystanders are very obvious about this – you defeat them, you get a doom. Evading them is not much of an issue, thanks to their low evade value they will likely only take a single action out of your current turn. Mutated Experiment sports 3 health, which will usually take you two actions to get rid of. And then it’d still ping you and possibly others for a horror on its way out. If you’d evade it, you could handle it with just one action and without the horror penalty. It doesn’t have Hunter, so if you are able to move on from that location in the same turn, you did much better than if you had spent two actions and possibly even a bullet or two.

So, with regards to our action economy, evasion can be a cleaner solution to many enemies than defeating them. It also has value against several enemy keywords, so don’t underestimate it. Even a main fighter that usually murders things with a shotgun will find opportunities to get value out of a good evasion if they have the capability to do so.

In summary the advantages of evasion are:

• Takes only a single action: We established that dealing with your Mythos phase for one action is good as it leaves you two more to progress the game
• Doesn’t require specific assets: All you need is an agility value, possibly enhanced by skills or just random agility icons on your cards in hand to make evasion an option
• Independent of health value: Some enemies are unable to be defeated in one round because they are too chunky. Evasion can still stop them from doing something in the enemy phase. This does include Elite enemies who are often completely stopped from impacting the game for a round after being evaded.
• Cancels enemy keywords: Obviously an evaded enemy doesn’t get to attack in the enemy phase, but it also doesn’t get to hunt, it doesn’t attack with Retaliate if attacked afterwards and it won’t move with Elusive either
• Enemy doesn’t go into the discard: A discarded enemy will eventually shuffle back into the encounter deck and can be drawn again. An enemy that is stranded on some location stays there until the scenario is over and can’t hurt you anymore.

Disadvantages are:

• The enemy is still there: If you either can’t move out of the location afterwards or have to return at a later point, it will re-engage you, asking you to either defeat it then or evade it again.
• Some enemies need to be defeated: This includes enemies with doom tokens on them, but also some Elites that are mandatory for scenario progress
• Some keywords interact badly: Hunter will limit how useful evasion is, as it allows the enemy to catch up with the investigators. Aloof is the other major thorn, as an evaded aloof enemy needs to be engaged with an action again if you wish to attack it afterwards. There are also enemies that trigger things on engaging them which can be an issue with evasion heavy play that might see you re-engage previously handled enemies again.

Other alternatives

A couple of cards offer further alternatives. For example, the card Restrained lets you not just evade an enemy, but also chain it down permanently. The card Hypnotize shuffles an enemy back into the encounter deck. These special effects can be understood as variations on either defeating or evading the enemy and be treated accordingly. Refer to the list of Advantages and Disadvantages above and see how the specialized version modifies it. These cards are often particularly valuable for flexes that are unable to fight and/or evade otherwise as they provide good one-shot solutions to immediate problems.
Many of these don’t work on Elites however, which further pushes them towards flexes over main fighters.

Conclusions and Deckbuilding Tips

That was a lot. So let’s try to pull some tangible deckbuilding tips from all of this. The goal with today’s portion of deckbuilding is to preserve as many actions as possible for the player or players whose job it is to advance the game. Except in a few scenarios that feature a mandatory bossfight, killing enemies is not actually advancing the game, so we want to spend as little time as possible on keeping them from blocking our way forward.

As a main fighter, we want to invest into our capabilities quite heavily, which means high combat value AND extra damage. Unlike seeking the job of repeatedly fighting enemies isn’t something to do only half-hearted because, unlike clues, enemies fight back. This means getting a weapon onto the table as soon as possible. Run enough of them that you can expect one in your opening hand. To tackle more difficult enemies, you are probably going to need additional bonuses from allies or other assets. Also, ways to spike your damage from 2 to 3.

If we are flexing into combat, spending the resources on building out a tableau of assets isn’t feasible, so you will probably want to look at a couple high impact events instead that can get an enemy off your back. Especially for this purpose, defeating enemies shouldn’t always be the primary concern. Evading them or otherwise disabling them, even if only temporary, is often good enough so that you can get out of a dicey situation and get back to your actual job of advancing the objectives on the act.

The five classes are leaning certain ways here:
Guardians are the primary combat class and make for the best main fighters. They have firearms, melee weapons and event based opions alike as well as allies and other support cards to expand the role. Generally their statline provides them with a good to great base combat value to build on.
Seekers are the weakest fighters. They have some event based options for emergencies, but for the most part they are the ones that need protection.
Rogues are particularly great at evasion, keeping the enemies out of your hair that way.
Mystics can do everything with the right assets in play and that includes combat. They need to invest more into playing a certain role (both in terms of xp and resources) but they can become just as proficient at killing as Guardians or as good at evading as Rogues. Arguably, their top end is even higher than Guardian in the evergreen card pool, once you are able to throw 20+xp at the deck for Cosmic Flames, Blood Curses and the like.
Survivors have the weapons available to do a combat job, but will generally have to start from a lower baseline than Guardians. Their weapons are usually stranded with some extra conditions or costs than the more straightforward Guardian weapons. Survivors are also pretty good at evasion.

As before, these aren’t hard rules, but trends. For example, the Core actually puts Joe Diamond into the game right away who goes against Seeker class trends and can be built to be quite proficient at combat thanks to his high base combat value and access to blue cards. Trish similarily is a cluever with built in affinity for enemy handling.

Enemies aren’t the only thing coming from the encounter deck that is trying to take your actions away. Many treacheries can be defused by passing agility or willpower checks, and being able to do so is valuable for for any investigator. Note that this plays double duty for protecting against treacheries that try to kill you directly instead and often you will have to decide whether to use a limited resource (like say for example a Guts in your hand) to preserve your actions or your health/sanity.

Movement is just another tax on your actions. You can devote deckspace towards lowering the movement tax, but unless it’s particularly cheap or comes with other benefits on the side it will often be better to just be good at your thing instead. Personally, i think of movement as something that has been priced into the scenario by the designers the same way as the doom clock. Movement only becomes an issue if you are inefficient elsewhere and I’d focus on getting those deficits up instead.

Finally, you could just gain extra actions. Straight up gaining extra actions comes at a premium due to their versatility. Rogue has a couple of cards in the chapter 1 cardpool that are pretty solid, but the general gist of extra actions is that they are expensive. If you are unsure if you are going to take enough value out of the flexibility that comes with them, then just stocking up on Fast cards is usually better, as those give you the ability to squeeze in extra fights, evades, investigations into your turn as well.

Next Up: Resources

Having cards that do things is all well and good, but to actually play them, you are going to need resources. And i don’t just mean the stuff that the game rules call resource, but anything you spend to gain value. Actions are also a resource as we’ve just seen. Obviously, cards are too. What else? And how the hell do i fit all of that into my deck? Well, seems like deck space is a resource too. We’ll talk about it in the next article.