Intro
This is a direct continuation of the previous article which was about Damage and Horror, one of the ways the game tries to make you lose a scenario. This time we are going to start looking at the second major way that Arkham will try to pull one over you: Time running out.
We’ll take a look at the basic timers inherent to the game, the action economy and the concept of Tempo. Also, at the two basic capabilities that investigators will need to have to successfully finish a game: fighting and investigating. Well, three actually… but movement is a little less interesting than those other two.
Finally, there will again be a discussion about what all of that means for deckbuilding and how to integrate last article’s findings with the one from this one.
This was originally supposed to just be one article, but i decided to split the whole “Tempo” topic up into at least two parts. So I’ll only be doing the investigation side today and save the combat side for next time.
Tempo: The Basics (as they relate to clues)
Starting at the bottom, let’s go over some basic ideas and terminology again. The game runs on a relatively simple timer that restricts how long the players have to fulfill their goals. We usually refer to this timer as the Doom Clock. Each round, during the mythos phase, one doom token is placed on the agenda. Afterwards, the total amount of doom is compared to the agenda threshold and should it be equal or higher, the agenda advances and stuff happens. The last agenda in the agenda deck will (in most cases) end the scenario in a defeat, so we end up with a total number of rounds that can be played.
In each of these rounds, each investigator gets three actions with which they can attempt to get their objectives done. The typical scenario will need the investigators to do three things: Discover clues. Fight specific enemies. Move across the board.
So you have two things working against each other, the scenario timer on the one side and and the investigator objectives on the other. How they currently relate to each other is often described as Tempo. Did you just spend the last two rounds playing assets and dealing with the fallout from treacheries? You lost tempo on the game, hopefully the assets you put on the board will help you catch up in the following turns. Were you, after an irrelevant draw from the encounter deck, able to simply use all your three actions to investigate, leading you to pick up 3 or even more clues this turn? That is not something the game expects you to achieve every round, so congratulations – you just gained tempo. Note that Tempo is a somewhat nebulous and hard to quantify term, it’s difficult to put a number on it and any attempt to do so would assume perfect knowledge of the scenario, its doom thresholds, clue requirements, location counts… all things you definitely don’t know on your first play of a scenario. And let’s be real, unless you have some sort of photographic memory, you won’t have those details on your sixth play of a scenario either. You aren’t really *supposed* to know, you are meant to feel pressured into action at all times.
The Doom Clock
The typical Arkham scenario will give us around 12-15 rounds to complete before its agenda deck runs out. There is some variance to it, of course. If you look at the three scenarios in the Core Set, then you will find that if you add the doom thresholds of the agenda cards in each scenario together, you end up with 18 doom for Spreading Flames, 18 doom for Smoke and Mirrors and 16 doom for Queen of Ash. Which sounds like a lot, however these numbers all come with caveats.
Spreading Flames has the Cosmic Evils encounter set which can accelerate the doom clock beyond its steady one tick per round. Additionally, its final agenda cranks up the danger through putting out Fire treacheries every round and trying to kill you that way, so you are really only getting 8 rounds (the first two agendas) before you are meant to get the hell out. Smoke and Mirrors already starts with doom in play equal to the player count, so the actual remaining time scales between 17 and 14 rounds. Queen of Ash not only has Cosmic Evils, but also Cultists that put doom into play. It’s also different in that it doesn’t end in defeat if the time runs out, but instead goes into a final showdown with Elokoss.
So even if the agenda decks do add up to more than 15, i would generally assume that you need to be done earlier than that.
Clues
There is a good variety of different objectives that the game presents you with, but in the end the vast majority comes down to finding clues and spending them on something. It could be opening up locations by spending clues, it could be clearing locations from clues so you are able to do something there. Spending clues to advance an act, to spawn a story card or to parley an ally. Ultimately progressing the game can be measured in how many clues you got versus how many clues you need. There are very few exceptions to that, like the occasional mandatory boss you need to defeat to progress – but even those can often be weakened or outright damaged by spending clues. You can finish the full Brethren of Ash campaign without ever defeating an enemy, a pacifist run is theoretically possible. But if you never discover a clue, you won’t even leave Your Friend’s Room in the first scenario.
So, how many clues do you need then? Well, the best answer i got for you is “It varies significantly depending on the scenario and it’s definitely not something you know ahead of time on your first play.”, but let’s try and not make it total cop-out. Looking at Brethren of Ash, our three scenarios come in with the following clue requirements per investigator:
Spreading Flames: 2 clues to advance act 1, 3 clues to advance act 3. Total: 5 clues
Smoke and Mirrors: 6 cultists, each requiring 2 clues to uncover. Total: 12 clues
Queen of Ash: 3 clues to open the final location, 5 clues for resolution R2. Total: 8 clues
So we got requirements to find 5 clues during 8 doom, 12 clues during 15ish doom and 8 clues during 16 doom. That doesn’t sound so bad, right!
Now, you might be wondering if that’s because it’s the intro campaign, so let’s (in absence of other chapter 2 content at the time of writing) check out the most recent chapter 1 campaign, The Drowned City, really quick and superficially.
One Last Job: Weird player scaling, context depending clue costs… i am just going to claim this takes about 5ish clues per player, the exact number isn’t super important for my point because there’s 14 doom across the agendas.
Western Wall: Clues are required to open new locations, opening up everything takes 13 clues which you will not require. Realistic requirements is in the 7-10 clues range. Time is 13 doom.
Drowned Quarters: 12 clues to unflood 6 locations, already accounting for the mandatory flooding. Encounter cards can add extra floods and thus clue requirements. 14 doom.
Apiary: You spend clues to discard from the encounter deck to find the locations in there. Lots of variance. So uuuh how do i fuzzy this… during my blind play i spent 16 clues according to a quick cross-read. It was a two-player game, so let’s say 8 clues per player? Maybe 10-12 if unlucky? In any case, there’s 18 doom.
Grand Vault: Moving the platform around one full circle requires 8 clues. Another 2 clues go towards getting glyphs. 3 more clues to open the optional Core. Total: 13 clues, 16 doom.
… and so on. Note that i didn’t spend a whole lot of time on counting these clue numbers and they might be off by a couple. For the point that i want to make this does however not matter at all. That point being:
If each player collects even just a single clue for every doom that passes, they are winning.
Well, winning on the clue front at least, it’s not like that is the only front we are fighting on… In any case, that is the yardstick by which i measure my progress when doing a blind play of a scenario and just in general. As long as i can reliably put out that one clue per turn, i assume that i can comfortably finish the scenario… or at least get to whatever finale the scenario has, if there’s a boss fight or something at the end. This yardstick even allows for grabbing optional side objectives like Drowned City’s glyphs, victory locations and to shoot for full clears of scenarios with varying degrees of success like Smoke and Mirrors.
If i fall back behind this baseline, i will try to catch up aggressively. If i am ahead, i am more inclined to play safer or to get assets into play that account for eventualities.
Obviously, this is not a law of the game, this is very much a rule of thumb. Not even one that the community as a whole worked out, this is how I personally think about this. It won’t be able to apply to every scenario in the game, no rule of thumb will be able to. And i will talk about a few exceptions later. But if you are looking for a sort of goal to set yourself during deckbuilding and see if you can match it in gameplay, there it is.
One clue per doom that passes.
Sounds easy, right?
Hah. If only.
Investigating
The collective name for the player characters is Investigators, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Investigate is the most important of the basic actions a player can take. If the goal is finding a certain amount of clues in a certain amount of time, then we will want at least one person on the team that is strong at actually picking up those clues. Depending on player count, more. Since the term “investigator” is regrettably already taken for the collective name, the community has come to call the player role which focuses on picking up clues the Cluever (a portmanteau of Clue Hoover… yeah, it’s horrible, but I’m afraid it’s what we got)
So, considering we somehow want to hit our assumed quota of clues per round and taking into consideration that the game is going to try to stop us from just taking our sweet time to do it, we’ll want to make sure that our Investigate actions do actually meet the requirements. To that end, there are two major ways to help: Making it so we pass our tests consistently. And making it so we get more than just one clue per action. Preferably both, but obviously that’s not always going to be possible without making concessions elsewhere. There is also a third route that isn’t tied to Investigate, which we’ll look at afterwards.
Book V Shroud
To succeed at an Investigate action, we need to pass a test with a difficulty set by the location’s shroud. Shroud values will in the vast majority of cases go from 2 to 4, with the occasional 1 thrown in. A shroud of 5 or more is very rare. Usually, investigations will test your Intellect, but options to test with agility, combat or willpower do exist. Especially Mystic spells and some Rogue tools are ways to investigate with non-Intellect numbers. For the sake of this discussion i will stick to assuming that Intellect (or “Book”, if you insist) is the skill of choice.
So if you want to be able to investigate at all locations and do it competently, then you will need to beat 4 shroud without too much of a problem. On Standard that means getting 6 or more Intellect. Depending on your choice of investigator this can be easy, Carolyn Fern gets there after just playing a Magnifying Glass. Joe Diamond would need assistance from Dorothy in addition to the tool, but that’s still easy enough to get to. That being said, most locations will be shroud 3 or 2, so it’d be fine for Joe to only have one of those two in play or even none, as long as he’s able to spike his skill value high for a test or three when he encounters a higher shroud location.
This gives you an indication of how many locations you can be expected to be able to tackle depending on your numbers. Tommy Muldoon comes in at a base level of 3 intellect which does afford him the opportunity to try his luck on a shroud 2 location, but without some extra investment that’s mostly going to be it.
Skill bonuses come in the form of assets that stick around in play. And skills or events which are temporary forms of increasing your skill bonus, but hopefully with bigger numbers than the assets. Or at least fewer costs attached.
Depending on your base skill and needs, both make sense and most investigators that consider picking up clues to be a major part of their role in the game will want a mix of both.
Clue Compression
The other way of getting better at investigating is picking up more than one clue on a successful test. There are two major advantages to this: One, you save an action. Since all of this boils down to making the few actions you can spare on investigations count, that is obviously great. But also, you save having to do another test. If your skill value is already very high (or the shroud you are at is very low) this might not be super important. But if you put resources and cards towards passing a difficult test, for example by putting a Deduction and a Perception into a skill test to take Joe from intellect 4 to 7 at a shroud 4 location, then picking up more than one clue for your trouble means that you get a bonus clue without having to pass another one of those tests. In a solo or two-player game it may even be enough to clear that location of its only clues, so you can move on to the next, hopefully more easy location.
This is a powerful effect and very few assets allow you to just get this over and over again. Even the Fingerprint Kit, which is limited to 3 uses, costs a hefty 4 resources which goes a long way to illustrate how highly priced clue compression is. The more common way of gaining bonus clues is from skills and events, which don’t break the bank as much, but are of course only one-shot effects. The going rate is “a card for a clue” with some extra condition or small cost attached, a type of card that is very common in the Seeker card pool and makes guest appearances in the other classes as well. Deduction is the archetypical card to mention here, but other examples for picking up multiple clues with one investigation in the evergreen card pool are Augur of Elokoss(3) and Stakeout(3). These events do of course have other benefits, like skill bonuses to the test, but that these are all costed at 3XP is again an indication of how much value the design puts on being able to break out of the “one clue per action” cage. Seekers are obviously the class that is best at this. Where a Guardian needs to put 3xp towards Stakeout, a Seeker can put 2xp towards Deduction(2) instead and get three clues for their test. Or just go completely over the top and play Commune with the Cosmos(5).
Alternatively, Just Cheat
The third way of dealing with Investigate tests is to just not do them. If you are Daniela Reyes, it’d take way too much investment to get your 2 intellect up to a level where you can gain a clue from anything but the easiest of locations. And even high intellect investigators will find themselves in situations where a treachery like Flash Flood makes the test a waste of your time. Or you are simply under enough time pressure that you can’t afford to pull an autofail right now. There’s cards for that as well, across all classes. Obviously, this sort of card comes with other conditions or costs attached, but since picking up clues is such an integral part of the game, all classes need to be enabled to at least dabble in it.
So our Daniela will want to look at Scene of the Crime, Lesson Learned or Look What I Found instead. Depending on the deck space she devotes to this sort of event, she can actually do a surprisingly large contribution to the group’s clue effort this way without ever having to succeed at an investigate test. All those events do have very specific timing points and at least the first two might even spend a few turns in your hand before you find an opening to use them which makes this sort of effect unreliable to use for more than just some incidental clues. Testless clues without timing restrictions do exist, but have some sort of cost attached to them instead. Working a Hunch can just pick up a clue at any time during your turn, but a card and two resources is a bad rate, at least in the Seeker class. Will of the Cosmos not only works without asking questions, it even gives you two clues. One of them even at any location. And it doesn’t cost resources? Clearly a fantastic card, as long as you know what to do about that doom token the card strands you with.
Player Count Concerns and “The Flex”
The clue requirements of the scenario and the available clues on the locations both scale by player count. So the theoretical math of how many clues per player per round are expected of you by the scenario to maintain tempo don’t change. Still, there are some considerations here.
Solo players will need to be able to do everything on their own. It’s usually considered to be the most difficult way to play the game for that reason. Their actions are extremely valuable and consistency is key just as much as efficiency – more so, actually. Bonus clues are still valuable, but since many locations only have one clue on them in the first place a solo player might only be able to use that Deduction on locations that have low shroud (since those are usually the ones that have many clues) which devalues it a bit compared to how bigger teams get to use theirs. The flipside however is that if they can just gain one testless clue, that will already clear many locations which makes cards like Working a Hunch shoot up in value. Cards that allow splitting up the clues you gain, like Will of the Cosmos or Right Under Their Noses(3) similarily get a lot of punch for solo players and even something like Scrape By suddenly becomes a card that just solves a location and lets the investigator move on.
At two players, we double the clue requirement for the team. There are largely two schools of thought on how to deal with this. The first is to make your team consist of a main fighter and a main cluever. Since they are able to focus on their respective jobs, they can cover for the requirements of the other player as well as their own. The fighter takes out all the enemies and generally helps the cluever with any other issues that pop up (maybe using their actions to discard a weakness or a treachery the cluever would otherwise have to deal with). This then allows the main clue finder, often a Seeker but not necessarily so, to grab 200% of the number of clues that would be required for a solo player. The other approach is having both players contribute to the clue effort. Even if an investigator considers themselves a fighter, they can put a couple deck slots towards picking up the occasional clue. It doesn’t have to cover their half of the clue requirements in full, but even just a couple of Look What I Found or a Lockpicks can go a long way to make the other player’s job easier, maybe they only need to get 170%, 150% or 130% of the clues now.
The practice of including cards that allow doing things aside from your main job is called flexing (again not a game term, but something the community came up with) and depending on how much your investigator splits up their attention between multiple jobs, they might no longer consider themselves a main fighter or main cluever, but a Flex instead. There is a bunch of advantages that this flexibility brings with it, like being able to split up if the scenario requires it or it becomes advantageous. It allows covering for one of the investigators struggling for whatever reason – or even one getting defeated. While i’d advise new players to build their first decks focusing on one job, i’d also recommend warming up to the idea of blurring the lines between the jobs rather sooner than later. The habit of always just picking a main fighter and a main cluever leads to success, but it is very limiting in your options to explore the game and get the most out of deckbuilding. And generally speaking, a team that has options is just better than one that doesn’t. Luckily, the evergreen cardpool heavily supports this. As mentioned, even Daniela has tons of options to pick up clues and the Core Seeker is someone who comes with Guardian cards and 4 combat. The Mystic, Rogue and Survivor cardpools lend themselves to flexing very well as does a skill heavy playstyle like Izzie’s who can just throw her wild icons at whatever needs to be done. This continues into the investigator decks, where Tommy Muldoon has a wealth of ways to use his intellect productively while Carolyn’s deck features a surprising number of combat options.
At three and four players, the variation between balancing fighters, cluevers and flexes gets increasingly more adjustable. As long as you make sure that all jobs are covered and everyone has something productive to do every round, you will be fine. Generally speaking, the game gets more forgiving as you add players, since you can usually count on someone being able to cover for someone else if they get a bad draw, a rough Mythos phase or both at the same time.
Some more notes on Tempo
For all of this, i have been treating the idea of tempo as it relates to clues and doom as something constant that you can just average out over the course of the scenario. While that is often somewhat true, it doesn’t have to be.
Agenda decks with multiple cards in them don’t necessarily distribute the doom thresholds evenly between them and sometimes you really want to get certain things done before an agenda flips and introduces new complications. This is also where the random factor of certain treacheries and enemies that deal with doom can come in and introduce some high points of tension where you suddenly need to get a lot more done than what you’d assume on average. As an example, Spreading Flames has 18 doom in total but the last 10 of them are spent in an ever increasing inferno of Fire! treacheries… not to mention the Servant of the Flame that will likely be around at that point as well. So while 18 doom sounds like a lot of time, you really want to get all or at least most of your clue finding done within the first 8 doom that agenda 1 and 2 afford you before things heat up.
Chapter 1 campaigns also confronted investigators with scenarios that have near constant round to round pressure or very short agendas, like Dunwich’s Essex Express or Innsmouth’s Horror in High Gear. While a scenario like Smoke and Mirrors would theoretically allow you to spend 5 rounds finding a crapton of clues and then having a few rounds of doing no clueing at all (or vice versa), this is not a luxury you’d have on the Essex Express or at Horror in High Gear where you need to be on the ball constantly. They basically replace the tempo requirements of the whole scenario with new and updated tempo requirements every round or couple of rounds.
But even when a scenario lets you decide your own pace for the most part, the game is dynamic enough that situations will force you to be able to adjust your pace. Maybe you are only one clue short of advancing the act with two turns before the agenda also moves on, so you are feeling pretty good about yourself. But one autofailed Downpour later you might suddenly find yourself scrambling. Or maybe you failed to remove a cultist and their doom in time and now the Mythos phase comes around serving you up a Cosmic Evils that threatens to advance the agenda two turns earlier than planned. Things can always heat up and that’s when you will be happy to have some cards in your deck that let you gather clues beyond your usual rate of one per action to make up for lost time.
Finally, there are more aspects to tempo than just clues vs doom. Enemies appearing and needing to be handled creates time pressure as well for example. Treacheries, weaknesses, the amount of actions available, that’s all relevant here as well. There’s a bunch more to it and hopefully i’ll be able to cover most of it in the next article.
Conclusions and Deckbuilding Tips
Alright then, let’s put all of that together. To make sure you aren’t losing tempo on the game, you as a group need to get your clues in a somewhat timely fashion. To that end, you should be coordinating during deck creation and investigator choice to an extent that you at least roughly define your roles. Depending on your own specific role and investigator choice, you will then want to run some mix of the following in your deck:
Intellect Boosts: Consider your base Intellect and what shroud values you want or need to beat. If you are the main cluever, you will want (on Standard difficulty) to shoot for 6 Intellect as a baseline so you got all common shroud values covered. Ideally, you can get there with assets, like Magnifying Glasses or Dorothy or at least with repeatable effects like Police Dog or Lockpicks. For Mystics and Rogues, this includes finding the investigation spells and tools that allow them to count their willpower or agility instead of their intellect. If you are only flexing, then you can get by with lower base value.
Compression: Clue compression takes your investigation to the next level, but you will want to be able to make sure you pass your tests first. With how expensive a Fingerprint Kit is, you don’t want to waste uses on tests of 4 vs 3 and even throwing away a Deduction because you couldn’t beat a -3 sucks. It’s sometimes necessary to risk this sort of thing when the game goes that way, but if you can minimize that chance during deckbuilding, do so by making sure your intellect needs are theoretically covered before you add too many expensive compression pieces. Think of it as something like enablers and payoffs for other archetypes. You don’t run a card that pays off for oversuccess if you don’t make sure you oversucceed regularly first. Same thing here.
Compression really shines if it lets you get double duty out of your temporary intellect boosts. It’s also a safeguard against situations where you are suddenly required to go beyond your regular pace.
Testless clues: Perfect for flex investigators to just grab a couple clues without ever having to invest in their intellect. They also allow main cluevers to crack otherwise difficult locations.
There are no hard and fast rules for how to balance these against each other. Much of it is personal taste and playstyle as well. I put a high value on flexibility and being able to react to a changing gamestate for example which is why i am arguing in favor of cards like Crowbar or Police Dog(1) more often than others. At the same time, others put more stock in reliability at one job which lets them value Magnifying Glass to the point where they keep it in their deck until the end of a campaign while i’d be looking to replace it with something that has a bit more oomph as soon as possible, like for example an Autopsy Report or Fingerprint Kit.
My suggestion to new players is to start with clear defined roles of cluever vs fighter for your first couple decks and then gradually increase the amount of cards that you put towards flex options to find the level you are comfortable with.
Again your class(es) will push you certain ways here.
Guardians generally make mediocre main cluevers, but get a lot of opportunity to flex into clues with events and assets alike, especially if the guardian has an okay intellect to build on. Their resource situation is infamous for being somewhat constrained, so you’ll have to decide how thin you spread yourself there.
Seekers are the main clue grabbing faction and excel at the job. They have high base intellect, cheap ways to permanently boost it through assets and then also plenty of ways to temporarily get bonus clues or spike their intellect even higher. When Seekers talk about flexing, they mean flexing into combat with the occasional card that doesn’t help with clues.
Rogues are able to leverage their agility with a couple of investigation assets. They can very well provide for their own clue needs, but lack the reach to also cover for the rest of the team. That makes them natural flexes, with specific investigators leaning in one or the other direction.
Mystics can similarly use their willpower to emulate intellect. They require the right assets and events but as long as the support in the card pool is there, the world is their oyster. With just the evergreen card pool, the critical mass for a pure cluever isn’t quite there, but that is only a matter of time.
Survivors are the best class at cheating tests and that does include investigation tests. Since Survivors are so different from each other, it’s hard to make too general statements here. But for the most part, i consider Survivors flexes that similar to rogues are able to cover themselves but struggle to get more beyond that.
I want to repeat the disclaimer from the previous article here that these aren’t set in stone rules brought down to us from a mountain on chiseled tablets, but merely trends that we can observe across the chapter 1 card pool and extrapolating from what we’ve seen from the evergreen chapter 2 card pool. Survivors that match and even surpass Seeker at the intellect job exist and some Guardians are actually better in the clue role than in the combat one.
Next up: Combat? In This (Action) Economy?
And that concludes the look at investigation and its place in the game. Now, the game would be very easy if each investigator could just put all their actions towards meeting the clue requirements of a scenario – why they can’t is going to be the next article’s topic. Join me next time for “Combat and Actions, or: How to Win at Arkham, part 2”.