Week in Review
This weeks trip to through the Circle Undone led up The Secret Name – a scenario that you either love or hate. Personally, i am a fan. On the way there, i looked over Realm of Death, a little four card set that at least for me is one of the most terrifying in all of TCU.
With that business out of the way, i decided to take the still empty Friday slot and also review The Watcher because it is needed for all three scenarios that i still need to get to in the following weeks. I think this one might be a little bit controversial. Basically, i don’t think very highly of the Watcher itself, i find this guy very uninteresting and lacking the impact that the story text pretends he commands.
Soapbox
FFG just announced the fifth Mythos pack of the Innsmouth cycle, The Lair of Dagon. The thing that jumped at me first: Just last week i was commenting on how great a level 4 Dig Deep is going to be for encounter protection and there it is, confirmed and ready to ship together with the other two missing level 4 talents. Obviously nobody talks about the Talents when there’s much more flashy stuff around (like the Favors… holy shit those have some cool uses), but i can see Dig Deep(4) doing a lot of good work making Survivors laugh even more at the encounter decks of TFA, TCU and TIC in particular. The other Level 4 Talents have similar applications, of course.
I didn’t expect this to happen, but it looks like that scenario will actually be focused on curse tokens and making you fail tests. Interesting and a bit out of left field, at least i expected them to keep the blurse stuff mostly to player cards. I wonder how much that scenario can be trivialized with some curse tech. Dark Ritual, your day has fina… just kidding, that thing is still bad 🙂
The previewed encounter cards don’t look too bad. The treachery seems very mild to me. The Cenarian Deep One is a bit of a pain, but not more so than other scenario specific Deep Ones we’ve already seen like the Ravager or the Emerging ones from In Too Deep. We get a sneak peak at Dagon himself as well. It’s a nice teaser, but without seeing the other side or the location he’s at there’s not really much to say here.
Over the last week, i also got to play Devil Reef, as a standalone with Roland and Bizarro Agnes. That was a wild ride. I really like what they did with the locations here, but you do have to reserve a bit more table space than usual! This scenario is every bit as sprawling as Return to City of Archives or Phantom of Truth, maybe even more.
It’s the first time we get to use the Agents of Hydra encounter set and boy is it an annoying one. Random discard is just the worst, especially when you are trying to play an event heavy deck like Almost-Agnes.
The vehicle stuff is well integrated, i think. It’s important, but not overstated. It’s something extra you have to care about but it doesn’t take away from the core of the game. Will be interesting to see how Horror in High Gear goes, i expect that the vehicle mechanics (heh.) are taking a more prominent place there.
All things considered, a well done scenario with lots of replayability thanks to the layered randomization of locations. Another hit, Innsmouth has been really great so far.
And that’s it for today. I wish all of you a merry christmas, happy holidays and that you can leave all the annoyances of 2020 behind for at least the last couple days of the year.