gamer509

Two ways to gear up quickly are:
1) Find the “Vault” tile
2) Find the “Safe” event card
When you draw the event card it will have you place the “safe” marker in the room you occupy. If your knowledge is high enough you can crack it to gain an item.
The Vault is a bit better, but also tougher. It requires a knowledge roll of 6 or more to open, but it will reward you with two items. I’ve found the vault tile on the ground floor more often than not, but it has also appeared in the basement a time or two as well. If you avoid the basement early on you can save yourself an early haunt reveal.

Of the characters that come with Innsmouth the one I’d say is a necessity is Patrice Hathaway. She has the ability to allow other characters to use her clue tokens as their own. She also gains a clue token every time a gate opens and 5 when the doom track reaches 9. Playing Patrice is an important strategy because, as you’ll come to find out, you’ll need clue tokens in Innsmouth to keep the deep ones rising track down.

When we play with the kids we use a house rule for the water bearer to make it a little easier for them.
HOUSE RULE: The water bearer can visit an oasis as many times as they need to. This way they can focus more on exploring and not have to worry so much about water. It does make the game easier and I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless you’re playing with young kids.

OH woe is me! I broke the arm of a space marine while removing it for assembly! (this really happened to me)
TIP: I found that the best way to cut the pieces out was with Swiss Army knife scissors and fingernail clippers. I tried Exaco knives and razor blades but they require to much pressure for the delicate pieces.

We take a similar approach to Elder Sign as we do Arkham Horror in regards to the first Mythos of the game.
HOUSE RULE: Skip the first mythos phase and allow characters to have encounters at the locations to help bolster their inventory. This is specially helpful if the ancient one has a short doom track.

while it can be easy to use your “Helicopter lift” treasure cards to get players together to trade cards or move to a location to pick up a treasure don’t forget that at least one player has to have one in their hand to get you off the island to win the game! You don’t win just by getting back to fools landing you also have to escape the island!

I quite literally laughed out loud right now because I was going to write a tip recommending that you leave someone in Innsmouth to deal with the deep ones rising track, but since that’s been mentioned a time or three we’ll take a different approach.
TIP: If you own the Dunwich expansion as well as Innsmouth don’t ever play Dunwich without Innsmouth. I have at least 50 games in with just the base game and Dunwich and at no time ever, I repeat ever, has the Dunwich horror shown up. He’s a complete non-factor on that board, but by adding Innsmouth you add addition vortex locations that border unstable locations so if a monster moves it can quite literally move into a vortex right off the bat adding a token to the Dunwich Horror track making it a significant factor in the game. Hope this helps!

In this Time Stories deck you’ll encounter avatars at locations that allow you to do certain things (if this is vague it’s because I’m trying to stay spoiler free just in case!) You have the option of “occupying” this avatar and replacing your character with it in order to make use of its ability. In your first run you’ll find yourself switching almost every time you come across one just to learn about it. In order to keep the flow of the game up we’ve house ruled that if you’ve occupied a vessel before you can reclaim it without going back to the location they’re at. Doing this (for us anyway) did not make the scenario any easier as is still took us three runs to complete the mission having started this rule in the second run. Hope this helps!

My daughter prefers to play as Jack, but becomes frustrated because of the difficulty of it so we’ve adopted a house rule to help her out.

HOUSE RULE: when it’s Jack’s turn he has the option of using any of the characters in play (with the exception of himself) instead of just the current characters who’s cards are up.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this with a more “mature” player as it can make it too easy for Jack to escape, but it’s worth doing with younger or first time players.

One of my favorite mechanics in this game is how the timer works. Instead of turning it over when all players have chosen a tile it isn’t turned until the first person completes their puzzle thus putting the pressure on the remaining players to finish.
STRATEGY:
We’ve found that some of the puzzles are easier than others so by watching which tile is chosen by the other players you can adjust your choice to finish first thereby tipping the timer and applying the pressure!

While I believe that this is a common house rule for a lot of us Arkhamites, I thought it would be good to post for newer players to read.

SKIP THE FIRST MYTHOS!
instead of starting the game with a mythos card, gate, and monster let each player have one round to move, encounter, purchase, or trade. this way if you start with a randomly drawn character (which you should) or poorly drawn items (my last run through I started with two common items-food and whiskey-and one unique-a task-and two clue tokens. Needless to say I wouldn’t be much help. So by skipping the mythos I was able to get a bank loan and go shopping with only one gate and monster on the board.

Certain scenarios allow the sheriff to use two pistols at the same time and the rules can be a little vague in regards to how this works. The rule book shows a player flicking both bullets at once (one with the right hand, the other with the left) but every time we try this we end up either having the bullets collide or veer off crazily. So we have house ruled that you can shoot one at a time, but you still have to use your left hand once (or right if you’re a lefty)

There is a subtle, yet useful strategy to use when you cast a spell that locks a die. Firstly you have to remember that the die is “locked” until another player uses it. This seems to be something easily forgotten by newer players as they tend to discard the spell if they fail the location. Secondly, avoid locking “investigation” symbols as appear on three sides of all the dice. try instead to lock “lore”, “peril”, or “horror” symbols as these will be more helpful to other investigators if you fail to use that die.

Thematically this is my favorite “small box” expansion (although I’ve not played CotDP) and it definitely ramps up the difficulty depending on the mode you play it in. I’d recommend playing it in the “Touring” mode to get the most out of it otherwise it gets too diluted depending on how many other expansions you’re using. The touring mode places all the KiY cards on top of the existing ones (i.e. Mythos, encounter, common, unique, etc..) and really gives you the feeling of the King in Yellow play driving people insane in Arkham. If you’re a glutton for punishment you can add the herald to the game and play with Hastur as the Old one to really get your butt kicked!

Each Avatar has a card that gets shuffled into your deck. This card has a symbol under the movie icon in the top left corner. Pay attention to your symbol! It’ll be either “leadership”, “Tech”, “Medic”, or a green fist (my wife calls it the hulk hand) while you’re recruiting you can gain other cards with this symbol that will grant you abilities like drawing more cards or, in the case of the power loader, keep a card in play while you discard the rest of your hand. This can be the difference between winning and losing a scenario. The power loader is a necessity for the Aliens scenario so you’ll want the player with the most “hulk hand” symbols in their deck to be the one to recruit it so they can keep it in play.

Once you’ve excavated both the tunnel tiles do your best to keep them clear! Not only are they protection from the “Sun beats down” but they allow you to move from one to the other which is extremely helpful when the sand begins to pile up.

I’ve play Asylum, The Marcy Case, and Under the Mask and out of the three Asylum by far requires the most detailed notes. The first time through make notes of everything from what you got where and where to avoid going again. the final puzzle has you refer to 5 pentagrams, but you don’t need all five if you’ve drawn them out the first time through. This will save you a ton of time units!

Don’t automatically jump on the “extra action” option if you roll a “?” symbol on the weather die. The “wind” option of doing the same action twice can be advantageous when behind in objectives because it can allow you to draw two objective cards at once and perhaps even playing one immediately!