Beau B

People rarely call a bluff on assassins – particularly if you’re using that role to pick off their first influence – it’s just too risky (since being wrong would knock them right out of the game). If you haven’t called two other roles yet – use that to your advantage early game.

If you can slip a low point survivor onto a boat with 1 other enemy survivor or two different players survivors, don’t forget you can control the boat as well! The look on others players face when you use your “1” value meeple to steer a boat with their “5” into a sea monster is priceless.

In a multiplayer spitting match, sometimes the best strategy is trying to mitigate damage to yourself – if you can play tiles that delay or divert lava from yourself, this is usually more beneficial in the long run than damaging another player.

One of the most beneficial skills in this game is the ability to read the board – someone might say they mean no harm – but the location of their armies and navies can tell you the real story.

The flip side of this is to hide your true intentions with ambiguous moves that mask your true intent until the last moment.

Combine Innsmouths Locals and either the Plants or Robots for the ultimate swarm army! The plants have cards that allow you to rapidly play minions of the same name that dovetails nicely with the handful of “Locals” you’re likely to have. Just watch out for the Pirates “Broadside” which can cut you to pieces – Innsmouths “Hiding in Plain Sight” works well to give you peace of mind against this.

As an investigator, time is not on your side, the longer you spend bumbling around, the more time the Keeper has to break you down. In order to move quickly listen carefully to the clues and the initial set up story – they usually give some sort of indication what room you need to check out next – “The corpse has spaghetti sauce stains all over his shirt” – better check out the kitchen.

Killing investigators too soon is usually a serious mistake on the keepers part. Beat them down and load them up with as many nasty status’s as you can – but don’t finish the job until the plot is revealed – otherwise they just respawn at full health.

Of course, don’t grief them too much, or they’ll never want to play again. I try to point out the humor/narrative of the conditions to help them identify more with the story that’s unfolding.

The push-your luck portion of this game comes from the two possible zombie “Pop Ups” during the player turn – one coming from opening doors and the other from the “Ahhh!” searches. Searching for equipment or opening a door as your last action as the last player is generally a very risky option.

Just played a game where I was the assassin and managed to zero in on Merlin, because, as the leader – he went and picked a “seemingly” random group of 5 people, ignoring all previous data – that were all good guys. Careful that when you’re trying to hide your id as “The Wiz” – the baddies know who the good guys are – so if you show some sign that you know who’s who, when you shouldn’t, you’re painting a target on your back.