Eldritch Horror - Tips & Strategies

Try to ‘Acquire Assets’ as often as possible. There is much to do in this game, but an absolute must is buffing up your investigator so he/she may be able to take on monsters (including rumor monsters) and face gate challenges. Acquiring Assets while in a city space is the quickest way to buff up your investigator. Don’t be afraid to go into debt to get that extra special item too. Usually the item will help you the rest of the game while the Debt Condition is relatively easy to get rid of. Who knows, one or two of the items you pick up may also be helpful if the GOO wakes up!

Going into debt can produce some unsavory results, but most of the time you can ward these off with a successful skill test. What it provides in exchange – the extra 2 successes for purchasing of assets – is invaluable as it can get you extremely beneficial tools that you sorely need.

You need these to balance the chances in your favour, so taking on a bit of a risk to ultimately strengthen your character is a worthy proposition.

Approaching apocalypse is no time for financial prudency – use Debt as much as you can (otherwise that action you just took to acquire assets was a waste too).

Eldritch Horror has plenty of situations that will test each one of your investigator’s skills over time. While completing a task only requires one success, odds are that at some point, an investigator will have to use a comparatively weak skill to complete a task. This is more common with any task (like closing gates) that requires two skill tests to complete. Improving a weak skill at the start will improve chances of completing complicated tasks, which can be really important late-game.

In Eldritch Horror, the odds are against you — literally. The clues, monsters, and gates that spawn are the same amount for 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8 investigators, so you may as well have the extra investigator along to help (especially in a solo game). It means someone has to do double duty, but given that travel across the board is very slow and you have a lot of ground to cover, the more the merrier. This is especially true if you are playing the Mountains of Madness expansion with the Antarctica board in play, since you may occasionally have to send one or more people off to that board.

The other advantage of having even numbers of investigators is that many of the investigator abilities and cards affect investigators on the same space. There are definitely advantages to a buddy system in which investigators travel in pairs at least some of the time. Also, while larger groups of investigators may face tougher odds and more difficult challenges (there are a lot things that are based on “# of investigators + X), a large group has more chances to help each other out. Smaller groups will see the investigators crossing paths less frequently.

There are, of course, disadvantages to larger groups. The most obvious ones are that monsters with variable toughness will be stronger and cards that require a number of tokens to resolve (such as most mysteries) will need more tokens for larger groups. The potentially biggest downside to a large team is that effects that hit everyone might knock out several investigators in a single event/round, and each one slides the doom track over one. Ultimately, it’s all about balance–personally I favor medium sized teams of around four investigators, when possible, though I’m certainly not opposed to one giant eight player Mythos Mayhem game on occasion.

As long as there’s enough snacks and drinks to go around the asylum after everyone goes bonkers.

In one or two-player games of Eldritch Horror, Trish Scarborough excels as an investigator. There are a fair number of Mystery and Rumor cards that require clue tokens to be spent in order to achieve an effect to solve or resolve. A typical target number is equal to half the number of investigators in play. Trish can gain a clue token as an action if she doesn’t have any, which means that she can handle most Mystery or Rumor cards better than any other investigator. This ability becomes less useful in games that have a lot of investigators, but is still a time-saver when it can be used. In smaller games, allow Trish to tackle the Mystery and Rumor cards as a main focus (if possible), while other investigators handle gates and monsters.

Once you are comfortable with the rules even in solo play – use two investigators. The # of gates, monsters and clues spawned as well as “half of number of investigators” is the same for one or two characters.

Playing with only one characters makes it nearly impossible to win once you failed a roll or two. There is just too much stuff happening for you to control with just one character.

I am all up for challenging games, but I find I have more fun with 2 players – with 1 I feel like I never even had a chance at a win.

If you begin collecting a number of the expansions, as I’ve done, you’ll find that you have also collected pages and pages of extra rule sets. These extra rules do add fun twists to the game and aren’t terrifically complicated, but whenever I open the box to play with family and friends, it can be a bit daunting to see the pile of pamphlets–you might lose sanity points before you even begin playing! Even worse, during a game, you are delayed when attempting to find which pamphlet contains the specific rule that you’re looking for.

Take heart! An intrepid Lovecraftian gamer has helped to restore our sanity by merging all of the rule sets for all of the expansions into a single document, and has even provided an index to the most-used rules. Simply perform a Google search on “Eldritch Horror combined rules”

Do you really want to play with one investigator without feeling like the game completely crushes you?

Consider skipping every second Mythos phase, only drawing half the number of cards. The game will still be very tough but more playable.

The game rules as written prohibit using attribute bonuses from different sources. Normally only the highest is used. This makes little sense to me as if my character has a gun and a thug helping him – both would be useful.

To address this I allow attribute modifiers to stack. It is not a change that comes into effect frequently and ultimately only makes the game a tiny bit easier. With the regular difficulty being pretty brutal it is not a change that will detract from your enjoyment of the game.

Instead it will remove a counter-intuitive rule and make things more exciting.

One strategy you could try out is to have two investigators team up a long the way. Use one investigator as “support/get item” and the other as as “spell-caster/fighter”.
A combination of Jim and Mark could work well for instance, Jim can “cure” sanity” while Mark can focus on defeating monsters.
Another match is to have a strong, well fitted investigator with the spy. The spy would generate clues and trade them, while the other would fight monsters. This way you can solve “mission” more efficiently.