New report's up!

Happy new year!

I'm about to enter in the game just played where I aimed for the maxiumum possible score in a similar manner to Enas'

After claiming every monster trophy and gate trophy with a team of ten, I make a total score of 90. I noticed Enas' was 87, yet I managed quite a bit more so I went and had a look at his post again and noted he added a point for each completed Task and Mission - have I missed something and that's been added to the scoring method post-Dunwich?

That I'm aware it is Maximum AO doom track + Surviving Invetigators + Gate Trophy + Monster Trophy/3 + Difficulty modifier - Terror value - Elder Signs used - Bank loans outstanding/defaulted.

Thought I'd ask before I posted it, as including Tasks/Missions I raise to 94 (an will have to try again as I wasn't really trying for them!)

For those that are interested I'll make a full transcript available shortly.

This makes me wonder. A lot. Has this really sense? I mean, I've always thought that the sense of Tibs's statistics was to show how people playing Arkham were able to confront the Mythos. Thus the sense of the curiosities (number of investigators retired, number of investigators devoured, points scored, and so on). The game has it's own limits: you cannot score more than 94 (or whatelse) points, you cannot have more than 48 investigators devoured or retired.

I personally (please, don't see this as a personal attack) don't see anything useful in creating a game with the specific purpose of scoring the max points. And, I'd add, it has no sense under a statistic point of view. The idea is: you run for your life, to save Arkham and the world from destruction, and to do so, you have to put six seals on the table. Yeah, there is nothing saying that you cannot leave the gate open for more monsters to appear, or that you cannot close instead of seal, just to score some extra points, or that you refuse sealing that stupid last gate in order to have some seals burst away, but this is no Arkham.

For the same reason, I don't see the utility of playing a Yog game, sending investigators in the Outer Worlds with just 1 San e 1 Sta, in order to have them LiTaS and thus devoured, just to beat the "7 devourings" record we actually have. 7 devourings in a game IS something interesting; tricking the game to have 20, it's just non sense. Same for points: scoring 40 or 50 points in a game can be interesting; sitting around the table and creating a party to "trick" the game in order to score the max points is... kinda useless. And that, in my opinion, transforms the statistic in something useless.

Most times, I play with various play groups and in the relaxed social atmosphere the object is simply to have a good time playing the game and hopefully win. Sometimes you win sometimes you don't, sometimes you score big and so forth.

Then again, I'm also a hardened statistician who finds numbers and puzzles fun. So, the question 'just how far can you push it?' is an interesting connundrum to be solved. I'm not going to do it every time, and I'll probably not bother again till there's a major change such as new expansion pushing the boundaries/fundamentally changing the play. Or maybe not at all, I've answered the question in my own mind.

Given there are several thousand results currently inputted, and I'd be surprised if the ratio of the former game style to the later is less than 100:1, it's not going to scew Tibbs' results that much aside from the 10 player game statistics. And the statistician in me says it's just as important to know the upper and lower bounds as it is to now the mean and medians.

If I played like that every game, or the majority of players played like that the majority of the time - I would probably wonder as well what the point was.

Points are superfluous, added as an afterthought for those players who insist on some kind of competitive facet.

Yes, you get +1 for each completed Task and Mission.

Learn a new thing every day. That makes 101 maximum points, as there were 7 tasks/missions I did not complete as I believed them irrelevant and could be completed without ending the game.

Think that'd be a fifty Mythos game, can't say I'll be trying that any time soon. Maybe next time I have the flu.

VinceT said:

Yeah, my point was that all the bounds can be easily calculated (lower bound: Yig, one player game, Terror level: 10, no trophies, five seals put down via ES. Final score: -4. IIRC, retired players should grant you a -1, so technically you could score -51; if everyone takes a Bank Loan, then it's -99; and possibly there is also a modification coming from the difficulty level; as per the upper bound: as you've calculated), so I don't see a reason to try to reach them. I know the speed of light is more or less 300.000 km/s: never felt the urge of traveling that fast ::laughter:: Not to mention that I believe it's more interesting (for me, at least) knowing how many max points were scored during a game without hunting the bound.

Or other statistics. Like: the most winning player ever; the fastest player, and the quickest sealing / closing victories; the minimum doomers for each AO when it was closed / sealed away; the best Mythos buster ever; and similar stuff. To compare the way people play this game; and not because I feel I'm in competition with other players, but because I'm interested in the way we live the Arkham experience

But I see whay you mean. Thanks for the clarification

Oh I also forgot: if you didn't know about the Task/Mission thing, you might not know that each retired investigator gives a -1 penalty.

I didn't , but ever since someone pointed out the scoring system to me I kind of assumed that investigators that don't make it but are replaced should count against you otherwise the scoring seems biased against Final Battle victories.

I don't actually think I've ever seen an investigator get retired.

Actually, have I missed this scoring modifications in the subsquent rulebooks or are they hanging out only online? Who knows what else I might be missing.

Yeah, the additions are in the Dunwich rules.

And yeah, it's biased against final combat wins, but most of us like coming down hard on combat wins anyway. Maybe the designer intended it that way.

Have you remembered to include the hardest difficulty card from Black Goat to give you +6 to final score (or whatever)? I discourage submitting non-"normal" games so that wouldn't be applicable to the stats report, but I thought I'd say it.

In the Dunwich rules? I blame sleep deprivation from too much Arkham.

The +6 difficulty card is actually only +1 - because it forces the Terror track to 5 which is a -5 straight off the bat. You're better off using the +2 one, which just puts a curse flat across the board, and probably doesn't shift the game that much in the end anyway

Ahh... didn't notice that. Since, you know, I never use diff. cards anyway.

Tibs: I forgot to enter Monterey in the pool of investigators of my last game. Plus, is an Old Debt considered paid when someone is actually devoured or when it just comes up during the game? It came up in this one (maybe the second time it happens in my career) but no one was devoured.

A (sort of) summary:

Gods...

I almost unintentionally beat the 7 devoured investigators in a game. I got to 6 in this, plus 1 retired. Here's how it went:

AO: Ghatanathoa + Tulzscha.

Investigator selection: completely random. Solo game with me running 4 investigators.

Turn 1: Ursula started in Innsmouth, determined to put down clues on the Fed track, to avoid the number 1 reason I always have to fight the AO when using the Innsmouth board: the DOR track filling. She had an encounter at the Order, where she looked into a mirror to get 2 clues and 2 Look cards. Bam, devoured. Nice start.

Turn 2: Monterey got 2 clues in an encounter. Flipped the first Visage token...there he goes. This is starting to look grim.

Turn x: Amanda is devoured due to a second R'lyeh gate opening on the board.

Turn I don't remember anymore: Mark is petrified by Ghatanathoa when he flipped a (currently) second Visage token. Gone.

Turn this is starting to be fun: there goes Rex in the same way. I think there where 2 Visage token already flipped when he picked the 3rd, mortal one.

Turn where I retired an investigator: Hank goes to look for Pa far from Arkham. He had 3 injuries and 2 madnesses from fighting the monsters in the Terrible experiment (eventually passed)

Turn things are looking good: I have 4 seals on the board and have cleared the DOR once already. The terror track is around 5-6. A couple of investigators have a lot of clues and Lily has becoming a killing machine. Her monster trophy pile is 10cm high. I keep knocking it over accidentally.

Turn where a gate burst removes a seal: oh no. Nononononono.

Turn xy: I manage to put yet another seal down. Terror rises to 7.

Turn WTH: Zoey is devoured by Ghatanathoa when trading a gate for clues at the Department. The boards have long since run out of clues (due to an Innsmouth Headline and Skids' failed personal story).

Turn where there are 3 Lloigors in Arkham, the Servitor in the Sky, Lily stranded on the Reef, Wendy in Church Green streets waiting to put the final clue on the Fed track to clear the almost full DOR track for the second time in this game, Skids LiTaS and Daisy trying to seal Whateley farm. And...gate on Independence square. Sealed. Thus filling the DOR track. Lily Chen's This is it kicked in; apart from that, I scored 1 (I repeat, one) success against Ghatanathoa in 5-6 turns of Epic Combat. Not 1 doom token removed, 1 success scored in order to remove doom token number 11. Gods.

I honestly think that had I had one more turn, clearing the DOR track and putting down the 5th seal with Daisy, I would have won the game. Wendy had just come in as a subsitute for Zoey and she still had her Elder Sign. It would have been easy to put down the 6th seal.

I don't think I will be playing Ghatanathoa again when soloing. His mechanic is mega fun in social games, but alone...I'm cursed for always picking the wrong Visage.

/rant over =P

Yeah, the Visage and Innsmouth Look mechanics are stupidly simple but psychologically effective. Though when playing solo I still have to weigh the risks of going after a stack of clues, so it's not like the effect diminishes much compared to a multi-player.

If you go to Wizard's Hill, you might meet the dark man and will be offered a deal. If you accept, you will be indebted to him. Thus, if the Mythos card comes up but nobody (alive) has struck a deal with him, there is no debt to be paid. That's why it's a checkbox: the Mythos card is just as likely to come up as any, but it's not so common that someone has actually made a deal and had to pay the price.

tl;dr don't check the box.

Yes, I know had Old Debt works. I think once in a past game I made a pact with the Dark Man, but the Old Debt card didn't come up. This was just the second time that card came up, though, in all of my Dunwich games. In a stack of ~200 Mythos cards, it doesn't come up so often.

So I guess you should edit my report. An Old Debt, after all, was not paid. That, and add Monterey to the pool of investigators. There were so darn many that I forgot to check his box =P