Arkham Horror Statistics

Cariosus wrote:

Post Fri, 2008 Sep 26, 9:06 AM (CDT) Subject: Re:Arkham Horror Statistics
selecting 1 from each sequential set of three? or 4 from a total of 12?

It will be the earlier option, so in clusters of three.

I just realised how much these message boards bring out my inner geek.

At least you're being honest...

Heh. Got me - Mariana the ex-nun cultist

BAM! Tsathoggua & The King in Yellow were devoured.

Victory by seals. Even though I lost one seal to a gate burst.

Now I need to get a new combo, since I'm not tired or drunk enough...

Hastur + Dunwich Horror, here we come...

Lets see how it plays out. And victory it was....

First I'd like to MCFlainez for setting up and evaluating the statistics page - this is a great idea!

I've duly entered all of my games but made a small omission for the latest one: It's the first game with 5 investigators (a defeat vs. Shub-Niggurath) and I forgot to select one of them:

The 5th investigator was Kate Winthrop.

I also have a question about the previous stats:
Did the investigator popularity numbers take into account whether the investigators were selected (pre/post selecting GOO) or drawn randomly? How about GOO poularity? So far I've always drawn the GOO randomly, so the numbers don't actually reflect popularity (at least in my case).

I'm unsure if games from the summer league scenarios should be added to the stats page. Did others add them? If so, they'll probably distort the stats quite a bit.

Finally there's one data item I'd be interested in that is currently missing from the statistics:
The reason for waking up the GOO.

From memory there's a quite a few possibilities that tell a lot about how the game went:
- doom track got filled
- too many gates open
- too many monsters in Arkham (after terror level reached 10)
- no more gate markers available
- no more monster makers available
- ?

jhaelen wrote:
Finally there's one data item I'd be interested in that is currently missing from the statistics:
The reason for waking up the GOO.

From memory there's a quite a few possibilities that tell a lot about how the game went:
- doom track got filled
- too many gates open
- too many monsters in Arkham (after terror level reached 10)
- no more gate markers available
- no more monster makers available
- ?

- no more Corruption cards
- used the Messa tome
- cast "awaken the ancient one"
- no more Servants of Glaaki

Oops. In my last game against Abhoth we lost by Act III. However I neglected to note that the King in Yellow Expansion was in Play. Please correct. Thanks. Mageith

Was wondering about the statistics, could you add option to used investigators to type in custom investigator names if someone was playing with them. (me)

Also would be nice to hear how the statistics have changed since last update.

I think that Black Goat of the Woods should be added as possible expansion to use.

Cariosus wrote:Also would be nice to hear how the statistics have changed since last update.

Yep, it really is about time for an update! Especially since now all of my games have been added

I wouldn't mind seeing Black Goat and whatever options that go with it added, since my order for it is on the way (along with KiY).

Good thing too, not having played AH since 26.09 I was starting to get withdrawal symptoms

. Adding 2 new Heralds means at least 24 new games (AH + DH GOOs), so at a rate of game/day (on weekdays), that's a month of gaming already "planned".

MCFlainez told me he'd be updating the stats site (and possibly be reporting the new results here) soon. Hang in everyone

Cthulhu/Nyarlathotep 08!

As a side note—since, due to the stupidity of the Electoral College, MA is going to end up voting Democrat, my brother and his friends are going to write in their votes as:

Cthulhu, R'lyeh, South Atlantic Ocean

tibs wrote:As a side note—since, due to the stupidity of the Electoral College, MA is going to end up voting Democrat, my brother and his friends are going to write in their votes as:

Cthulhu, R'lyeh, South Atlantic Ocean

I was hoping we could leave "real world" politics out of Arkham. The only thing that pisses me off isn't the EC, it's when we are told who the next president is prior to my state even reporting who "won" here. Makes me feel like my vote is worthless.

Anyway, those are great write ins! MA must not be into e-voting. In MD the "write in" is PRESELECTED from a few people; WTF is that? Isn't the point of a write in to... I don't know, WRITE IN whom you want to elect?

slerch666 wrote:I was hoping we could leave "real world" politics out of Arkham. The only thing that pisses me off isn't the EC, it's when we are told who the next president is prior to my state even reporting who "won" here. Makes me feel like my vote is worthless.

Well, the Electoral College is actually largely responsible for that ill effect. You and I, we're not so different after all.

slerch666 wrote:Anyway, those are great write ins! MA must not be into e-voting. In MD the "write in" is PRESELECTED from a few people; WTF is that? Isn't the point of a write in to... I don't know, WRITE IN whom you want to elect?

I don't know. MA might be e-voting. Brad told me this idea before voting, after all. I was just surprised that the voting terminals didn't have cloth covering the voters like when I voted in NY in 04. Plus I was surprised to hear about some places having optical scanning booths. We've developed optical scanning??? Can't wait to see what technology we have for voting in 2012—Breathalyzer? DNA tickler? Space laser?

I just told everyone that I'm voting Cthulhu/Nyarlathotep, because I disagree with some of the moral positions of the Hastur/Giant Space Octopus (GSO) ticket. Can I get an "I voted" sticker with tentacles?

Hi there

Just reported my third game, but I really miss an extra window for "notes of interest".
This game was one of the weirdest ever.
We always play with all expansions, but slightly trimmed decks (especially the spells and skills got trimmed down about 20%). We never came around to using Heralds and/or Guardians, the game is huge and hard enough already (especially if you do NOT play against the base set GOOs).

This time, we started with four players (counting as three), but one of us had to leave, so the one death we had was ruled permanent and we switched over to playing a 3-player-game (counting as two).
My co-investigators were pretty nicely eqipped, but mine was really crazy:
Harvey Walters with the spell that lets you sort the mythos cards, the reroll spell checks skill and, after a few turns of play, voice of ra, that whateley guy as an ally that lets you reuse a spell once per turn, and the spell that lets you banish monsters from the outskirts - among others.
That combo is ridiculously good. I basically controlled the entire gameflow, arranging mythos phases and monsters as I saw fit, and never, ever, losing sanity, while casting 5-6 spells per turn.

You would think that the game was easily won, but far from so. We played against Eihort, and we did make a small mistake (risking a character with 9 clues on egg-spraying cultists before he sealed at least once), but what still the doom track filled up pretty quickly. After a good while (about 12 to 13 turns, I guess) we were up to 11 of 12 doom and I knew two of the next three cards were double-doom cards. We had 5 Seals out, and two players in outer worlds on their way to seal (one with sign, me with tokens). We resealed at another location, and were back up to 5 seals.
Then, disaster struck and I had to put a gate burst on one of our seals on top, AND our elder-sign wielding Marie Lambaux got her ass kicked by some random monster in Kadath. When I checked the mythos cards again, I saw that we were done for, because we had double-doom, double-doom and a gate in wizards hill that WOULD open. We were about to ditch it, but decided to play the last turn out (we do not count killing the GOO as a victory anyways).

And that, then, was when Harvey, wandering around in R'Lyeh, encountered the great Cthulhu himself (what are the odds of drawing THAT ONE CARD from about 100?!), proceeded to waste him (thoroughly, I might add), and as a reward, I got to get out and seal at once. Game won. One phase before we would have lost (I really doubt we could have beaten Eihort, and as I already said, we would have counted that as a draw anyways).

That must have been the craziest ending ever, and we had a good number of weird things happen before.
I just thought I should share that story. What are your strangest happenings?

======================

More to the topic, some analytical stuff I noticed:

- As your statistics show, most of those memberships, special states and trade-in-cards like white ship or so are pretty much never coming up in games. That's a real shame and I really hope for a card-only expansion to concentrate on fleshing out those aspects of the game instead of introducing ever more stuff that never comes up.
- Same goes for the Dunwich Horror or the entire mechanics of the board. It hardly ever comes to fruition. Again, more cards for Dunwich in new expansions would be nice.
- Changed is never, ever, gotten. It is NEVER worth 5+ turns to get that thing, not even with the super-sign as a bonus. Player-Turns are a very rare ressource and should not be wasted on such things. I would rather take a one-turn detour and get me some strong ally and then get back into the action.
- For some reason, we have abnormally high rates of double-doom cards and gate bursts. There is only 7 double-dooms (in how many cards? 100?), for example, and we ALWAYS draw at least 3. Gate bursts on the other hand are a tad too common in the decks for my taste. The are random, cannot really be counteracted (besides the aforementioned silly super-sign or the flux stabilisator) and punish "correct" play. Has anyone ever thought of letting elder sign (and related) cards seal locations even against bursts to make this less frustrating?
- I would like to see another entry in the database - game length in turns. I think we had our by far longest game two weeks ago, where we played for about 30 turns (no joke), and we went through at least 6 or 7 extra mythos cards that we decided to discard (per investigator ability). We just had one surge after another, so doom stayed low but we were always busy cleaning up monsters. Our shortest game ever on the other hand was one a few months ago where we noticed that we had lost in turn 4 or so. It started gate, gate, extra gate throug encounter, gate, extra gate through encounter, extra gate through encounter - game over.

I've been putting my results for a few weeks now in this page and I'm glad we'll soon have updated statistics! :)

@Stormfox: Maybe there could be a "Battle Report" thread started to read about all the interesting things that may have happened in our games, but I'm not sure that this statistic sheet is the right place for it, if only because the space is pretty limited there, in the columns. :) Still, nice batrep!

tibs wrote:Well, the Electoral College is actually largely responsible for that ill effect. You and I, we're not so different after all.

True, true. The press doesn't help. Shit, even BBC-A was running election stuff all night.

tibs wrote:I don't know. MA might be e-voting. Brad told me this idea before voting, after all. I was just surprised that the voting terminals didn't have cloth covering the voters like when I voted in NY in 04. Plus I was surprised to hear about some places having optical scanning booths. We've developed optical scanning??? Can't wait to see what technology we have for voting in 2012—Breathalyzer? DNA tickler? Space laser?

I just told everyone that I'm voting Cthulhu/Nyarlathotep, because I disagree with some of the moral positions of the Hastur/Giant Space Octopus (GSO) ticket. Can I get an "I voted" sticker with tentacles?

MD is stopping the e-vote after this year. Too much controversy and too little payback. Cost something like $32 million to implement and we only used it on... 3 presidential elections? Kind of a waste of money. (they were used on the congressional voting also).

But enough of the politics; back to the important stuff! Arkham Horror!

slerch666 wrote:But enough of the politics; back to the important stuff! Arkham Horror!

Indeed.

Should there be a new endgame condition?

• Defeat by Joining Nyarlathotep

This of course would apply during Epic Battle with Nyar, and when one of the investigators succumbs (submits?) to Nyar's infamous Sinister Plot card. Sure the game is still a thematic loss, but in those instances when it's a loss in addition to when—or even because—an investigator joined Nyarlathotep, shouldn't it be noted?

@ Stormfox:

You do realise that Harvey does not reduce the sanity cost of spells, do you? It is a cost, not a loss, therefore Harvey's ability does not affect spells.