Problems with Kingsport

Overall I like Kingsport. The investigators are interesting, the monsters are scary, etc.

I do have a couple big problems with it however:

First, I think that something is missing from the rift closing mechanics.
Any person who spends a lot of time keeping control of rifts, usually doesn't get to collect clues, fight monsters, or do any other useful activity. Essentially their entire game can be summed up as:
1)move
2)have encounter
3)flip token
4) repeat, ad nauseum.

It's dead boring. And it's usually not worth the trouble of switching up investigators periodically due to the number of turns wasted in doing so. It might be better if everytime you remove a rift marker you get a clue token or something.

Second, Who thinks going to the Strange High House in the Mist is worth the reward? Considering the cost, plus the ENORMOUS number of turns needed to get it, I feel it's a huge chunk of wasted space on the board. Nobody in our games ever tries to go there since the first player who tried made it there, paid over trophies and got delayed twice on the way out and even sent backwards once, resulting in something like eight turns wasted just counting from when they entered the causeway. The game was over before they could even get back into play. It seems more like a joke than a real game strategy.
It MIGHT be worth it, and I say that speculatively, if the Great Seal could be held in reserve until an actual Gate Burst, at which time it is placed to prevent the burst.

I thought as you do at first about the rift closing, but after a few games no one amongst my regualrs (5-6 other players) has expressed an opinion that its boring or a waste of time. In fact as everyone is working together to beat the game, its considered a worthwhile action. The only thing I would say is that the encounter cards could do with a few more to help make them more worthwhile.

As for the SHHitM Its more than worth it. That one card that cuts doom tokens off the AO is more than worth it and has saved us on a couple occasions aginst the big bad.

TheBigShow wrote:In fact as everyone is working together to beat the game, its considered a worthwhile action.

It's definitely worth doing, preventing the resulting monster explosion from rifts you'd get otherwise. However, that wasn't my point. The point was that it is boring and repetitive for the player doing so. Nobody in my group ever wants to be the one to do it, so it usually ends up being me, and it is tedious.

TheBigShow wrote:As for the SHHitM Its more than worth it. That one card that cuts doom tokens off the AO is more than worth it and has saved us on a couple occasions aginst the big bad.

I'm not sure what card you are referring to here. The cards you get are The Great Seal and Changed. Neither of which do what you are saying.

Yep, my feelings exactly, i'm afraid Rifts are sadly boring!

mg wrote:

TheBigShow wrote:As for the SHHitM Its more than worth it. That one card that cuts doom tokens off the AO is more than worth it and has saved us on a couple occasions aginst the big bad.

I'm not sure what card you are referring to here. The cards you get are The Great Seal and Changed. Neither of which do what you are saying.

I think he is talking about the Encounter cards. There is more tot he SHH than just the Changed cards. One encounter allows you to remove 2 Doom for the cost of 3 Sanity. Two other cards allow you to take the William Bain Ally card if you pass the skillcheck. He also allows you to remove a doom token.

That's true, potentially removing three doom tokens is pretty great. The potential is even greater if you send the photographer :')

Or, if your concern is wasted time, get the character who you want changed deputized then use the patrol wagon to teleport directly to the house.

Also, regarding the boredom that is closing rifts in Kingsport :'D just wait until Innsmouth comes out (also many aquatic locations, and presumably it's going to add a bunch of nasty or interesting aquatic monsters into the cup). In the meanwhile, just get used to being bored there.

Or, if your concern is wasted time, get the character who you want changed deputized then use the patrol wagon to teleport directly to the house.

I hate to spoil your fun, but the rules specifically forbid "unusual" methods of travel to the Kingsport Head locations. See page 7 of the Kingsport rulebook

Like TheBigShow, my troupe doesn't find Kingsport duty boring at all - from reading other threads, I assume it's just a matter of taste or play-style. Encounters are seen as pretty much the best thing about Arkham Horror, so being able to do 1 each turn and actually be doing something useful by doing so is very cool - i.e. everyone likes to do such things with our group.

As for repetitive...really, the entire game is "repetitive". You get clues, run through gates, seal them. Then Repeat ad infinitum. Kingsport adds another "repetitive" routine on top of that, so overall the game becomes either less repetitive if you are of the opinion that multiple tasks affecting one another create an overall interesting experience (as you have to react slightly differently to what happens on the baord, depending on Ancient One, Investigator and so on) OR it's just as repetitive as before.

So...yes, if you do not like encounters, you will hate the rifts mechanic and the Hypnos Guardian. If you like encounters, you will enjoy these two alot.

Personally, I thought the two (Hypnos, Rifts) added a much needed mechanic to the game. While you did have events to collect clue tokens, there was never really much of an incentive to have the events themselves associated with the location they were on and absolutely no incentive to visit stable locations (beyond the hospital, boarding house, etc.). Since the genre which spawned the game is investigative horror, I'm very happy to see the design team implement these sorts of mechanics.

I agree with the people who have said that anything which encourages encounters is theoretically a good thing. Based on one game in Kingsport, however, in which the Kingsport streets became flooded with monsters and my Urchin was duly sent up to deal with rifts, I have to report that I didn't find the encounters as interesting as I've come to expect.

As I said, that's based on one game, and I may well have been unlucky. I hear that there are plenty of Allies available for the fortunate, and I hope there's plenty of Lovecraft-brand Kingsport flavour and Terrible Old Man action to be had.

ColtsFan76 wrote:

mg wrote:

TheBigShow wrote:As for the SHHitM Its more than worth it. That one card that cuts doom tokens off the AO is more than worth it and has saved us on a couple occasions aginst the big bad.

I'm not sure what card you are referring to here. The cards you get are The Great Seal and Changed. Neither of which do what you are saying.

I think he is talking about the Encounter cards. There is more tot he SHH than just the Changed cards. One encounter allows you to remove 2 Doom for the cost of 3 Sanity. Two other cards allow you to take the William Bain Ally card if you pass the skillcheck. He also allows you to remove a doom token.

The encounter is what I was referring to. IMO its more than worth risking the journey to get that card if things are going badly, or you start with Ghroth on the table.

If you have enough investigators to make this a valid strategy, sure. With 3 or less Investigators it may be less great (unless you get one of those Arkham encounters that beam you to the Strange High House in the Mist, then you'Ve at least saved yourself the way up).

Victimizer wrote:(unless you get one of those Arkham encounters that beam you to the Strange High House in the Mist, then you'Ve at least saved yourself the way up).

I haven't gone through all the Arkham encounters in Kingsport yet. Are there encounters that specifically allow you to "beam up there"? Because the rules state:

"In addition, investigators may not move directly into any
of the Kingsport Head locations using spells, equipment,
or through other unusual methods, such as returning from
being lost in time and space. Instead, they must move to
the Harborside streets and enter the Causeway normally"

It happened to me in a game once, so yes, there is a card which negates that rule and immediatly moves you to the strange high house.

I got caught up in this topic in another thread, but in short, I agree...everything in the Kingsport expansion is cool *except* the Rifts mechanic. It's deadly dull and quite frankly, bad game design.

And kind of stupid, thematically speaking. I mean, the fabric of reality is thinner in Kingsport, so it's going to cause rifts to open up in Arkham? Huh? I don't like that they wander around the board either....it just seems like too much of everything, and it feels cobbled together.

As far as the argument about "encounters" being fun...encounters are fun. There are plenty of strategies that allow you to have encounters without needing Kingsport to make it happen. My group picks characters rather than randomly drawing them; most of the time I play Jenny Barnes and I spend my games taking encounters in Arkham, gathering funds, and shopping for the whole team. It's good fun.

Victimizer wrote:It happened to me in a game once, so yes, there is a card which negates that rule and immediatly moves you to the strange high house.

I think it's just one card, though- an encounter card(?) You can't use spells or equipment to get there- the closest you can get with those things is the street location that (eventually) leads up to it.

It is indeed an encounter card. I'm not sure either if there is more than one, as I don't read encounter cards until they come up in play.

@Renee
Do I understand correctly that you don't necessarily dislike the mechanics on how to stop the Rifts (i.e. walking around and having encounters), but the actual way the Rifts are implemented once they come into play?

Victimizer wrote:It is indeed an encounter card. I'm not sure either if there is more than one, as I don't read encounter cards until they come up in play.

I had a Kingsport Mythos card that sent the first player to that Strange High House yesterday. Unfortunately there was no first player at the time since it was the first gate opening, so no one went.

Ah, I think that could've been it instead - I just remember being in Arkham at the time it happened.

Victimizer asked:
"Do I understand correctly that you don't necessarily dislike the mechanics on how to stop the Rifts (i.e. walking around and having encounters), but the actual way the Rifts are implemented once they come into play?"

The whole thing reeks of patchwork game design, to be honest.

The designers wanted to do a set without unstable locations. Which makes sense I guess, because at this point if you're playing with DH and KH, the chances of gates opening at either is going to be pretty slim. Best to just focus on the unstable locations that already exist.

And if you're not going to have gates in Kingsport, you must to give the players a reason to want to go there. In keeping with the general theme of the game, they obviously wanted to go the route of negative reinforcement (if you don't go there, something bad will happen) as opposed to positive reinforcement. I guess I get that, although I don't necessarily agree with it.

Beyond that, I'm lost though. They came up with the idea of Rifts, which in general are fairly uninspired. I mean, they're basically just monsters that you can't fight and that deposit monsters where ever they go (and occasionally spike a Doom counter). Pretty dangerous, but also pretty dull. And they don't even show up in Kingsport...they show up in Arkham, which makes no sense at all. They do get you up to Kingsport, but there's never a sense you had any real choice in the matter (someone is going to have to go to Kingsport eventually, and spend a fair amount of time there) which is never a good thing in a strategy game. And apart from having encounters (many of which are incredibly lame) and a chance to grab a couple cool new jobs, the Kingsport board is pretty static.

I could think of a lot cooler things to have done with Kingsport. Being such a mysterious place full of antiquated lore and whatnot, why not allow the Investigators to collect some new resource or perhaps fill up a different track on the board for each Location visited, to represent their growing understanding of the Mythos? Make the encounters really ominous and perhaps even deadly. Make it a challenge. And when you've collected enough of the resource or filled up this new track, a gate of the player's choice is then sealed from afar or a Doom counter is removed from the Ancient One, or something awesome like that. A worthwhile reward for a decision made and followed through on.

Cripes, that actually sounds pretty cool. Maybe I should get on Strange Eons and design a Providence expansion or something.

Point is, I just made that up and I don't get paid to do this stuff (well, not often anyway).

At risk of repeating what everyone has already read, I suggested in a different thread that the investigator who closes the rift should get a reward. We are giving him/her a choice of either 1 spell, 1 unique, or 1 general.

In other words, house-rule it.

Right you are, tiborvadovan. I skimmed the Kingsport Manual when I first got it (just to see how elusive, aquatic and rifts worked). I missed the part on the SHHitM (although I've never tried going there anyways).

Again, regarding Kingsport, I think it will become much more exciting when a new expansion adds more aquatic monsters and makes it so that the rift closer actually has to fight to stay in Kingsport.

What if you make it so the Rifts show up at Kingsport in the location on the last rift token. Have it spit out an initial monster and have monsters in Kingsport count towards the monsters in Arkham (effect the monster limit/outskirts). They will be a threat to the Doom track, Terror track, and the investigator over there.

Of course that is just a bandaid solution.

mohr wrote:What if you make it so the Rifts show up at Kingsport in the location on the last rift token. Have it spit out an initial monster and have monsters in Kingsport count towards the monsters in Arkham (effect the monster limit/outskirts). They will be a threat to the Doom track, Terror track, and the investigator over there.

I like it!

If one wants to do that sort of thing, then yes, sounds perfectly reasonable and balanced. Pretty good bandaid!

*slightly ups the difficulty level in that spawned Rift monsters won'T be removed due to Arkham encounters and similar oddities, but who cares - that's a pretty small thing*

You can use the Deputy's Wagon to escape from the High House once you get there. We make the trip more worth it by letting the investigator put an elder sign token on the High House that counts as a sealed gate if he spends the trophies required.

Anyway, I really like that rifts in Kingsport bandaid...