SPOILERS AHEAD SO READ NO FURTHER IF IT MATTERS FOR YOU . . . . . .
So we’ve played through the Dunwich, and Path to Carcosa campaigns and had a grand time all the way through them. Then we started on the third campaign The Forgotten Age.
Things were definitely trickier with the new explore mechanic but manageable for the first two scenarios. We definitely felt a large step up in difficulty.
Then we got the Boundary Beyond and just got like totally smashed with almost no headway towards finishing the second act. Like we retried it twice but the results were nearly the same we got one maybe 2.5 locations cleared out before our situation became obviously hopeless.
The costs to explore each location are just so punishing and leaves you with no gas to handle the mythos that ultimately ushers us to our doom.
It’s really soured our group on the game in general and I’m not sure they’ll want to continue at this point. Is there something we’re doing wrong?
We’ve definitely lost scenarios before and were fine with it even if it ended our campaign (our first carcosa campaign did not go well). Its just that at least most scenarios that we lost, we at least come reasonably close before losing or saw that did something dumb that caused us to lose catastrophically. In those cases we could at least see what we did wrong and how we could improve if we were to have another go at things later.
This one was the first case where we didn’t see either of those situations. We just didn’t even come close no matter what we did and we had no idea how to deal with everything that was being thrown at us in terms of strategy or deck building so that threw everyone off.
But yeah we’ll definitely have to skip this one or give ourselves a pretty meaty handicap to keep us motivated next time around!
I see what you mean; sounds frustrating and I’m sorry I can’t think of a particular suggestion you wouldn’t have tried (go faster, be better at Willpower tests, etc.)
I can say that there are some absolutely wild (fun) surprises ahead—unlike anything in the previous campaigns—so I hope you enjoy them :)