Editing Eldritch Horror (section)

== Gameplay ==

[[File:EldritchHorror.jpg|thumb|800px|center|8 characters in play, also featuring wooden token trays and one end of a [https://www.warbox.pl/en_US/p/HORROR-2020-ed.-chest-designed-for-Eldritch-Horror-and-Arkham-Horror-2-ed./97 large wooden chest] for the whole game. You'll need something like that if you get all the expansions, which you should.]]

The game is setup with the large game board and picking an Old One as the big bad of the game. You can draft it or pick a specific one. Some are vastly more difficult than others, which can be seen by how many Mysteries you need to solve to win the game. Easy ones require 4 mysteries, average difficulty is 3 mysteries, the really nasty ones require only two - and do not make the mistake of thinking that the 2 mystery ones are quick and easy. Hastur, for example, have mysteries that requires the player characters to catastrophically debuff themselves with multiple madness conditions before they can be solved.

With the expansions, some bosses introduce extra game boards such as the Mountains of Madness in Antarctica, the Eqypt board where you can enjoy tea time with mummies and dark Egyptian horrors, or the Dreamlands board where you can truly learn how [[Anal circumference|stretchy]] your mind and body is as you journey to Unknown Kadath.

Once that's ready, you draw a Prelude card to set the stage for the game. This can make extra monsters appear at the start of the game, or offer players a choice at the start of the game to start with extra gear or stat buffs, often for a price. It might even require that you set up extra expansion boards, despite the Old One for the game not requiring it. With that done a number of portals and clues are spawned, scaled to the number of players. The game can have between 2 to 8 players, though you can easily play the game by having two or more characters helmed by one player, but you always need a minimum of two: You are not supposed to read your own encounter cards, because then you can see what the branching paths might lead to and cheese the game.

A turn of the game has three primary phases, where the players take turn doing their thing for one phase, then everyone moves to the next phase and so on.

* Action phase
Each character can perform two actions per turn. This can be move one space, prepare for travel by buying a ticket which can extend a travel action, buy new stuff, rest to recover health, sanity and heal injuries or madness conditions. You can do any given action only ONCE per turn, unless the character has special abilities that allow for something else.

* Encounter Phase
Here the characters will battle monsters, and if there's no monsters left on their space - or none to begin with - then they have an encounter based on their location. Different major cities and other key locations tend to have encounters that, if you pass the skill checks, reward you with specific stat buffs or types of loot. Rome for example is a good place to go for Blessed conditions, while Buenos Aires is the place for Ritual type spells, including the ever-useful teleportation spell which can make or break a game. Expedition encounters often reward you with special artifacts that usually have amazing weapon stats or buff spellcasting greatly, or allow for special actions that grant great rewards. Research encounters on spaces with clue tokens mostly yield clue tokens.

Monsters are fought by first rolling your Will stat against the monster's horror rating. If you have successes equal to or larger than than the rating, you lose no sanity. Then its your strength stat against the monster's damage rating, if you beat that you take no damage. If you get enough strength successes to match the monster's toughness rating, it's defeated. Epic monsters will have absurdly high horror and damage ratings, but certain types of gear can lower these. Epic monster toughness ratings usually read as "Player count + 2" or something similar, so their difficulty scales with the number of players. Plan your combat encounters accordingly.

Weapons and gear can boost both  your combat strength and will stats quite a lot. It's not uncommon to have enough strength buffs on a combat-focused character to roll 10 or more D6s on a strength roll. It should  be noted that a character cannot get a stat buff from two of the same thing for the same stat. If you have two Weapon type assets that give buffs to strength, then only the biggest buff apply. Same applies for will and other states. However, you might also have buffs from an Ally type asset, a Trinket, a Tome, a glamour spell and so on. They're fine as long as there's not two of the same type of item giving a buff to the same thing with the same wording. An item saying "You can roll one more D6 for strength tests in combat" is not the same as an item giving just flat +1 strength.

It can get messy to track all the buffs and whether the items that only give you one reroll per round have been used or not. Try to keep your character sheets and inventory well organized, it'll make for a smoother gameplay experience.

* Mythos phase
This is the phase where all the characters and the players bend over, drop their pants, and recieve the [[Rape|tender love]] of the Old Ones as they get their turn. The composition of the mythos deck of cards are unique to each Old One, and with enough expansions you'll never run into the same build of mythos deck ever. Some Mythos cards are marked with a white icon denoting it as an easy card that might actually see the players buffed or rewarded, while cards with crimson tentacles will easily molest your characters to the point that even Slaneesh would be like "Dude, chill" by introducing some decidedly [[Dwarf Fortress]] flavors of [[fun]].

The game rules explicitly state that a way to control the difficulty level of the game is to chose whether or not you have any tentacle-level mythos cards in your game. These things can [[Rocks fall, everyone dies|end a game in an instant]]. Enjoy.