Elder Sign: The Gates of Arkham Expansion

Does anyone care to opine on adding expansion material to the base game? I could go get a review, but I don't want to taint any review that I might write down the road.

So, opinions on what they do for the game?

Played it Sat night with the wife:
It is a new way to play and a lot of the extra stuff is more tuned for this variant. I felt like there were more things to consider on a turn which was nice. And we didn't even get half the Elder Signs needed before the GOO woke, but we smacked it down pretty good.

I don't have the new expansion yet, but the first expansion is mostly just more of the same, with some different success / fail effects. You can now get cursed or blessed, which affects your dice odds a bit. If you like Elder Sign there is no reason you wouldn't want the first expansion. This new one seems awesome too, and I'll definitely get it at some point.

Unseen Forces is a great expansion if you like the base game but just want more.
Gates of Arkham is a great expansion if you don't mind the base mechanics but feel like the game is almost but not quite there or if you want something a little bit different. (Also, you know it's gonna be good with Mr. Steve "MIA" Avery listed as a play-tester).

hotseatgames wrote: I don't have the new expansion yet, but the first expansion is mostly just more of the same, with some different success / fail effects. You can now get cursed or blessed, which affects your dice odds a bit.

Unseen Forces (the first expansion) also has a handful of replacement cards for adventures/characters, and some light rules changes. One important change: Players can't purchase Elder Signs. (Originally you can buy them for 10 monster tokens.) However, when purchasing stuff, you can purchase two things at a time instead of one (e.g., two unique items, one unique and one common item). The curse/blessing dice are also fun.

When playing, we always use Unseen Forces. I look forward to trying the new expansion (Gates).

Just ordered Gates of Arkham. Hopefully I'll get a chance to check it out this weekend.

This came in the post yesterday, so we played it last night. I expect we got a few rules wrong, but I really enjoyed it. It does play differently than the museum game. Buying stuff is harder, and involves committing to a location adventure. You'd love an ally, but it's on a red-backed location. Or you'd like to tackle that green adventure, but it has an item for sale that you can't afford- should you leave it for the other players? Once you flip the card, you lose the chance to buy anything. The clock spins a lot faster in this game, but doesn't seem to cause any real disasters. Most bad At Midnight effects we saw were on the backs of adventures, so just flipping the cards negates them, even if you fail the adventure itself. Skills, spells and items you can use on other players' turns, the memberships, add a lot of tools for you to play with.

We played against one of the GOOs that opens lots of gates on the doom track, so we had a lot of Other World adventures. Then of course a Mythos card hit anyone who had Other World trophies for 1 St/Sa... and the next one removed all trophies from all investigators.

I felt there was an ebb and flow to the game that wasn't there before, and the sense of location, even if still abstract, was nicely thematic. I can imagine the poker players not liking it quite as much, because you can't calculate the odds for each adventure until it's revealed*, but as a tentacle adventure, I really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to playing again tonight.

*maybe they will. Unknowns are an element of risk management.