You're probably think "Huh-wha?!?" right now.

Let me explain\qualify the question.

My wife and I have been playing AH a lot more recently, with and without friend groups. When it's just her and I, we always play 2 investigators each as if it were a 4 player game. Two, after all, is nearly impossible. You just can't close gates or collect clues fast enough, so it's not really a good two player game.

However, with four investigators it's far too easy. Once you have that flow of sending the brawn to take down monsters and the clue mongers hit the gates, the game becomes just a matter of reasonably good planning with a smattering of dumb luck. We pick the elder god randomly and the investigators randomly, but we haven't had a losing combination recently. Even with only three, it's become a bit less of a challenge, especially if you seek the right items early on. ("Find the Gate" spell, anyone?)

Really, the only super hard games anymore appear to be either 2 players or 5 players. With only player combinations, the game has become a little less challenging. ** Anyone else find this to be the case?

** Couple caveats: We haven't played the 8-clue elder god yet... which would likely tip the balance back, and we don't have any expansions... just the base game.

Am I crazy, or are we just getting really lucky as of late?

Not lucky enough to know better than picking up a duck in a dungeon, apparently.

You're accurate as far as the base game goes.

Once you add certain expansions, though, the game starts punching you in the face.

On that note, what are the better expansions? We'd like to get one or two, but would likely limit ourselves to just one in all probability since there are other games on our wish list.

The game is immensely harder to win at the ends of the player count spectrum. Less than 4 characters, and you don't get enough actions to accomplish stuff. More than 4 characters, and the extra monsters make it tough to get anything done.

Our group's experiences with the expansions:

• Dunwich: Fairly positive, though that's probably because we've never actually had to face the Dunwich Horror itself. The Injury and Madness cards provide a creative alternative to simply getting sent to the hospital or asylum.
• Innsmouth: Absolutely unfair. The personal mission cards are fun, but the encounter cards for the Innsmouth locations are really brutal, and the layout for the Innsmouth locations is awkward.
• King in Yellow: Hasn't made enough of an impact on our games to tell yet. Only thing that's showed up so far is a mythos card that starts the First Act, which we made the requisite sacrifices (clues, I think) to stave off.

Almost picked up Kingsport the other day when I visited Compleat Strategist, but I decided against it as I didn't want to have to cart the thing home.

-- Ben

Base game is a cakewalk, especially if you've played a few times or looked through the decks.

You can try using the 'house rules' - a PDF you can get off the site which has rules used by Richard Lanius (the games designer) to tweak the difficulty, or you can use RP 'rules' some masochistic players use.

For RP, basically you don't tell a player the mechanical consequences of choices on encounters, so 'you see an item, if you pick it up you do a test and good things happen if you pass and bad things happen if you fail, or you can just leave it an nothing happens' becomes 'you see an item, do you pick it up?'. Makes things MUCH harder, but the games not really meant to be played that way.

Expansions definately make things harder. If only getting 1 or 2, how about 1 big and 1 small? I'd recommend Dunwich for the first of the big expansions - madness and injury cards alone are a great addition to the game and some of the Ancient Ones force you to play the game in a completely different way, even if you don't bother with the dunwich board (it never really did anything in our games). For little expansions, I'd go for Dweller on the Threshold first. It has the biggest obvious impact on the game (revamping gates) so seems the most value in my opinion.