Arkham Chronicles S2E5: Not the bees I was looking for

Time to visit the Apiary, at least according to the scenario name. As usual, this is your first and only spoiler warning.

Story

As the team continue its way down the city, they encounter what looks like alien factories frozen in time. Large metal claws and gargantuan statues stand in alcoves for miles, without any clear indication as to what they could have been manufacturing in the area. Exploring this part of the city takes days. The team ends up in the vast cave. The walls and ceiling are covered in honeycomb structures, which can only a bad omen. Once again, the team finds fresh human remains, with a note written in blood requesting help. Before they know it, strange creatures emerge from the honeycomb cells and converge towards the investigators.

Gameplay

Before the scenario, Agatha was prompted to make a choice based on her task, Walk in Faith. I played it safe this time around since I completed her task objective in all scenarios so far. I erased 1 progress, the compensation was to replace the first encounter draw for each investigator by a deck draw.

This scenario puts the location in the encounter deck. You need to use clues to discard cards from it, the revealed locations are then put into play. The first Act requires you to find a sanctum, and it can be time-consuming. The objective isn't seeded right away in the deck, this is a multistep process, requiring you to discover other locations first.

The second Act required me to defeat the Hive Mind Mother. From what I understand, if I had been coming from the West, I would have had to save pilgrims.

Performance

I can't pinpoint a specific hurdle, but I barely had time to pass the first Act. It didn't feel I was wasting any time. Maybe I was simply less efficient than required, perhaps going for the two artifacts wasn't necessary. They were nice, though! Three more glyphs were translated. Then I hit a "gotcha" moment.

I knew I would not have enough time to defeat the monster, I had only two turns left of doom, but still flipped the Act. I thought I could still resign and move on. I was wrong.

The second Act removed all locations but 4 from play. They were rearranged into a cross-like pattern, with a central nest for the Mother in the middle. However, the central nest is adjacent only to the location bordering the card's bottom edge. At the end of each round, you flip a coin to determine whether the nest rotate clockwise or counterclockwise. You can easily get stuck in one spot, unable to further advance the scenario. Oh, and by the way, the resign option? It's not where you start the act! 🙄

I didn't have any action left when the act advanced, I was stuck and my only option was to let the doom run out. And then the resolution text told me that each investigator who hadn't resigned had been killed, campaign over. 😦

I absolutely dislike these win or die scenarios mid-campaign. That's why I refuse to play Forgotten Age. It's even worse in cases like this one, where I felt the game didn't provide me any hint about what was coming. It felt like a bad GM smirking after killing my PC because he could. Now that I know this, you can bet in the future, I will resign early in this scenario. Bummer! I was enjoying the campaign and my decks.

Editor's note: As I write this summary, I'm checking the cards and scenario booklet, mainly to make sure I didn't miss any detail. Well... I missed a big one. I was so focused on the moving through the central nest, I forgot to look at the location symbols for connections. It turns out, I could have resigned and avoided being killed. I rolled back the ending, treated the resolution as if both investigators resigned. We're still alive, but we now have a new weakness.

The scenario awarded 6 XP, with the caveat I've done this from memory rather than at the scenario conclusion.

• Marion:
  • Guard Dog x2 ⏫Guard Dog-2 x2
  • Scrounge for Supplies x2 ▶️Hunter's Mark x2. At this point in the campaign, the number and quality of level-0 cards in the deck make Scrounge far less interesting. Hunter's Mark is another new event that should help dig more damage.
• Agatha:
  • Olive McBride ⏫Olive McBride-2
  • Drain Essence ▶️Brand of Cthugha-4. I only used Drain Essence once so far, I believe it's time to replace it with something that could pack a punch for the final scenarios.