True! So I wrote a little thing about it on BoardGameGeek and Reddit. (It's the same thing, I just posted both in case people had a preference of one or the other.) Speaking of which, where's everyone going when the forums here close? I need to know where to find y'all in case I happen upon any secret troves of Phantom of Truth! I will miss this little thread. I'm coldtoes on BGG and coldt0es on Reddit, so you can find me both places.

I 100% would have told you! Believe it or not, it was #6! Go figure. I made a humorous comment in a Reddit thread where someone was looking for this pack, and some guy who had never had any interaction with me saw two copies in his FLGS, randomly* picked me and someone who replied to my comment, and bought them and sent them to us for retail + postage! SO NICE. He could have made $250 on eBay. I told my husband I'd given my name and home address to a stranger on the internet, so I was either going to get a really coveted Arkham Horror mythos pack or an envelope of anthrax. But we decided that either way it would be exciting (for me. He doesn't care about AHLCG except that it's kept me from driving everyone else crazy during the pandemic) because who ever gets anthrax these days? So, I'm sad that I didn't have a source I could share with you all so you could get it too, but I thought you'd appreciate a heartwarming story where one actual nice thing happened in 2020! * He says it was random. I'm choosing to believe it's because he thought my comment was funny.

Do you give up? Hint: no one has guessed yet. (But like Norintha I thought #7 was going to be my ace in the hole.)

I finally picked up In Too Deep, Devil Reef, and Jacqueline Fine from my FLGS on Thursday. They had accidentally gift wrapped In Too Deep, so I put it under the tree for myself. Won't I be surprised on Christmas morning?

So, here are all the ways I have tried to get a copy of A Phantom of Truth: Refreshed FFG's product page multiple times a day for weeks on end Regularly checked dozens of other online stores Made a spreadsheet to track dates that other packs were restocked at FFG vs retail outlets, hoping to predict the date Phantom would become widely available after I missed it at FFG, so that I could refresh even more frequently on the likely dates Signed up for restock alerts on any site I could find that offered restock alerts Searched the internet endlessly hoping to find one in a store no one had noticed Commented on every thread on BGG, Reddit, and this forum where people were looking for this pack, so I'd be tracking all those threads in case someone posted good intel Created an email-to-text alert so that I would immediately be notified via text of any restock alerts or forum posts mentioning Phantom (so it goes off every time someone posts here) GUESS WHICH ONE OF THESE BORE FRUIT?

¡Muchas gracias! Lamentablemente me español no es lo suficientemente bueno para jugar El Fantasma de la Verdad. 😂

Yeah, I'm expecting my local store should still have them in stock after Christmas if no one gives me one, so I should be able to buy it myself at the end of the month. But with all these reports of reduced inventory, there could be a run on them and I could get stuck without. If so, I'll just have to wait for the reprint. But I'm gambling that I'll get one.

I don't believe that legit game shops are the ones responsible for this. Looking at the sold listings in the US in the last two months, only one is clearly a game shop, and a few more are sellers who clearly specialize in nerdy stuff. The rest seem to be people who aren't selling a ton of other stuff which suggests that either they were aware of the demand and found a copy somewhere local (or got one when FFG briefly had them for sale on 9/24) and bought it with the intent of making a profit., or they had a copy from their own collection and realized they could take it to the bank. All these may be scalpers sitting on stocks of these hoping the price will go up even further, but I don't think we should place blame on the game shops. Also, I don't understand your comment, "the aftermarket sellers are driving the prices, this is not a supply and demand thing." If you offer something for a price and people pay it, that's the very definition of supply and demand. If the demand isn't high enough to justify the price, then the price goes down. It's not going down, it's going up (these were going for $50-$75 in September and $125-$150 in October/November), so the demand is there. Unless, as you say, people stop paying this price. Which I 100% agree they should do. Don't encourage the scalpers! We can get these for $15 if we're reeeeeally patient.

I finally got the notice on Wednesday that my Devil Reef was ready for pickup at my FLGS so I was able to go get it yesterday. They still don't seem to have War of the Outer Gods though. (I didn't preorder that one — trying to save something for people to get me for Christmas. But it's a gamble.)

Wages of Sin was the second-to-last pack I was missing; I guess I lucked out when I found one in Canada in late October. I didn't want to pay $9 US to have a $13 item shipped, so I bought a couple of investigator starter packs too (until then I was still pretending that I was not going to get those until next year, as if I had some restraint) so that it would be $3 shipping per pack instead and thus feel more reasonable even though it really just meant I'd spent more money. Arkham has turned me in to the queen of financial rationalization.

BREAKING: Even though @Sarre hated City of Archives, @Jaync may feel encouraged to know that it's just been voted as "Better Than A Phantom of Truth" in this Twitter poll! Editor's note: I haven't played any of the other scenarios in the poll, but I did like City of Archives a lot. (Also: spoilers in the comments so don't read them.)

I started to read these as I'm on my second run through, but then hit something I hadn't encountered in the first one (or, at least, didn't remember) so stopped. But I'll offer an alternate perspective — while everything you say is true, I kind of liked the surprise of the random consequences, and having to deal with those. I've never had an investigator with that much trauma before! But I felt pretty boss to finish with 6 mental trauma on Minh but she wasn't insane. I don't think I would have felt as satisfied if I'd known how to avoid a bunch of it. For me, it was enough to know that it felt unfair to a lot of people, so I was prepared for that and then it didn't bother me as much. If I hadn't known that, I think I would have felt a lot more upset. On my second run, though, I am using the supply spoilers. My usual rule is that I can't write down tips for future playthroughs of the campaign — if I want to benefit from my prior experience I have to remember what it was that would have been a better move. (My theory is that this will keep the campaigns fresher.) But in this case I did decide that having experienced supplies once blind, I didn't have to do that way again. So, you absolutely should make the decisions that seem like it will make the game most fun for you, and that certainly might be by getting tips from someone who's already experienced the campaign. I just wanted you to know that it's not impossible to have fun if you go in blind.

Hilarious! I’ve got Ursula and Finn in the Wilds right now and they could use a donkey companion just for the moral support. They’re feeling kind of overwhelmed at the moment.

So true on supplies. They're a no-win situation pretty much. Welcome to Arkham Horror! 🤣 I can see why you might find Depths of Yoth the worst. We (Akachi, Minh and I — my pandemic bubble is apparently bigger than I thought!) got our asses handed to us but I did have a memorable thing happen in that scenario where Akachi was saved from imminent defeat by, of all things, a draw from the encounter deck (when does the encounter deck ever actually HELP you?!?) so that was pretty wild. I can't see how to do spoiler tags on this site (weird?) but I wrote about it on Reddit if anyone wants to know how that happened.

I knew that people felt that way about it so I just decided to be one of the people who loved it despite its flaws, and I did. I loved the theme, and there’s a great opening twist in one of the scenarios. There are definitely some things that feel unfair, but as a result, I had to take a Minh with 6 mental trauma (out of 7 sanity!) through the final scenario and when she survived it that was a great feeling. I did play on easy though I usually do standard, and I’ve heard it’s unusually punishing for true solo but I always play two-handed. So it might be worth adjusting your normal play mode. I thought about adding Return To, which fixes some of the things people don’t like, for my next run with Ursula and Finn, but I decided I want to see if I can use what I learned the first time to improve. Then I’ll add in Return whenever I do a third run. So I’d say if you go in with appropriate expectations, and are prepared to let the bad stuff roll off your back (which can amount to things like, “What? I have to take trauma because I thought a coffee filter would be more useful than a garlic press?!?”), you’ll have a great time.

It’s okay. It seemed too good to be true (how would that have happened, like they were cleaning out the storeroom before Black Friday and they found one that had fallen behind a shelf or something?) so I wasn’t terribly surprised. And I’d already resigned myself to waiting until spring. I’ve now played through The Forgotten Age and it was great. I’ve still got TCU and Dream-Eaters to go and even Innsmouth may be complete before I get to do Carcosa, so I can keep myself occupied.

Well, not surprisingly, I just received the following email: So, I am back in the "Waiting till spring(?) 2021" boat with the rest of you!

Akachi and Minh survived TFA but only just barely — I had to spend all my late game XP on horror soaks because they had so much trauma! And I had to make a story choice I didn't feel great about; I'm not sure it was in character but they had limited options. (I mean, if your other choice is going to result in insanity in fairly short order, it's not much of a choice, is it?) So all-in-all I was satisfied. I didn't think they'd survive to the end of the campaign so I'm considering that a victory, particularly on my blind run! Next up: Back through TFA with Ursula and Finn. Trying to decide whether to add in Return or play it one more time without (I'm leaning towards the latter, so I can see how much I learned from the first run-through). And my son said he'd let me teach him Arkham if he could teach me Magic, so we're going to play Stella (him) and Wini (me), either in an Excelsior Hotel one-shot using the starter decks upgraded to 19XP, or starting Dunwich with a slightly modified Wini deck so she won't die from That One Treachery that's bad for investigators who move through their decks quickly.

A Thanksgiving miracle! So I woke up this morning to a restock alert on A Phantom of Truth from a store where I didn't even remember having set up restock alerts. I quickly bought it (for retail + $5 shipping, although I'm sure I would have paid more despite my vows not to pay inflated prices!) and was headed here to let you know where I'd gotten it so you all could get one too. But when I went back to the page, it's sold out so they must have only had one copy. Sorry. We'll see if I actually get it or if it was posted in error. But fingers crossed!

Sure, I’ve done this for Innsmouth with my FLGS, but I only started playing this game during the pandemic, so I had a lot of content to catch up on. A subscription is great for new items, but for old ones, those of us who are new to the game are stuck with lots of nightmares (as is appropriate for AH!)

People are crazy! I've never paid more than $20 US, including shipping, for a mythos pack. If this was your last chance to get it ever, I can see deciding it was worth an outrageous price, but not when you'll be able to get for 1/10th the price if you just wait a few months.

This election chaos is still very much in my way! If any Americans here are able to concentrate on anything else you are much more focused humans than I am! As for In Too Deep, with Innsmouth (which also came out on a Friday IIRC), my FLGS emailed me on Saturday for payment and it was ready for pickup on Monday. So I'm expecting the same timeline here. Not as fast as my instant-gratification-desiring brain would want, but really fine since I'm not going to play the cycle until it's complete, and I don't typically incorporate player cards until then either (although I might break out the investigators before then). So there's really no need for me to be super anxious to get it, but, I still sort of am.

Hooray for new toys! Wini & Harvey are due here on Friday. They are my last missing pieces other than Phantom (excluding novellas and Labyrinth, which at this point I don't have plans to buy) so I guess I'll have to stop tracking store inventory and just play the game!

And you didn't pay $188, which was really the thing I was focused on here!

😮😮😮