This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of The Grand Oak Hotel fan-made scenario by Argus the Cat for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
The Grand Oak Hotel has investigators heading to New York to look into disappearances surrounding the titular hotel. There, they need to deal with whatever is causing people at the hotel to lose their memories, and guests to simply be forgotten. While it has an exciting hook and some interesting mechanics, overall the scenario is messy enough to not live up to its potential.
The main mechanical hook of the scenario is that of "Nobody" - one investigator begins to be forgotten by the others, and they're unable to help them out. Many encounter cards interact with the Nobody character, targeting them specifically - or giving them a choice on how to effect other players. It's a neat effect, and one that can be passed around at needed, so nobody feels particularly picked on. These mechanics need to be dealt with while the characters explore a variety of locations - the map ends up quite big, and many of the locations don't scale with player count, encouraging players to split up. On the other hand, the elevator that connects all of the floors can save actions by having characters group up and use it to together. All of these add to a push and pull of different effects, leading to no one obvious strategy to tackle the scenario with.
Unfortunately, the "Nobody" mechanic comes into the scenario far too late - likely only arriving halfway through the scenario. Until that point, half of the encounter deck are simply blank cards, leading to a scenario that feels like it doesn't fight back most of the time - these cards don't even surge if they do nothing! There are even victory enemies who can spawn early who won't even engage investigators until the scenario is nearly done. This is made even more stark with some of the cards that can spawn early being incredibly difficult - the difference in drawing encounter cards that do nothing, or a 5 fight, 5 health, 3 damage enemy after the first turn is huge. It's a real frustration - especially as players are either gaurenteed to start with weapons in their opening hand (at a huge penalty for campaigns, or no peanlty for standalones) or have to take several actions and guess what location they can go to to get their weapon cards - of course, Mystics can just ignore this whole problem with their spells. This ends up leading to the scenario feeling extremely, extremely uneven.
At 19 XP, I found the scenario of normal difficulty... with caveats. The standalone Standard bag looks more like an Easy bag (capping at -2), and the standalone Hard bag looks more like a Normal bag (capping at -4). Played as part of a campaign, it would be much more difficult with a nasty chaos bag. The scenario also has very lopsided rewards, potentially being gamebreaking in either direction for campaign play.
Overall, while the Grand Oak Hotel might be worth trying as a standalone to experience it's theme, it's unlikely to impress.
Rewards
Scenario Cost: 2 XP
Potential XP Gain: 4 (locations) +2 (2x Thought Harvesters, in the encounter deck) +3 (Yill, Memory Feaster) = 9 XP, or 7 XP after its cost
On a success, all players get the following:
On successfully completing the scenario, if William Hebb is still alive, the investigators gain the following:
All investigators gain a Grand Oak Momento, a fast asset with 1 sanity soak that can be exhausted to accumulate a charge, or to spend two charges to place a secret on an asset at your location. It also helps protect against effects that discard cards.
All investigators can add a level 0-3 Item asset to their deck at no cost, ignoring deckbuilding options.
Any investigator may spend 2 experience to add William Hebb to their deck. He's a 1 cost ally asset that gives all investigators at his location +1 willpower, and can be exhausted as a fast action to discard two cards and draw three cards.
Finally, any investigators who smuggled a weapon into the scenario add a -3 token to the chaos bag for the rest of the campaign.