Arkham Incidents: Unscrupulous Investments: Review and Rewards

This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the fan-made scenario Unscrupulous Investments, part of the Arkham Incidents collection by The Beard for Arkham Horror the Card Game.

The Arkham Incidents are a collection of scenarios set around Arkham, each involving an iconic ally of a difference class in their story. Unscrupulous Investments revolves around the Rogue ally Dario El-Amin, and helping him hunt down a thief who stole an artifact that turns people to gold.

Unscrupulous Investments has a fun set-up that involves running around a large map (13 locations!) and dealing with locations that either reward playing around their power - or demands it. The scenario is heavily focused on resources, so investigators able to accumulate large numbers of resources have more options. There's a point of frustration that investigators who don't have high resource generation to begin with might struggle to play all of their cards, and may find some of the resolutions out of reach.

The mechanical focus on Unscrupulous Investments is all about resources - cards that give you resources, take away resources, and reward or punish you for having them. Every encounter card references resources in some way. For those who can engage with gaining and hording reosurces, this leads to interesting trade-offs: while it will be harder to build up resources in the first place, some cards will become much easier to deal with, and some much harder. For others, the constant loss of resources or punishments for spending resources might constrain play severely. While the scenario doesn't have many effects in play at once, there are a large number of locations, some of which need to be played around in order to investigate - particularly, many have high shrouds that have special ways to reduce them.

The scenario's biggest struggle is that even with all the focus on resources, there's not much in the scenario itself to help you gain them. And while the scenario is built around Dario, decks that originally intended to stay at around 10 resources to benefit from him without going for higher pay-offs are going to struggle to maintain that level.

With a 19 XP party, I found Unscrupulous Investments to have a decent balance - the enemies were of moderate threat, and none of the encounter cards were a game-warping threat.

Unscrupulous Investments is a good scenario, but is best played with at least one investigator who can gather lots of resources to see it at its best.

Rewards

Scenario Cost: 2 XP, but an investigator with Dario El-Amin in their deck pays 1 fewer XP.

Potential XP Gain: 4 (locations) + 1 (The Gilded Spirit) = 5 XP or 3 XP (2 if your deck has Dario El-Amin) after cost

In addition, if you complete the scenario by defeating The Gilded Spirit, one investigator may add the Gilded Coin to their deck. If you instead complete the scenario through accumulating resources, one investigator may add Midas Touch to their deck.