"Like, where did I park the Mystery Machine?"

My friends and I are playing through the Night of the Zealot campaign and I'm using this to keep track of my deck.

Two of them played The Gathering with me using starter decks and we lost, then the following night we re-played the scenario with another newbie, building our decks this time around. (The new friend I built a deck for.)

So, one of the players who played the night before picked Mark Harrigan and the other picked Minh Thi Phan. I explained that it was fine to double-dip on any class, especially those two, then I explained Survivor, Rogue, and Mystic to the newbie. He wanted to play a mystic and after looking over the characters (with really brief explanations from me), he picked Akachi Onyele. The Rogue I wanted to play most was Sefina Rousseau, and I didn't want to be stealing the newbie's thunder, so I instead picked "Ashcan" Pete, someone who was decent and fighting or gathering clues as the need arises.

We played through The Gathering and everyone started to get the hang of the game (with some pretty easy monsters showing up and no real danger happening), and right before we advanced to the last Act, we got slammed with our weaknesses and with enemies out of the encounter deck. And they all decided to advance the Act deck--since I had explained that reaching a Resolution means we don't normally have to deal with all of the problems in front of us. (Besides weaknesses that can cause trauma!)

So, bad gets worse when Minh failed her first attempt to Parley with a Story Asset ally, and couldn't return to our location with them. (In one turn.) And Mark takes damage from Sophie while fighting the Big Bad with a Machete, putting him on the verge of being wracked with guilt. I'm doing my best to handle the rats, the Mob Enforcer, and ghouls lingering around with the help of Scooby Duke and cards in my hand.

We survive a turn of the onslaught, only for the Agenda to advance. It becomes clear to us that we need to resolve the Objective on the Act card rather than trying to deal with all the lesser threats. Minh finally brings the Story Asset ally back to our location, which helps us all concentrate all of our efforts on finishing off the Big Bad, Scoob getting the last strike in!

Minh, the lead investigator, makes a choice that leads us to Resolution 2. They got 9XP and the rest of us got 8.

Charisma was a kind of greedy level up choice, but I'm probably going to try to get Aquinnah (1) by the last scenario of the campaign. Ideally, I can get Aquinnah (3) and have her show an elder god who's boss, but we'll see if that pans out.

Whoa, we managed to "win" Scenario 2. We walked out with 10 experience, we were just short of being able to clear out two more locations. But I feel like I had enough experience left to really optimize my deck. Flare makes it very likely I don't even need the economy to afford Leo De Luca or Aquinnah (3). If I had one more experience, I probably would have added a second Charisma instead of another upgraded Emergency Cache. But we'll see if that ends up really mattering. Perhaps I'll beat Scenario 3 for the first time with this team!