Each player chooses an investigator and takes their mini-card. Set health and sanity tokens to the printed values.
Each player builds or selects a 30-card deck for their investigator (respecting deckbuilding rules and card limits).
Set up the chaos bag with tokens matching your chosen difficulty level (noted in the campaign guide).
Read the scenario setup in the campaign guide. Place locations, set the agenda deck and act deck, and add doom/clue tokens as instructed.
Place all investigators at the starting location.
Each player gains 5 resources, draws an opening hand of 5 cards. You may mulligan once — set aside any cards, draw that many replacements, then shuffle set-aside cards back.
Winning & Losing
Win: Advance the act deck to its completion or meet the scenario's specific victory conditions.
Lose: The agenda deck advances past its final stage, or all investigators are defeated (health or sanity reduced to 0 eliminates an investigator).
Round Overview
1. Mythos Phase— Skip on round 1. Add 1 doom to the agenda. Each player draws 1 encounter card and resolves it. Check if the doom threshold is met.
2. Investigation Phase— Each investigator takes 3 actions in player order. Actions include: investigate, move, play a card, draw 1 card, gain 1 resource, engage an enemy, evade, fight, or activate an ability.
3. Enemy Phase— Hunter enemies move toward their prey. All engaged enemies attack (deal their horror and damage values).
4. Upkeep Phase— Ready all exhausted cards. Each investigator draws 1 card and gains 1 resource. Discard down to hand size (8) if needed.