Magnificent. Introducing the Browning Automatic Rifle, a weapon that lets you spend exactly as much ammo as you need to one-shot the enemy.

I think the most obvious card to compare this to is Lightning Gun, and I think they tend to be neck-and-neck. The key here is that the Lightning Gun's insane +5 bonus is usually more than you need, given that every character who can buy this already has at least 4 . Mark Harrigan in particular is going to prefer the BAR's more judicious approach to spending ammunition.

Some noteworthy interactions:

• Probably the best card to date to combine with Sleight of Hand, so Zoey Samaras and Leo Anderson should especially consider it.
• One of the few cards for which Contraband unambiguously pulls ahead of Extra Ammunition.
• Speaking of which, Extra Ammunition and BAR are genuinely terrible together. You want Extra Ammunition to at least double your usage out of a weapon, and this combination is nowhere close. (I might consider it before Contraband, though. You could probably make the case that it's worthwhile to get 22 ammo instead of 16.)

The BAR seems to just generally love Rogue cards, actually. Even Double or Nothing, a card I'm not ordinarily fond of, can seriously up its game in a BAR deck, where its chances of producing a 10-damage strike are much better than with Shotgun.

In all, the Extra Ammunition problem prevents the BAR from being quite as good as the Lightning Gun, but it's not quite as expensive, either, so they're roughly in the same tier. (Lightning Gun pulls ahead on Expert, though, because its +5 becomes more relevant.)

The BAR seems so powerful for Leo that I think it's my automatic first upgrade if I ever run him.

As far as investigator-specific weaknesses go, Vengeful Hound is relatively mild. I would say it is most like the basic weakness Stubborn Detective in that it effectively blocks out Norman's special ability.

The differences between Vengeful Hound and Stubborn Detective:

• Stubborn Detective has +1 fight, where Vengeful Hound has +1 evade.
• Stubborn Detective's effect blanks every investigator's text box at the location, whereas Vengeful Hound's effect only works on the investigator engaged to them.
• Vengeful Hound deals one point of horror damage whereas Stubborn Detective does not.

Generally speaking, character-specific weaknesses are supposed to be worse than basic weaknesses, so if you get a character-specific weakness that's on par with a basic weakness, that's pretty good. If you compare Vengeful Hound to other character-specific enemy weaknesses like Sacrificial Beast and Graveyard Ghouls, I think it's much milder. In fact, I think even Stubborn Detective is a tougher weakness since it has a harder fight and you really don't want to be evading these types of smaller hunter enemies anyways.

I think this weakness was made weaker because Norman Withers has such low and , but he has plenty of combat options to help him deal with this weakness. Mind over Matter, "I've got a plan!", and Shrivelling can all potentially take down this monster with tests that are base +2 or base +3. That's really not bad. Of course, if it's multiplayer and Norman doesn't have any combat options in his deck for some reason, another investigator can easily dispatch this enemy for him.

I'm not sure what the non-replacement cards for Norman Withers will look like. I think that the other replacement card, Split the Angle, is situational at best. However, I think it is possible people may come back to use these replacement cards even after the main cards are released so that they can continue to use this relatively mild weakness.

There's an obscure theorem that I feel I should bring to your attention:

Finn's Law

For any card in Arkham Horror CG, if the card's combo potential with Double or Nothing is part of what makes it exciting, then that card is actually very boring.

Double or Nothing depends on being played with just the right card in just the right circumstances in order to accomplish anything. The effects of this card can certainly be spectacular, but spectacular does not win scenarios - utility, efficiency, and reliability do.

I've built a fair number of high-XP Seeker decks and I've never been that tempted to include Deciphered Reality. Oh, sure, the peak performance of this card is bonkers. In some scenarios you could arrange events so that you pick up nine clues in a single action. The rewards for a successful investigation are so high that combining it with Double or Nothing is actually worth actively pursuing (whereas most reviews' mentions of Double or Nothing are more like a fun thought experiment than a practical deck-building consideration).

But I'm not sold on it, and I think there's an important philosophical point we ought to unpack, there.

Arkham Horror CG decks should be built defensively. The consequences of succeeding a scenario are huge compared with failure - it could mean getting powerful allies, avoiding trauma and extra weaknesses, or even tipping the balance of success or failure for the entire campaign. By comparison, the difference between succeeding at a scenario and succeeding at it very well is typically an XP or two.

Therefore, cards that help you not fail are more important than cards that help you win harder. Deciphered Reality is a card of the latter type. You can only really bring out its full potential when you're in total control of your situation, where you can afford to have you and your other investigators spread out and exposing as many locations as possible to maximize the yield. If that's the position you're in, then you were probably going to win anyway.

Sure, in theory picking up a lot of clues at once can tip the balance between a win and a loss, but honestly? This is more clues than you need. Bear in mind that averaging one clue per investigator per round is extremely fast, and most scenarios will let you get away with half that pace, e.g. six rounds to pick up three clues per investigator. Massive clue-vacuuming plays are less important for a Seeker than just making sure that they, or someone else nearby, can keep enemies at bay so they can zip around the map and investigate at a steady pace.

If you don't specifically plan to use Deciphered Reality to make a huge play, then it may not even be worth using. It's not cheap at four resources, and there are relatively affordable cards to help you rapidly collect clues, like Archaic Glyphs: Guiding Stones and both variants of Deduction. Moreover, Pathfinder or a well placed upgraded Shortcut are great ways to cut down on the number of actions in a scenario, which is similar in practice to the payoff from Deciphered Reality, but they're cheaper and they're easy to use well.

On top of that, this card is just begging to be autofailed. If that happens, then you're practically guaranteed not to have time to pick up clues at all the VP locations that you deliberately didn't finish up, and could be at risk of failing the scenario itself. This game is meant to randomly generate huge setbacks. For the love of Yig, do not put all your eggs in one basket, like Deciphered Reality is baiting you to do!

It feels like the 3XP cost of upgraded Expose Weakness has more to do with making sure that Roland Banks can't buy it than it does with the actual value of the card itself.

This card basically lets a Seeker fight an enemy with their Intellect. If that were all it did, then it would just be a weaker version of Mind over Matter.

The card's only two saving graces are the card-draw (which is fine, I guess), and that it lets another investigator take the shot. The clearest combo is Shotgun, for which Expose Weakness hugely boosts the odds of scoring the maximum 5 damage. If you throw Double or Nothing in the mix, you could be looking at 10.

That combo is all well and good if you can pull it off, but it comprises three cards across separate classes and, realistically, at least two separate investigators in the right place, and a total of 7XP. That's assuming your scenario even has an enemy with enough health to make it worthwhile.

If that represents the best case for Expose Weakness, then it's in trouble. For the same 7XP, you'd be far better off getting Acidic Ichor and 3XP Emergency Cache to refill it, and dealing with the enemies yourself. As a Seeker, you're also in a much better position to make sure you actually draw those cards, using e.g. Cryptic Research or No Stone Unturned.

Also compare with "I've got a plan!" - the other major card built around weaponizing your intellect. It's more costly than Expose Weakness and doesn't work if you don't have the clues (although for a Seeker that shouldn't be a problem very often), but it deals solid damage and you don't need anybody else's help to deal it. It's genuinely unclear whether Expose Weakness even represents an improvement, which has got to be a pretty embarrassing comparison for the card that costs 3XP.

I give this card a rating of "unpurchasable."