[Pre-release review written before the last three scenarios of The Forgotten Age were published.]

Okay, this is a weird one. Unlike Ace in the Hole which, for the same XP cost, is instantly and reliably useful, Borrowed Time can only really be useful if you build your entire deck around it.

While superficially similar to Ace, Borrowed Time gives you deferred actions rather than extra ones. Why would this be useful? Mainly because of the combos you can achieve with cards that confer bonuses until the end of the round, the phase, or the investigator's turn. That means building a deck with one-round-boost assets, or at least a large number of events and skills.

Ideally, the one-round boosts should come from reusable assets, because then you could reliably spend alternate turns saving up actions and then taking pumped-up super-turns. At the time of writing, the assets with one-round boosts (based on the search strings 'x:"end of the"' and 'x:"end of your"' on ArkhamDB) are:

• Keen Eye, which only works for a character who can buy 3XP Rogue and Guardian cards (and is a pretty underwhelming combo anyway);
• Encyclopedia, which only works for a character who can buy 2XP Seeker and 3XP Rogue cards; and
• The Red-Gloved Man, which doesn't actually stay in play for more than a round, so it's more like an event for our purposes.

So, basically, Lola Hayes with Encyclopedia is your only option at the moment, but it's a pretty compelling option. More on that in a moment.

Turning to single-use cards, first of all you should obviously try to run two copies of Pay Day with Borrowed Time. For 0XP cards, Intrepid, Sleight of Hand, and especially Fight or Flight should usually be included in a Borrowed Time deck where feasible. Mind over Matter won't play well with any of the characters so far who can actually buy Borrowed Time, but who knows what the future holds?

Under the current card-mix, the best-case non-Lola scenario seems to be recurring The Red-Gloved Man - take a Rogue who can buy Survivor cards like Jenny Barnes or Finn Edwards, and use A Chance Encounter to replay The Red-Gloved Man, and then use Resourceful to replay A Chance Encounter. That's powerful if it works, but it hardly ever will - you'd basically be building your deck in the hope that you draw Borrowed Time and The Red-Gloved Man early enough to put them to work, which is unlikely even if you doubled up on The Red-Gloved Man for a total of 16XP. It seems pretty clear that Jenny and Finn have better builds available at that level.

Having said all that, I think a Borrowed Time/Encyclopedia combo has some real potential for Lola or for a hypothetical future Rogue/Seeker character. The Seeker class has Research Librarian and No Stone Unturned to improve the chances that the Investigator can actually get Encyclopedia and Borrowed Time into play. Maybe supplement with Quick Thinking, upgraded .41 Derringer, or the normally-inefficient Leo De Luca in order to get even more boosted actions. In Lola's case, she also has access to all those lovely Survivor cards, so a Lola/Borrowed Time deck could be a serious powerhouse.

For anybody else, though, this seems like a pretty dubious thing to throw 6XP at.

Uses for this strenght card:

• Kill a bad treachery. The inbuilt helps make this happen but this use really takes off with Alyssa Graham in your deck. Mind the strict build restrictions and potential inconsistency since youre not guaranteed to draw Split the Angle. If ally slots are hard to find then Scrying and Scrying

Obviously the 5 mythic level 0 card limit can affect your ability to field Alyssa, but take it from me, this is a hugely powerful interaction.

• Kill a useless draw. Your top card is always revealed and if you see something that isnt helpful, for example Emergency Cache when you're sitting on 7 resources, you can rid yourself of the dead draw action-free and reveal something immediately useful.

Be mindful not to kill cards you need later or yourself with the horror from cycling your deck.

• Foresight is good. The least useful ability in my opinion, but you can always spend a few actions to spy on the Mythos deck. You wont always see stuff to kill and Norman struggles with action econ, but knowing the future is helpful, especially in larger groups where each unique action is less important. In a 4 player game you can help your friends prepate for enemies and if you spent 6 actions spying and kill just 1 Doom generation thats a return of 6 actions for your investment.

Norman cant gain cards like Deduction, Archaic Glyphs and his is so high that he gets limited returns from Drawn to the Flame or Rite of Seeking, this may mean that youre picking up every clue singly with an test, thus actions will be primo real estate, especially solo.

I just wanted to provide a bit of statistical analysis for Sefina's alternative opening hand in an attempt to help people with the question of how many events should you have to get the most value out of the ability to place cards beneath her.

For a standard deck For at least 2 cards tucked: 3 (non painted world) events provide a 30% chance and 6 provide a 72%

For at least 3 cards tucked: 5 events provides a 24% chance and 9 events provide an 72% chance

For at least 4 cards tucked: 8 events provide a 30% chance and 12 provide a 73% chance

For all 5 cards tucked: 10 events provide a 24% chance and 15 events provide a 74% chance.

For those interested in the impact of cards added during a campaign, adding 4 non weakness non event cards to your deck lowers the above odd around 7% for the 20-30% values and around 12% for the 70% values skewing worse for the larger amount of tucked cards.

Just want to make a few quick points here. First, I think this card is somewhat underappreciated. Three resources, a card, and an action to automatically dispose of a Hunting Nightgaunt or Conglomeration of Spheres is a great deal. It's a shame that this is a Seeker card, because Seekers have some of the most valuable resources and actions in the game. If this were a Rogue card, it would be much better. Still, there's nice value here.

Remember that reaction triggers are optional (so you don't have to throw away your Disc if you draw Swarm of Rats), and that you can use this to discard a teammate's draw (provided you're at their location, which you should always try to be), so getting good value out of this is pretty easy. Unlike something like Tooth of Eztli, you can get full value out of the Disc even if you draw it in the mid-to-late game.

There's a nice interaction with Scavenging. I don't really recommend this for Rex (he has far, far better things to do with his actions and money), but I think this is a pretty reasonable build for Minh.

Finally, this card gets much better in the Forgotten Age campaign. Ordinarily, the fact that this card discards rather than defeats the enemy is a drawback. That means it doesn't add victory enemies to the victory display, reducing the number of attractive targets. In Forgotten Age, though, Disc of Itzamna is an outstanding response to big Vengeance enemies like Boa Constrictor.

This is such a prominent and frequently-referenced card that I thought it deserved a quick review. In the days when we only had the Core Set, Unexpected Courage was absolutely one of the 15 best cards available to every investigator, and you saw two copies in pretty much every decent deck. To this day, people use Unexpected Courage as a benchmark for evaluating new releases.

I think Unexpected Courage is still a perfectly decent card, and will not cripple your deck should you run it. More often than not, though, I omit this card in multiplayer these days. Although +2 to any test for a card is not a bad deal--you can almost always find a situation where the test is important and the +2 is a significant swing in probability--for the vast majority of investigators, there is more than a full deck's worth of more powerful cards available. Simply put, the standards have risen.

This card does offer a lot of flexibility in exchange for relatively low power. But in high-level multiplayer, that's not the kind of trade you want to be making. The best approach there is to have investigators hyper-specialize and spend as little time as possible taking tests outside of their area of strength. You can see how Unexpected Courage is not one of the most powerful cards for this strategy.

Besides, this card's flexibility diminishes on high levels. On Easy, this card gives almost any investigator a decent shot at doing almost anything (except maybe the very hardest tests in their very weakest stats.) On higher levels, when the average pull is -a -3 or worse, you would have to stack a lot of additional boosts for the card to function this way.

I think this card is better in true solo, where flexibility is much more important. And there are some investigators who have special synergy with skill cards, like Minh, for whom this card is obviously more powerful. But these cases aside, I'm usually not finding room for Unexpected Courage these days.

(By the way, nothing in this review applies to the other core skill cards: Guts, Overpower, etc. Those cards are a totally different kettle of fish and continue to be outstanding, in my opinion.)