I'm not sure about about Liquid Courage for many of the investigators in the core set/Dunwich legacy. To be honest, the investigators who struggle with Sanity - e.g. Roland Banks, or "Skids" O'Toole - also tend to have low willpower, so this isn't so useful for them.

Zoey Samaras can make pretty good use of it, particularly if she has something to give Willpower a boost, and her sanity is low enough to need a little help.

However, I've found it fantastic for... Agnes Baker. Yes, she can't actually take this card herself - but another investigator can, and then use liquid courage to heal Agnes' horror. This lets her use her ability to inflict damage when she takes horror even more often, which is awesome, and her 5 makes it unlikely that she'll fail the test to heal the second horror very often.

So if you're hunting Great Old Ones with Agnes at your side, embrace sociable investigating! Come 'ere Agnes, and have wee dram for yer nerves...

The ritual candles to me are something that I thought were considerably good at first glance, but started to come around on them after further investigation.

The typical approach that I tend to take for any test that matters to me is to get to the +2 range in a 'standard' scenario. I mention 'standard' because my opinion of ritual candles changes when we start thinking about 'hard' difficulty and beyond. In 'standard' difficulty level play the +2 that I aim for on checks is going to succeed the majority of the time regardless of whether I draw a , , or (less so on the symbol). That means that the ritual candles are doing nothing for me in those situations that I really care about it. In the hard difficulty level you can still aim for a +2 and all of a sudden the candles are now bringing that -3 into the +2 range of success for the investigator and the chances for success go up significantly.

So as far as using it for standard scenario play, I am a little down on the card, but in hard mode play I am feeling positive on the card.

The other way to play when you get the ritual candle when there are several -2 symbols would be to then just provide a +1 to your skill check and possibly get an extra pull of the bag that would be in your favor. You still have a -2 or two in the bag that are now bad for you though. However, you do keep the negative effect of the symbol from affecting you at that point that the -2 didn't. By putting yourself at a +1 with the ritual candle you fail on -2 pull but might pass on a "-1 if you fail, drop a clue at your location" which is a better situation to be in.

If you have no hand-slots in use as is on some characters, the ritual candles can provide some improvements, but on the most part, I am somewhat down on it unless I am playing on harder difficulty levels and then at that point I find it quite beneficial.

This card is a bit hard to quantify. The obvious comparison to it is against the Knife that is available to every other role in a neutral form. At the same cost and strength, there are only 2 factors to consider when deciding which one is better over the other.

Perhaps you don't consider blackjack or Knife, because you prefer to carry .45 and machete as your includes in your deck. For those types of decks, then this isn't even a consideration. But in several cases I have considered machete and Knife/blackjack as it is a considerable cost savings over the .45 and 80% of the time the machete does the job of the .45 anyway.

Also, if you are solo, blackjack isn't for you. In large groups, you may be required to peel monstrosities off of people and help them out. In these situations, with the blackjack you expect to get some action efficiency.

1 health enemy (blackjack) - Action 1 swing 1 health enemy (Knife) - Action 1 swing or Action 1 Engage, Action 2 swing

2 health enemy (blackjack) - Action 1 swing, Action 2 swing 2 health enemy (Knife) - Action 1 sacrifice swing or Action 1 swing, Action 2 swing or Engage, Action 2 swing, Action 3 swing (sacrificing if needed on the second swing if the first missed.

There might be a scenario or two there missed, but that covers the majority of what you are looking for in comparison. The main situation where blackjack is best is obvious in the 1 health enemy category because the blackjack can save you an action and it doesn't make sense to sacrifice the Knife when it is on someone (in most circumstances).

If you don't care what happens to your allies, "swing away" and choose the Knife so you have an option for a burst damage opportunity.

If you do care about your friends (how nice of you), then the majority of the time you are using this weapon you are saving an action for fighting enemies for your allies. That was my thought pattern with using this for a four player campaign. On average over three scenarios so far, this has saved me perhaps 1 action per game. Also, if you wiff on your strong attack with the Knife you are left without a weapon anymore and the blackjack doesn't tempt you with that.

What I do like about the Knife though is that you could save an action with a single attack doing 2 damage when you need. So, this can also save you 1 action per game. Also, when you have that machete out in a situation such as this, the Knife can possibly be useful still for taking out 1 of 2 enemies engaged with you to turn that machete back online.

Is that worth having over the Knife? I tend to think that it is not in practice. The Knife just seems to be a better choice from my perspective. Just in case someone was going through these considerations as well, I thought I would share the experience I have had with the card here.

Note that this card does not require that you are performing the skill test, or even that it's at your location. As a result, in a multiplayer game it can trigger almost every turn, keeping you sane even while playing mystic cards and occasionally helping out your fellow investigators.

Don't forget that it works with Jim's elder sign ability. Usually there's no real difference between +1 and 0, so as long as skulls don't have some terrible extra effect, it's safe to turn your elder sign into a skull and enjoy the healing.

Initially this card seems kind of useless. Honestly I can't really comment on its applicability to your typical investigator but I do know of two investigators who can benefit a lot from it.

Zoey and Jenny can both get really screwed by their weaknesses if they drop in the last few rounds of the game. Zoey can get caught traveling all the way across the map in order to kill some jerk monsters and Jenny searching for Izzie in far off lands. This can be especially problematic in large maps or ones flush with monsters. If you only have a couple turns left in the campaign before the final Agenda procs you may not have that many actions to spare, and especially for these weaknesses they are on-par with being defeated anyway (which is significantly worse than any other investigators weakness penalty). In this method you can almost halve the number of actions required to fulfill these without screwing over your win condition.

It's not a perfect fix, but I'd consider a 1-of for these investigators to help them out alongside action-investments like Police badge or action-compression items like Cat Burgler.