- Arkham Horror Second Edition is a brutally difficult board game to begin with, but three particular Ancient Ones make it practically unwinnable. Since your gear is both decided by starting equipment and sheer luck of the draw, you need all the help you can get
- Cthulhu himself is one of the worst. His ability reduces both the max sanity and stamina of every Investigator by 1. Characters with average numbers such as 5/5 or 6/4 struggle enough, but any character with a 7/3 is in for a brutal time. Because this is a passive effect that is always active; any time an Investigator is devoured and that player draws a new character, this effect immediately cripples that character. This is made even worse if Father Dagon and Mother Hydra are Heralds, as their abilities explicitly debuff the players with more stat loss and give Cthulhu extra bonuses to his toughness and strength on top of adding additional nasty effects.
- Atlach-Nacha can be utterly impossible if your draws from the Mythos Deck are bad. Every gate you open is a Gate Burst. Normally, when a location is sealed by an Elder Sign, that location cannot have a new gate appear there. However, one of the new mechanics is that certain card draws result in a Gate Burst, which removes these valuable symbols and reverses progress by the players. Atlach Nacha making every gate opening a Gate Burst means the players are just crossing their fingers with every draw that no gates open where there are seals. This also means that, even in the best circumstance where no Gate Bursts happen, new gates are constantly opening, which risks Atlach-Nacha waking up prematurely and resulting in a Total Party Kill. It's a lose-lose situation.
- Glaaki is considered, without contest, the hardest Ancient One to beat. His ability is somewhat situational and it's possible to not run into any Servants of Glaaki, but the problem comes in if the players fail to stop his awakening. Many different cards and actions raise the game's Terror Level, which results in numerous problems for the players. During the final battle, Glaaki raises the Terror level by 1. This alone, during a fight, does nothing... but if the Terror Level is ever 10, Glaaki immediately wins and everybody dies without any further chance to retaliate. If the Investigators go into this fight with the Terror Level above 3, they're basically done for unless everybody got a perfect set of weapons and magic to use to offest his physical resistance and his powerful -5 Combat Rating. If it is at 9 when the battle starts, it's an instant win for Glaaki. To make matters worse, if anyone were to die due to an errant spell or negative effect on a good card, Glaaki immediately bumps the Terror Level by 2.
- Ironically, the most powerful Ancient One lore-wise is Azathoth, but gameplay wise he's a complete pushover unless the player's have numerous Heralds or expansions in play. Yes, he wins if the game goes to the final battle by default, but players don't want the game to go to the final battle since every Ancient One is terribly dangerous. However, one of the heralds in the game, Ghroth, synergizes with Azathoth incredibly well as his ability starts the game with 2 Doom Tokens, meaning Azathoth is already on the way to waking up, and every turn a Mystic Mythos card is drawn, a die is rolled and one of the outcomes is adding another Doom Token. With poor draws and rolls, this makes it easy for Azathoth to fill his 14 Doom Token track rather easily.
- The Dark Pharaoh is a difficult Herald that can make the game actively not fun to play. The detriments to using the exhibit items in the Dark Pharaoh expansion come with such negative debuffs such as being cursed or suffering damage that it becomes a genuine hassle to bother collecting a single one. To make matters worse, if Nyarlethotep is active (an already difficult Ancient one with the ability to put powerful unique "Mask Monsters" in play), it gets a +1 to its health for every Mask Monster not defeated before the final battle. Considering how grueling these monsters are to face, it's entirely possible to end up facing a Nyarlethotep with at least a +3 to health or a maxed +10. Both scenarios might as well be a game-over.
- The Dunwich Horror is a herald who also acts as a miniboss as dangerous as an Ancient One. When the Dunwich Horror is in play, certain actions raise the Dunwich Track. When the track fills, the Dunwich Horror is unleashed. When it moves on a 3-6 (later amended to 2-6); it adds Doom Tokens to the Ancient One's Doom Track. Worse yet, the danger is poses is randomized every time it fights so you cannot ever be prepared. It could have impossibly beefy stats, or just outright kill an Investigator for failing a roll.
- Quachill Uttaus can be absolutely brutal and is entirely luck dependent. Unlike all other Ancient Ones, this one changes the turn order. Normally the player with the First Player token passes it to the next player each turn, but Quachil Uttaus forces every player to discard valuable Clue Tokens to pass it to the next player. If the player refuses to do so, they must draw from the Dust Deck. There are three decks, and the first two each have three cards that shuffle the deck, and one card that discards the deck. The third deck has three cards that shuffle the deck, and one card that kills the investigator and reshuffles all three decks back into play. Additionally, if the players end up fighting Quachil Uttaus, his ability is to just outright kill whoever is Player 1. Next turn, the new Player 1 will die. Investigators are on a strict time limit to even attempt to defeat him, and him having both Physical and Magical immunity makes this so much worse as any character with a low Fight stat is basically just dead-weight.
- Ghatanothoa is entirely a luck-based mission. Every turn a player gets more than one clue token, a player must flip over a visage token. seven of them have a clear sky, but one of them has Ghatanothoa's face. If this token is flipped over, that Investigator just outright immediately is devoured. Once this happens, or four of the tokens are flipped, all tokens are shuffled and flipped back over. Ironically, this makes the easier difficulties harder, as the difficulty card for Discomforting (the easiest difficulty) places two clue tokens on every space instead of one, meaning the entire board is one giant landmine.
- Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition starter adventure module Lost Mine of Phandelver has Klarg Clawhammer, a bugbear mercenary and boss of the first real dungeon the players will be exploring. Due to his Bugbear abilities, if he attacks first during the first round combat he can easily deal enough damage to drop most first level characters in one round, 2d8+2d6+2, or an average of 18 damage. If he does higher than average damage, there's a good chance the target will be flat out killed even if they had full health, which will almost certainly happen if his attack is a Critical hit (where his average damage would increase to 34!) Due to Phandelver being part of the starter set, Klarg is the first real high damage enemy most players will encounter, and while his damage goes down after the first round, it is a hell of a wake up call in a mostly easy warm up dungeon.
- Exalted second edition's Deathlords are hugely overstatted and obnoxiously powerful, to the point where people can wonder in all seriousness why they haven't destroyed the world yet all by themselves. They were nerfed multiple times, most notably when their wtfhax perfect defense that didn't count as a Charm activation was clarified to only work a handful of times before having to be reactivated, but they remained ridiculously powerful. Third Edition has largely solved this problem, rendering them extremely powerful, but ultimately beatable with cooperation and heavy stat focus.
- Pathfinder: Players with a lot of experience with high level play in Second Edition speculate that the hekatonkheires titan was designed as a joke. It's not that its stats are particularly strong; in actuality, a 25th-level enemy is perfectly beatable for a party of 20th-level PCs with buffs even though the encounter math suggests otherwise due to how strong many 20th-level items and feats are, and the hekatonkheires are only 23rd-level. The problem is their abilities; these titans are Space Masters with the ability to teleport as many enemies as they want within 120 feet anywhere they want within that range and trap them. Between their insane reach, ability to lock troublesome enemies in an extra-dimensional labyrinth, react to attempts to move within their reach or cast a spell with an attack up to 100 times per round, attack all enemies within their reach at the same time, and Impossible Stature aura making it more difficult to move within 100 feet of them, the ability of the hekatonkheires to lock down enemies is absolutely nightmarish and makes them practically impossible to deal with. Anywhere within 120 feet is effectively an "Instant Death" Radius, in a game where that's a long range for a spell and the longest ranged weapons take a penalty outside that distance.
- Sentinels of the Multiverse:
- This game has The Chairman. 15 of his 25 cards are minions of one form or another, and the deck's mechanics mean the field will start out heavily populated and the swarm will only grow. The heroes have to defeat a certain number of minions before The Chairman's card flips and he can even be damaged... but each one defeated provokes a high-damage counterattack from The Operative. Even when The Chairman finally does become vulnerable, he counters almost every attack made at him for heavy damage. Even if The Chairman is defeated, the heroes don't win until they can bring down The Operative as well; if this happens, The Chairman goes into the discard pile like any other defeated target... which means if the Villain Deck is reshuffled (and considering he starts with 10/25 cards in the trash and you need to defeat a lot of minions to get this far, it probably will), there's a chance he can be played like any other card, return to the field invulnerable side up with full health.
- Wager Master, Miss Information, and the Ennead can also fall into this, particularly Challenge MI and Advanced Ennead. Wager Master has a deck of random nonsense that can, depending on order, either lose him the game before he even starts or utterly wreck your shit, particularly since What Do You Really Know is an indestructible Ongoing that will deal obscene amounts of damage to you. Miss Information takes forever and is a huge pain in the neck who keeps trashing your field and causing tons of damage to you, particularly on her Clue-spamming Challenge version. Finally, the Ennead can dish out a lot of damage, and the Advanced version is essentially guaranteed to get their full numbers out quickly, at which point they become extremely hard to shift without the exact right options.
- The Others (2015) is a cyberpunk action-horror board game where 1 player is the Sin player, and the other players are all Agents of F.A.I.T.H. The Sin player gets special rules depending on which Sin they are playing as, making the difficulty of the game for the F.A.I.T.H. agents variable on the choices of the Sin player. Of them, Envy is probably the worst. Every time a F.A.I.T.H. Agent gets an upgrade, they have to make a choice: take 1 wound (you only have 5 HP and healing isn't always easy) or corrupt every other Agent in play (A max of seven corruption can be had before new corruptions just result in wounds). The problem is that Upgrades are absolutely vital to the success of the F.A.I.T.H. players, as they offset the immense advantage the Sin player has. Taking damage every time you get a vital bonus is a massive problem, and it can outright result in easy deaths in the benefit of the Sin player. To make matters worse, if the mission is a Corruption mission, F.A.I.T.H. players run the risk of drawing a Corruption Card that could kill them outright or give their character to the Sin player.
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