Wendy Adams: The Urchin

Wendy’s backstory is one of the most classic Mythos clichés, nicely put into a gaming experience. Woman is driven insane by the Mythos forces (and the added irony, since some of her actions clearly made sense, but were seen as completely crazy by the “regular folk”). As a result she ends her life in a mental institution. On top of ruining her life, it also destroys life of Wendy, who after spending few years in an orphanage chooses to live on a street.  

Legacy: Wendy is present in all Arkham File Games. Her design is always centered about being resistant to negative effects thrown at her by the game. Her tough life hardened her will, while also teaching how to hide in the shadows without being detected. This idea is still present in AH:TCG, albeit maybe not so strongly present as in the previous installments of the series.

Another defining aspect of Wendy is her Elder Sign necklace – the only thing left to her by her mom.

Isn't it fun, that both Wendy and Jenny are drifters?

 Skill Values: This is where the design of the sneaky and strong willed urchin begins. With Agility and Will of 4 she is suited like no one else to resist all the dangers of the encounter deck. She will suffer the negative consequences of having to deal with Treachery cards the least of all the characters and can instead focus on progressing the investigation. Additionally, she has solid value of both Stamina and Sanity, protecting her from ending her adventure prematurely.  This is perfectly in line with the previous vision of Wendy as a resistant, cunning character.

She is absolutely terrible at classic fighting though, as her Combat value is 1. While she can somehow boost it with Hard Knocks and one of the Survivor Weapons, it’s not a long-term solution, she could consistently employ. Instead she is forced to rely on alternative means – Backstab, evading etc. It makes the job of handling the bosses tough, though manageable – biggest issues arise if she is forced to kill multiple enemies on a regular basis (see: Acolytes in the second scenario)

Finally with her Intellect of 3 she is managing investigating fairly well, too (apparently she’s rather a clever child), her only weakness is… well, physical weakness.

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Special abilities: The resistance to possible mishaps is also represented through Wendy’s special ability. It allows her to redraw a Chaos Token, possibly saving her from the consequences of a failed skill check. Very often it can be used to save a potentially lost action (failed attack, investigation etc.), making her ability another member of the “free action” set. It comes especially handy if you invested a lot in the test – committed icons, spent resources etc.

To be able to use her ability whenever needed, you should ensure, you have a steady supply of cards – luckily not only Survivor cards are beneficial here. Pickpocketing (which she can include in her deck) is also helpful.

While dodging Deep One's blows, Wendy also got his wallet

A central theme to the Survivor cards is “push your luck” mechanism. You underinvest icons in hope of a good draw – if the Chaos Bag turns out not to be kind enough, you use Lucky! or Look what I found! to succeed against the odds (or a Rabbit Foot, to still squeeze some benefit out of a failed test).  The benefit of such approach is – in case you were lucky enough not to need Lucky! (irony intended) you keep the resources, instead of committing them in advance. Wendy’s ability fits the same niche – you pray not to have to use it, but can preserve resources/cards knowing, that if the worst happens, you get another shot.

The Elder Sign effect is pretty much another “0” in the Chaos Bag. Chances that having the Amulet (thus making it an auto-success) will somehow make any difference are very slim. If it happens, however, it’s most probably another case of her being saved from a bad negative effect; making it a very thematic experience.

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Signature cards: You can't only consider one of Wendy's signature cards at once. They exist in a connection with each other, creating an amazing dynamic. Wendy's Amulet allows you to play events from the discard pile, while her weakness removes the discard pile from the game (on top of inflicting 2 horror) which in result robs you of the events and (almost – see tricks further) all of Amulet's power.

To both achieve this interesting dynamic and prevent the abuse of the Amulet, its text stipulates for played events to go to the bottom of the deck, instead of the discard pile. It means each card will only be replayed once. Also, once you play the amulet, you can't gather more events for later re-use.

It once again leads to a push-your-luck dynamic. With the Amulet on your hand you can either create a pile of events (hoping to recycle lots of them later on), or settle with quick play of the amulet to ensure you'll take advantage of its power, before the dreaded weakness comes in.

One of the weakness, you actually prefer to draw early

There are three problems with the Amulet itself. Firstly, it is rather costly, on top of the events you plan to reuse (Backstab, Elusive, Look What I Found!... only Lucky! seems rather cheap) it uses lots of resources. Secondly, the events are lined up in a given order, so either you plan carefully a way to use them (which is sometimes hard and sometimes next to impossible) or force yourself to use them later on, playing sub-optimally. If you somehow need to play a more situational event (Elusive let's say) or commit one for icons, it lands on top of the discard pile and can easily prevent you from reusing any events at all. And last, but not least, it shares the slot with Rabbit's Foot. It all causes me to commit the Amulet surprisingly often for the juicy 2 Wild icons.

Here are the promised tricks. The general one is - even once the Amulet is in play you can still put events in discard pile and reuse them! You just need to either commit them, or use for Wendy's ability. You can even do sort of two at once! Commit Look what I found and if you still fail the investigation – play it from the discard pile! Discard any event for the Wendy's ability and then play it using her amulet. So in fact, the amulet interacts with Wendy's Special Ability, Elder Sign effect and weakness! It also builds up on the event-heavy nature of Survivor deck. Nice!

Other than the nasty interaction with the Amulet, Wendy's weakness is not a major deal, really.

While the interaction between the cards is cool and creates tons of fun tricks to use, due to its limitations it is not a superb card. In fact, my wife believes it's a very poor one. It certainly is one that does not meet huge expectations you build upon just reading its text.

The Necklace provides light in the dark.
Literally and metaphorically.

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Class/Deckbuilding options: Two main themes of Survivor class are – evading and Push-Your-Luck. It is easily seen in the cards, almost exclusively centered on this topic. Whenever Survivor cards do not fit your approach to evading, you can find some replacements within the Rogue class, toppled with absolutely powerful Pickpocketing. Unluckily, at this moment the most useful Rogue cards (even more useful for Wendy, to who surprisingly often struggles with resources and could use another Push-Your-Luck card – Sure Gamble) are outside of her reach. (Cat Burglar is worth considering, though, despite her access to Leo) Rogue weapons are not particularly strong either to help her with her low Combat, so I’d rather rely on Survivor options for the rare instances of fighting (Backstab helps a LOT, though, basically main way to deal with the big guys, save Double or Nothing for it!).

Since Wendy is not really a fighter, she does mostly investigating job (and some odd jobs like dealing with Locked Doors, spawning cultists in the 2^nd scenario etc.), thus lack of cards to help with investigation in a rogue deck hurts a bit.

As Rogue cards are the other set helping with evading (and similar enemy dodging tricks), it fits Wendy’s profile quite nicely. I sometimes struggle though with thematic explanations of her pulling out Liquid Courage, Hard Knocks or a Derringer…

Despite The Prohibition, even Children abused strong Liquors

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Wendy seems to fit a role, that some of players see as assigned to Skids. She can deal with minor tasks, while dodging the enemies on her way. The Urchin has tons of ways to avoid fighting, while remaining efficient. It seems that designers are on their way to boost evading (Bait and Switch is the Exhibit A here, as with good planning it might be just as good as killing a monster), so we can hope for her to get even stronger with upcoming cards.

The Arkham Files game always had some troubles adjusting for an Urchin. Despite some attempts (Lower Sanity Stamina values in Arkham Horror, for instance) the limitations seem not to portray playing a child (or a teenager if you prefer) too well. It is a sacrifice done for the gameplay reasons (otherwise her card choice would be too limited for creating an interesting and strong enough deck).

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 All images are courtesy of cardgamedb.com and fantasyflightgames.com