I love that it's a weakness that you can remove while progressing the game but it's too easy for cluevers.

I think this is well balanced for fighters as you can always get help from a teammate... unless you draw it during your turn. I had this in Marion and it was terrifying. In my most recent game I had 5 turns in a row where I draw this during my turn (after playing an event) and I was forced to take a horror and shuffle it back in my deck before anybody could help remove it. I ended the scenario with 1 sanity remaining and this being the only card in my deck. Very scary.

In the right hands, this skill will always net 5 tokens for 0 cost. This puts it on par with the upgraded version of Keep Faith!

I found this particularly effective with Father Mateo/Favor of the Sun and Ancient Covenant. This guarantees a success with +2 your base stats.

This card mechanically feels similar to "I'll take that!" to me - you play an item from hand after succeeding after a specified test. However, I'm a bit flabbergasted by how much better that card seems than this one. First, Hold Up requires you to play it in advance of performing the fight action, whereas "I'll take that!" is fast and allows you to respond to your own success. The auto-fail sends this card to your discard pile as opposed to you being able to retry the same test for another chance at an over success. Second, Hold Up's effect replaces the damage of the test, while you keep the clue or the evasion of the enemy with "I'll take that!". Finally, this card costs 1 resource while the other card is free. These cards are on a completely different playing field in regards to level of power!

No mention of Preston here yet! For the Preston who wants to automatically succeed, this card seems like it would be bomb-diggety. Just uh... make sure you get approval from potential teammates. Or don't. You're a rogue after all!

I completely misinterpreted the text on Robert's ability, so my review is quite misinformed.. I'll leave the original comment as maybe it will prevent someone else from making my mistake.

The ability feels quite different than the upgraded Robert Castaigne

This is also one of two level zero allies for rogue that adds ; the other being Lonnie Ritter

fighters tend to rely on more actions, to defeat enemies as compared to fighters with big damage numbers. This is another card to theoretically save actions.

How many actions do you save to gain what is virtually one more ammo? I suppose this depends on if you are stocking a lot of weapons with low ammo. You don't save as much if your weapons have a lot of ammo already. Keep in mind this ability is only for discarding one handed weapon which are typically lower damage (with one exception detailed later). The other benefit is if you are out of ammo, and haven't evaded the enemy to exhaust them, you might avoid an attack of opportunity if you can kill the enemy.

it's not bad with Dirty Fighting, when you are out of ammo on .41 Derringer maybe you can use that extra action to play the next firearm.

Best use might be one more use of Sawed-Off Shotgun with Well Connected and lots of resources. This can easily become big damage (imagine Jenny pulling her elder sign) Feel free to dabble with Mob Connections to bring it back, but since that is 2 resources to recur and 3 more to play the shotgun, you will need to watch your funds to keep Well Connected providing a good bonus.

With experience it is recommended to upgrade to Robert Castaigne as it has simpler combos and is less resource intensive.

In my opinion, if I have to choose one early ally to add I would favor choosing Lonnie and a Trench Coat or Heavy Furs for damage mitigation and other bonuses. Later I would consider the upgraded Robert Castaigne instead of his zero version.