The Ornate bow has to have been one of the most impactful cards in the Forgotten age Cycle, simply because it is the only weapon that straight-up fights via . Here's my experience with it:

Ornate bow is fantastic. But bear in mind that it has severe limitations that drastically change the way you approach combat.

• It has "infinite" uses but only ever one loaded shot at a time.

At once a big problem and incredibly flavourful. As an character sneaking around the periphery taking shots is exactly what you would be doing, the design of the bow achieves this in how carefully you must approach combat. You need to be ready to evade when you fight big threats, you take your time to load and plot shots.

To be effective with a bow, NEVER forego reloading it. The characters who put the bow to the best use need high , but more importantly they need a synergizing cardpool. A 3 character with the right cards is a way better archer then a 4 one without. The cardpools in question are: and .

The bow has a worthy bonus to hit, a 3 character is making shots at +5. The important part is being able to supplement the accuracy with cards that magnify the hit chance or "arrow efficiency". Live and Learn and Lucky! are HUGE backup cards for when you draw a really bad token while Sleight of Hand and Double or Nothing help you get a little more out of your bow. Narrow Escape lets you reload under pressure. Leo De Luca helps you get more shots inbetween evades. Lola Santiago, Peter Sylvestre and Track Shoes all help you net hits, not to mention several skill-pump talents, Cornered or High Roller. If you can play cards then Shrivelling covers you while the bow is empty and Premonition helps land big hits. The bow as an weapon cannot use Vicious Blow but Venturer will keep your bow loaded for you!

Watch out for the resource cost. 4 is quite a lot, but the bow is absolutely worth it. The double hand slot is much more a nuisance because it blocks Lockpicks.

So. Who can use it best?

• Wendy Adams, Silas Marsh and Rita Young all have good cardpools for it and great stats, especially Wendy whose accuracy is unmatched thanks to her ability.
• Agnes Baker has a good cardpool for archery, once you combine the bow, spells and her ability she's easily the strongest combat in the game and very flexible too.
• Sefina Rousseau, "Skids" O'Toole and Finn Edwards all have great cardpools and stats for the bow, it really shines in Sefina who can supplement it with spells and attack events and can afford to land headshots every now and then.
• Rex Murphy, while the cardpool has next to no synergy with the bow, Rex can just borrow some cards, his limitations block Lucky! and Double or Nothing but he can do Track Shoes and Live and Learn. The shoes are pretty great for a .
• "Ashcan" Pete and Jenny Barnes both have nice cardpools for archery but both also have other techniques to fight, bringing in the bow is viable but will result in rather complex decks that double-dip and .

Thats it. I've used the bow to dig through surprisingly densely packed hellholes, now you go do the same! Remember this mantra: Shoot - Evade - Reload.

I am always stumped when I see this card, because as much as this cycle toys around with the players, suddenly inverting difficulty levels at the very end of the campaign seems to be mean just for the sake of being mean. Players who choose the Easy difficulty setting may cruise through the campaign only to suddenly have to deal with 10 Autofails in a bag which is quite possibly an absolute showstopper. Harsh.

The artwork of this card is sooo cool. And here you are an interesting tip: the woman painted on this card is a real ffg employee. Does anyone know any other card with such background? Let's gather collection!

I've been using this card with Daisy Walker rather than with one of the main Mystics which makes this perspective slightly different. The short version is that I really like the card, though I appreciate that it's not awesome.

So let's start with the basics. I think the icons are better for Daisy Walker than they are for the Mystics, particularly the Agility, so that's something. It's also important to point out that it's both fast and so it doesn't cost you an action as well as it costs 0 resources. This means that the only cost to it is the slot is takes up. The ability to play it at pretty much any point in the game regardless of location or turn order really increases the odds you can use it at a good time.

Now for the more complex stuff. There's lots of times you can use this, but the times that provide a good benefit are much fewer. Reacting to things like nasty encounters haven't turned out well for my group. Typically we've drawn a terrible token and so there's little else to do than suck it up - no amount of committing will help. In fact various of the uses of the card are for nought when you draw a bad token - all that happens is you know the inevitable and so either just fail or end up wasting an action.

There are times when you find out how much you need to commit (or not) and those are nice, but they're often pretty niche. On the one hand you might be really likely to fail so there's a question about why you're doing it anyway and typically you'll just find out that up you're going to fail. In another case you might be pretty likely to succeed and so you just confirm that that works too with no real value. The ideal situation is that it's a challenging but not insurmountable test for which you have enough cards to commit but would ideally save them if you can. However, you must consider that you're spending a card to save cards so you'll need to save at least two cards to make it worthwhile. Hmm. that's a pretty niche case in my opinion. I suppose you might find out how much to boost with something like Higher Education though.

So where does this leave us? Well, it really starts to improve when:

• you have charges on things that you want to avoid wasting
• you're using cards you want to make sure you get the positive effect from (e.g. extra clues or damage)
• when you're about to perform actions where certain tokens cause drawbacks.

When reading the other review here I saw that this perhaps has a lot more use in a Mystic deck than with Daisy Walker. This is because most spells fit two of these criteria. With Daisy Walker you're generally just smashing out clues so it has less use, but we have been using it with Old Hunting Rifle on another investigator nicely. Some uses are random chances - using it essentially unnecessarily before Archaic Glyphs meant I avoided an autofail that would waste a token - and those are nice but not exactly strong. You can get some utility by using it early on as well - ideally before anyone has started their turn - and essentially help plan your turn. If you get something cool you or someone else can do good stuff, but generally you learn "yup you will fail the test" and so plan around that accordingly.

As I said at the beginning, I like this card and it's fun, but in my opinion its use cases are more situational than I at first thought. It's almost useless for encounters as well as for many of the Big Moments that appear in this game. It's most useful things with limited uses such as spells, items and cards, and things you control that may have bad side-effects on certain pulls.

It felt like the community went pretty bonkers over this card when it came out. I've been using it most of the way through Carcosa so here's my thoughts.

It costs a lot of XP and a lot of money, and you'll maybe want two copies to make sure you get actually it at a useful time. You might feel it needs even more support too in the way of cards to add more secrets on to it, so that's even more slots/resources/xp ploughed into it. This adds up to a lot so it better be pretty damn good.

Basically, it's not been as good as I hoped.

Maybe it's the investigator party mix that's the issue, but I'm Daisy Walker which seems like the intended user. Maybe it's that running it in Carcosa isn't so good. Maybe running it with only two investigators is the problem due to not always being at the same place as another investigator. Who knows?

What tends to happen is that first it requires a lot of saving up if I don't have Dr. Milan Christopher out, which is already annoying. Then I get it on the table and then it sits there waiting for a good opportunity that only seldom comes. The reaction to encounters seems great, but then there's lots of reason it's not useful:

• you pull an enemy. It can't help with that
• you need to test a stat that is too low and you can't boost so it will fail anyway e.g. agility
• there's no skill test involved in the encounter
• you're not at the same location as your team mate so can't help them out
• your team mates encounter is a Peril
• the downside of the encounter is relatively harmless so there's no point wasting it e.g. adding some doom to an agenda that will advance next turn anyway or something

The secrets can sit on the card unused for a while. I find similar things can happen with cards like Ward of Protection and Forewarned which I have also been using, where using the card is just as bad as the potential penalty from the encounter, or it's an enemy so you can't use it - these cards are great and powerful but sometimes can wait a long time for the right opportunity. Pnakotic Manuscripts has been falling into the same category for me.

The other ability this card has does have it uses and has been used to good effect, but the times where you would like to use it are often problematic:

• you need a clutch evade as Daisy Walker, however you'll take an attack of opportunity using it which can be really damaging and exactly what you're trying to avoid. Also her agility is so low that it often wouldn't help anyway.
• you want to help a team mate do something important/difficult/awesome, but you can only help on the first pull and they need to do something else first
• your team mate needs to do something important/difficult/awesome, but they need to take their turn before you do so you can't help them out
• your team mate needs to hack away at an enemy and you can only help them out on the first chop. This one is of course still good, but with a big monster you need consistency
• your team mate needs to do something important/difficult/awesome but they're not in the same place as you and you really need to work the setup to make it click

Now, it is good when combo'd with risky things like the Old Hunting Rifle. It's great for that stuff for sure; however, we've been managing the campaign pretty fine without using that card for a while now. I haven't tried it with things like Lightning Gun etc., but it's probably less great for them as you get so much combat boost that's it's often not really necessary. From reading around it has potential for those all-or-nothing plays that Rogue decks sometimes have and that's probably got some legs. However, in that use case you're waiting for even more stars to align than just everyday usage which is already a bit problematic so you may only get that working a couple times in the whole campaign.

So yeah, in my opinion based on current plays it's basically a lot more situational than it appears. This doesn't make it terrible, but costing 5XP and 5 resources is a very high price to pay for it and I'm not entirely convinced it's worth it.

PS: not sure if anyone else felt like this, but this card also weirdly makes the game less fun too, which is not something I expected. If you remove key pulls from the bag from big moments in the game you have these super plays that have no risk. As a result they can be less exciting; Arkham is all about that chaos bag.