It's a nice adjunct to/replacement for Burning the Midnight Oil. Rather than being 2 Resources for something you would probably be doing anyway, this is fast in a different way. I guess it would not fire if Minh Thi Phan recurred it from her discard pile with Scrounge for Supplies, but why would she do that? NOt flashy, but a nice utility card, especially since Seekers often need to spend resources on Assets to really get going. This might also help Roland Banks with his perennial resource problems.

It's temping to turn this review into a referendum on the "Blood on the Alter" 3 XP Permanent boosters, but let''s not.

Assuming you want to play with the "pay to pass strategy, most 0-cost "play from your deck boosters" are 2 XP, so this is a bargain. The "you must keep 5 cards in hand" drawback is moderately steep. So, to make this more than a "sometimes treat," you need to have good card draw (to find it and keep it active), good Resource economy (to pay for frequent use), and and that need boosting. Seekers tend to struggle a bit with resources while they get their rigs out, then slowly amass quite a pile toward the end, so having a way to turn that surplus into winning is not a bad thing, even if "pay to pass" is not your main strategy. Which Seekers might like it?

Note: I am assuming Taboo, so spamming Dr. Milan Christopher isn't an option.

Amanda Sharpe -- Her dreadful stat line could definitely use boosting, but she has no inherent economy or card draw, so you would have to build heavily for it.
Daisy Walker -- She's definitely interested in boosting her , and Old Book of Lore (plus her free tome action) gives her easy card draw, but she'll need to work on getting resources. Daisy finds this more attractive than most since many of the static boosts are Hand items, and Daisy wants tomes.
Harvey Walters -- This card was literally made for him, and he has no problem whatsoever with keeping 5 cards in hand, although he needs the boost less than most and still needs to watch his economy.
Joe Diamond -- He can definitely use the boost, and Preposterous Sketches in his Insight Deck is helpful at keeping hand size, but his decks tend to be pretty resource intense, so cashflow will be a problem, and he can get static boosts from Hawk-Eye Folding Camera, Magnifying Glass, Tooth of Eztli, all of which are probably better spends.
Mandy Thompson -- When her search engine (heh) is up and running, card draw is no problem and her resource economy is robust with the extra Astounding Revelation draws, but she can get static boosts much like Joe
Minh Thi Phan -- She could use it, but skill cards and Grisly Totem are more her speed.
Norman Withers -- Relatively high stats, plus pricey Spell Assets and Events make this unattractive for Norman. I suspect he would prefer the Crystalline Elder Sign and Arcane Studies (4).
Rex Murphy -- Rex could use boosting, but he needs to keep an eye on card draw and resources, now that Taboo has kneecapped his beloved pal Milan. Maybe?
Ursula Downs -- In my experience, Ursula struggles a bit with resources at the begining, then has an excess at the end. With a little card draw tech, this might work with her.

Do any non-Seekers want this? Most of them have better options in their home class. Carolyn Fern of Roland Banks, maybe, if they can keep the cards and cash coming? I don't see Finn Edwards, Marie Lambeau, or any of the Dunwich crew using up their precious 5 of slots on this.

So, an OK card, but definitely more suited to some decks than others.

I'm generally a fan of upgrades to cards that aren't strictly better because they make for some interesting deckbuilding considerations (and card analysis!). Each dram of Liquid Courage (1) has you heal two horror and discard a card if you fail the Willpower test, and heal one horror and draw a card if you succeed, where the original had you either heal one horror and discard, or heal two. Clearly, healing two horror is better than one, so in the event an investigator fails the test on Liquid Courage, the level one upgrade will be better. As for succeeding, drawing cards is pretty good, so I think that most investigators will be happy to take an extra card even if they are desperate for healing.

The fact that the additional horror healing is tied to failure on Liquid Courage (1) is going to be another upside for most investigators wanting horror healing. Generally, high Willpower goes a decent way towards protecting you from taking horror from encounter cards like Rotting Remains, so paradoxically the very investigators that had a good shot of passing a Willpower 2 test were the ones who least needed the additional healing from a successful Liquid Courage (0) test (the main exception being Agnes Baker). To make matters worse for the Dunwich Legacy version, Rogues as a class tend to have lower Willpower and sanity than most, so they were likely to end up sipping for a single point of sanity and a lost card for their trouble. Pretty unappealing!

Liquid Courage (1) solves that problem neatly by healing double when you fail, meaning that is no longer a lose-state for the card, and it still rewards you for actually passing the skill test should that come up. It now offers reasonably efficient repeatable horror healing, but you really have to be willing to throw away cards to use it effectively. Alternatively, target investigators who are out of cards to ignore that downside and you might also help them fill their hand back up. It's possible you can soften the blow of Liquid Coruage a bit by playing Survivor cards that want to be discarded - Moonstone, Winging It, and Fortuitous Discovery, to name a few - but given that the discard is random, you'll still have to thin your hand out a bit to make it likely you hit a specific card.

One substantial downside remains for Liquid Courage (1), and that's the possible scenario reference card effects for the , , , and tokens, which can sometimes punish you for failure and push you away from taking superfluous skill tests. The meaningfulness of this downside is going to vary from scenario to scenario, but I think in general this shouldn't disuade you too much if you are particularly hurting for horror healing. Maybe you can beg a Mystic teammate to seal the for The Doom of Eztli to put your mind at ease!

Finally, a niche use for Liquid Courage (this also applies to the level zero version) is in generating a low difficulty skill test to commit multiple "succeed by" Rogue skills to. This is most likely applicable for Sefina Rousseau with her 4 Willpower, and you can throw in "Watch this!", Momentum, and/or All In to generate resources and cards. Additionally, Double or Nothing will only push the skill test to difficulty 4 where it will likely still be possible to oversucceed.

This doesn't quite have the versatility and simple reliability of something like First Aid, but it can put out much more horror healing for you and your team if you can stomach discarding a couple of cards. I suspect many of the low Willpower Rogues could stand to benefit from trying the new and improved whisky to salve their sanity. I doubt most Finn Edwards players will give up on playing Peter Sylvestre for a similar role, but Liquid Courage (1) might free up an out-of-faction slot if you are willing to run without the big man, and it is Illicit-traited if you're playing into that. "Skids" O'Toole and Tony Morgan could also both do a lot worse than turning to the bottle with Liquid Courage (1). It'd be a disservice to review such a good horror healing card without mentioning Carolyn Fern, and I think this is likely to be her best low-level option for repeatedly healing hear teammates' horror.

While this is certainly a fun and interesting weakness for Nathaniel Cho and other guardians, or fighters. That much isn't the case for decks that mainly focus on clues, I would advice you to draw a different basic weakness if you happen to draw it with one of those decks. Fighter type investigators usually have a larger health pool, but Self-Destructive can easily trigger twice on a turn in multiplayer, so it's comparable to Internal Injury in impact I think.

In solo it's mostly fine and fun, since you always have to deal with enemies (though some decks use evasion and/or cards like Waylay, Persuasion and Dumb Luck or even Scrying to deal with enemies).

The fact that the impact of this weakness varies so heavily does raise an interesting question: "should Fantasy Flight restrict the basic weaknesses a character can draw?". I think the answer is yes, and they could just put it under deckbuilding requirements e.g. no pact weakness. And for characters who have multiple obvious archetypes, not all of which are impacted, probably also restrict their weakness pool to cards that are highly likely to be at least somewhat impactful.

All in all I rather like this weakness (for any deck in which it has any impact), though it does fall into the, frankly massive, suite of weaknesses with remove bad effect. I find that these weaknesses often still linger in my threat area, as two actions can be a steep cost if you have to deal with monsters or you just have to hurry up to progress through the act deck in a timely fashion.

Fun (sort-of) interaction with Lita: you get another bonus 2 damage across this card. If you're running through core you can take this after the XP-heavy second scenario The Midnight Masks and then go into The Devourer Below with murder on the mind. If you land the second attack ("No please!") you deal a whopping 7 damage.

If you're playing solo, this card will let you take out the big bad in two actions — one playing this, second with an attack from any standard weapon that deals +1 damage.

But if we're doing that, why don't we go further? Take Vicious Blow x2 (only one actually has to be levelled) and chuck'em in as well. Blam, blam! You just biffed the big bad beastie back below. In one action! It's about sending a message.

Now, the first of these 'combos' is easier to pull off; you're just looking for Lita (which you're doing anyway — she's incredible). But if you do happen to draw your Vicious Blows in time... well, surely one-two punching an Elder One back to beyond as soon as it raises its head is as cool as it's going to get?