Skids has a bad reputation, but I think he's strong - at least at Standard difficulty, 1-2 investigators - if you can adapt to him.

His card pool is his first difficulty. He can take Rogue (0-5) or Guardian (0-2). With the prevailing wisdom of "killing enemies is better 'cos then they can't hunt you down", it seems a lot of decks treat him an auxiliary fighter. This gets him bogged down in combat, and misses his major ability - speed. Some decks lean into Guardian - don't. You're not there to fight, you're not even there to waste time evading (if you can), you're there to run.

Skids can regularly take 4 actions a turn. That is awesome. There's a reason that Leo De Luca is one of the strongest allies in the game, and Skids can take him as well. That's 5 actions a turn, if he can afford it.

Oh, Hot Streak? Lone Wolf? "Watch this!"? Resources shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Skids should try to rush to the finish. With his low , and the fact hunting enemies do appear over time, you want to minimise the number of turns you take. Rush to the finish, before the encounter deck finishes you.

Your encounter card mitigation is getting through the game fast, by aiming to take 5 actions each turn.

How do you do this? Well, Skids has access to two Awesome allies. Leo De Luca is expensive, but excellent. Cat Burglar doesn't see a lot of love, but plays beautifully when you're trying to run to the finish. Testless disengage and move? Sign me up!

You can also mitigate attacks with cards like Narrow Escape, Dodge, and On the Lam is actually really good when you just need to press on, regardless of the enemies around you. Elusive is a great mobility card, and gets you away from the horde of enemies you've got chasing. Consider "I'm outta here!" too - when you need it, it can win the game.

With 4 , Skids can evade - but evasion takes time, and this should be a backup option. Cat Burglar gives some of the benefit of evasion - the disengage - and a move, so can be very efficient, especially with multiple enemies.

But... you can't run away all the time. Sometimes you'll need to fight. Well, Rogue faction has you covered. Sleight of Hand makes firearms fun again, and Lupara is a great card to combo with it. Fast play a gun, use it twice at +2 +2 damage and get the gun back? Give them both barrels! .41 Derringer is another good one, and can play into the 'more actions' theme of the deck. And Switchblade is an awesome upgrade of Machete - cheap, fast, +2 , and a decent chance at additional damage.

Contraversially, I'm not a fan of Lockpicks in this sort of build. As they can only be used once per turn, they're too slow. Flashlight has no such problems. I suspect that Scene of the Crime might offer a good way to grab 2 clues before you run away.

What about his alarming Willpower? Well, ignore it. Don't try to shore it up; you'll fail anyway. If you're really worried about cards like Frozen in Fear, pack "You handle this one!", or beg another investigator to take Logical Reasoning. However, I've found that it can be quicker just to press on for the finish, carrying Frozen in Fear.

In short, try for fast events, fast weapons, fast everything. Fence may help with this (not tried it). Arrive, get Flashlight out, and go...

In multiplayer, I suspect this approach will suffer; more enemies will be drawn, Lone Wolf won't fire so much; I'm not sure how well it will work. I've also not tried this on Hard or Expert, so it might not be viable there.

I haven’t had a chance to do this yet, and of course we don’t know what it turns into at the time of this review, but screw it. Go big or go home! This card’s effect records the ‘difficulty’ of the test, not the shroud, which means that Double or Nothing substantially increases this number. (It also records the result twice, although I doubt that will matter.) This means on a shroud 4 location (the highest number you reliably see in scenarios), you can record a whopping 14! The only challenge that leaves is having to actually pass a (14) test. And you have to do it honestly too, as autosuccess effects won’t do you any good since automatic success treat the difficulty as if it were 0 - which is a pretty depressing number to record! No, we need to commit a handful of skills. Or just use Higher Education and call it a day because that card is fair... Plus you get to discover 4 clues in the same action, which ain’t too shabby!

I was trying to come up with a use for this card, and I'm got to say I'm pretty much stumped. Maybe I'm missing something. But given that this card cannot stack with a weapon, it doesn't seem good for much.

About the only use I found is that this card is good against Rats (since reducing the test difficulty to 0 means almost a guaranteed success.) Solo Wendy can actually find Rats pretty irritating on high levels, so maybe there. Rats are generally not a card I worry about countering when I'm designing a deck, though.

For most investigators, there's the risk that Improvised Weapon gets stuck in your hand as a really weak event (attacking for 1 damage is not very good) that has no skill icons. That's not great.

For all the investigators with high Fight and access to Improvised Weapon, like Mark or Yorick, this card seems clearly inferior to simply fighting with a weapon, and therefore not really worth the deck space.

Wendy and Pete, of course, can fodder off Improvised Weapon to their special abilities and then play the more powerful version from their discard pile. Which sounds great... except that they have 1 and 2 base Combat. They can't hit with this at all, not unless they're playing an Easy or they're attacking a 1-Fight monster. And there are just not enough of those to justify this card, I think.

However, I think this could be interesting in the future if we get more effects that can reduce monster Fight and stack with this. Quasi-guaranteed successes against 2 or 3 Fight monsters would be really useful.

Good old Dynamite Blast finally gets an upgrade. The changes from the original are:

• Minus 1 to resource cost
• Added icon
• Doesn't provoke attacks of opportunity

Given the advent of Stick to the Plan it can be invaluable to get a decent selection of tactic cards. It could even be worth forgoing the 0 XP version entirely and then buying this only once it can start attached to that asset. Guardians are often strapped for resources and making a card cost fewer is often seen as XP-worthy, as evidenced by Leo De Luca.

Whether this card ends up being worthy of your time comes down to whether or not the ability to bypass opportunity attacks does anything for you. If nothing else it makes playing "Let me handle this!" and On the Hunt much more viable while already engaged with other enemies, whereas previously that would be a bad line of play because doing so turns off your Machete.

YMMV.

Return to NoZ certainly brings some interesting upgrades. Rabbit's Foot is considered to be a good card because it alleviates the opportunity cost of failing a test, which usually boils down to wasting an action, by turning that wasted action into drawing a card. Especially in the class that often runs extremely light on resources, drawing a card can be the most valuable consolation action, and it doesn't usually face stiff competition for the relic slot.

Yet treachery cards exist therefore blindly drawing threatens disaster at any moment... So enter bunny memento mk II. Failing a test by more than 1 yields actual card selection rather than simply drawing, helping to dig for specific answers or important assets while avoiding poorly-timed treacheries (or even intentionally drawing them at a time of minimal impact).

Whiffed on grabbing Fire Axe after your mulligan? This helps fight those fires. Trying to bet on a Dark Horse? Bunny's got you covered. The very act of failing the tests as you attempt them will help you find the pieces you need to overcome them. If you get lucky then awesome, but if you fail then fail with style. In fact this card turns tests on their head so that is often going to be a better pull from the chaos bag than , , or !

The most interesting application seems to be with Silas Marsh because he can sometimes choose to fail non-essential tests and appreciates the card flow. Most survivors tend to struggle to spend XP after upgrading their ally suite and are forced to grab things like Lucky! for a tiny bit more efficiency. I can easily see this replacing that in many an XP schedule.