This is a very unusual card.

Permanent cards are, by their very nature, kind of strange in that they start off in play, so taking the card doesn't dilute your deck. Normally with cards like Scrapper, the level and experience point cost are barriers that keep every eligible investigator from immediately taking it. Arcane Research, the other level 0 permanent card besides Shrewd Analysis, inflicts mental trauma when you take it, so you have to consider the consequences of using the card before you acquire it.

Shrewd Analysis is different from both of these cases because there is, in most instances, no drawback for taking it. There is no experience cost, no trauma... you just get it.

The ability on the card is not mandatory (since it is phrased, "you may upgrade a card") so taking this card does not commit you to using its ability. It simply gives you an option that wasn't there before. In my opinion, it is really not a good ability, since you sacrifice deck consistency for a discount, and I normally don't consider that a good trade. However, the option is there. In a way, taking this card kind of future-proofs your deck a little bit; if there is ever a card released like Strange Solution with upgrade paths that have a negligible difference between versions, you'll be thankful you grabbed this permanent. However, if you never use this card's ability, that's fine too, because it doesn't cost anything. The only potential drawback is if there's an encounter card that punishes you for number of assets or number of permanent cards. That second situation seems pretty unlikely, but you never know...

For investigators that have limited Seeker cards or out-of-class limitations, I think you should probably never take this card. I don't think it's normally worth it.

Otherwise, I think you should always take this card.

For reference...

Investigators who should always take this card:

• Daisy Walker
• Roland Banks
• Rex Murphy
• Minh Thi Phan
• Ursula Downs
• Norman Withers

Investigators who should never take this card:

• Any Dunwich Legacy investigator who isn't Rex Murphy
• Marie Lambeau
• Carolyn Fern
• Finn Edwards

Conditional:

• Lola Hayes can take this card if she wants to use it to take up a Seeker slot without taking up a card in her deck.

Is there a functional reason to justify not taking this card if you have no Seeker slots restrictions? I really can't think of one. Very curious to see if we'll get more level 0 permanents like this one in the future.

This core-baby needs a review, so here's my 2-cents.

Sure gamble belongs in a small group of elite cards that allow you to mess with the success of a token draw after the fact of drawing it. other members in this group include Lucky!, Counterspell, Wendy Adams, Nautical Prowess and a few others.

The ability to look at a token (mid-test) and just say "No thank you" or "Ah, I'll increase my skill a bit" is tremendous, often the bonus is just a bit extra, 1 or 2 more than otherwise, but the retroactive bonus to turn a lost check into a success is tremendous. More powerful even that the actual bonus is the freedom that having this card grants. if you've ever played with Lucky! then you know what i'm talking about. Risking tests at moderate skill values and not spending resources and cards to max out every test, safe in the knowledge that Lucky! got you covered for the worst tokens you might draw.

Some differences between Sure Gamble and Lucky!:

• Sure gamble has a swingy bonus, and can cover against even the very largest and worst tokens. (Example: Taking tests at +2, and drawing a -6, you can still play Sure Gamble to succeed on the check while Lucky! wouldn't help at all). It does cost 1 more resource and 3 Xp however.

• Sure Gamble is in a faction where large success can be turned into extra benefits. Sure Gamble has the compound benefit that you can try tests at +2 and guarantee the overkill benefits (barring ). Don't make the mistake of trying tests at +1 or +0 only to actually draw a benign token!

• Lucky! does not cost XP and is 1 resource cheaper, for this reason Lucky! is a near-autotake for characters while Sure Gamble is just a powerful but not mandatory upgrade. I do think that any competent should take this at some point before the end of a campaign, especially on harder difficulty, but unless youre Sefina Rousseau you should probably prioritize some useful cards that make the big successes enabled by Sure Gamble worthwhile.

Am I missing something? This seems like an underwhelming card even for Calvin Wright, whose base skill values are all 0, and completely useless for anybody else.

The ability to draw just one extra token for a card and two resources isn't exactly a bargain, so you'll want the difficulty to be at least two higher than your base skill. A few problems with that:

• A difficulty two higher than your base skill? That probably means your investigator is working outside of their specialty. Why would you take such a test voluntarily?
• If you're taking it involuntarily, then it's probably a willpower test - but don't all the Survivor investigators have at least three base willpower? How often do you run into a five-difficulty willpower test?
• Don't you need at least a +3 boost alongside Against All Odds to have a reasonable chance of success? With three token draws you can be reasonably confident of drawing a -1 on most difficulties, but not a 0.

So if Against All Odds isn't a good way to win skill tests, what is it good for? Maybe it would be worthwhile if:

• the investigator has access to amazing effects if he or she draws a special symbol, such as ; or
• the investigator is trying to fail the skill test by as wide a margin as possible, for some reason.

The former possibility doesn't really work right now. There aren't any symbol-specific effects so good that they're worth playing this card for a slightly improved, but still slim, chance of drawing that specific symbol.

The latter possibility is interesting but I don't think there are any cards that can take advantage of "failing harder" at the moment - and certainly not well enough to justify 2 resources and 2XP. On top of that, the minimum adjusted skill-value is 0 anyway, so what you'd really need is an effect that plays off of large negatives on the skill token itself, like Sure Gamble. Except also not like Sure Gamble, because this would be a stupid way to use it and your investigator probably isn't even eligible to buy both cards anyway.

So what about for Calvin? Well, it's mostly just a drastically weaker variation of Will to Survive. Sure, you can't use Will to Survive on Treachery cards, but there are all sorts of Survivor cards that do work in the Mythos phase, which are both cheaper and more reliable.

Do you see how badly this is wracking my brain? Even my most feverish hypotheticals are riding a long trail of "even if" before I can arrive at a slightly useful application for this card. Bottom line, I might include Against All Odds in a Calvin deck if its combined XP and resource cost were less, and wouldn't include it in anything else even if it were free. Someone please tell me what it is I'm missing.

In the review of Flashlight, reviewer Caius Drewart notes that using the Flashlight on a location to reduce it's shroud value to 0 basically guarantees a success regardless of what chaos token you draw (barring the dreaded tentacle token.) Similarly, this card can, potentially, guarantee the next Fight action against a baddy succeeds (again, barring auto-failure.) I think this card is in the same vein as the Flashlight, since it hedges your bets against the chaos tokens in this way. I might even dare compare it to the Grotesque Statue, Wendy Adams' special ability, Jim Culver's special ability, and Kukri.

Quick Rundown: Daisy Walker & Norman Withers both have 5 Intellect . Carolyn Fern, Finn Edwards, Marie Lambeau, Minh Thi Phan, Rex Murphy, and Ursula Downs all have 4 Intellect . If you succeed the Intellect test with flying colors, Expose Weakness basically lets you trade out your Combat icon for your Intellect icon for a single (the next) attack. And remember, if you reduce the enemy's Combat to 0, success is basically guaranteed, meaning you get a minimum of one damage in.

In some sense Expose Weakness helps Seekers deal damage, making it similar to Mind over Matter or "I've got a plan!", and even Strange Solution: Acidic Ichor. Let's compare these four cards:

• Mind over Matter is cheap, Fast, and can be used in place of your Combat and Agility values until your turn is over. That still means three seperate pulls from the chaos bag.
• "I've got a plan!" is more expensive than MoM and limits you to a single Fight action, but it can deal a massive +3 extra damage if you have the clues for it (which is harder than it seems, making it very conditional.)
• Acidic Ichor possibly lets you deal 3 damage, possibly 3 times, but has a huge EXP cost and the labor pains of using the Unidentified Strange Solution, and despite the solid Combat value of 6 to work with, that's still three chaos tokens being draw from the chaos bag, which can be very nasty if you happen to fail.
• (This is where the utility of Expose Weakness distinguishes it from those other three Seeker cards.) Expose Weakness is Fast, like MoM, meaning you get your full three actions, and it doesn't provoke an Attack of Opportunity, but more importantly it can be played right before your damage dealing buddy takes his turn. You can almost guarantee a successful attack for yourself or (!) one of your damage-dealing buddies packing the big guns and the big damage (Shotgun anyone?) That seems pretty powerful to me.

I also think it is a mistake to think Expose Weakness is intended to be used on boss monsters. Maybe it was, and you certainly can, but I think you'd be better off securing that guaranteed hit on weaker Strength enemies, letting your Guardian buddies take them out quickly and easily: save them ammo, actions, cards, and skill tests. For reference, I counted 45 out of 114 enemies with Strength 4 or greater. Also, even though we haven't seen it yet, I fully expect more Weapon with the "for each point you succeed by" clause, each one of which will combo with this card. Even Spell cards for combat. Expose Weakness may be a situational card, and I think it is definitely for Seekers wanting to play supporting role to their buddies (as they should), but is it jank? I'm not so sure. It's upgraded version is even better, of course.

[Pre-release review written before the last three scenarios of The Forgotten Age were published.]

Okay, this is a weird one. Unlike Ace in the Hole which, for the same XP cost, is instantly and reliably useful, Borrowed Time can only really be useful if you build your entire deck around it.

While superficially similar to Ace, Borrowed Time gives you deferred actions rather than extra ones. Why would this be useful? Mainly because of the combos you can achieve with cards that confer bonuses until the end of the round, the phase, or the investigator's turn. That means building a deck with one-round-boost assets, or at least a large number of events and skills.

Ideally, the one-round boosts should come from reusable assets, because then you could reliably spend alternate turns saving up actions and then taking pumped-up super-turns. At the time of writing, the assets with one-round boosts (based on the search strings 'x:"end of the"' and 'x:"end of your"' on ArkhamDB) are:

• Keen Eye, which only works for a character who can buy 3XP Rogue and Guardian cards (and is a pretty underwhelming combo anyway);
• Encyclopedia, which only works for a character who can buy 2XP Seeker and 3XP Rogue cards; and
• The Red-Gloved Man, which doesn't actually stay in play for more than a round, so it's more like an event for our purposes.

So, basically, Lola Hayes with Encyclopedia is your only option at the moment, but it's a pretty compelling option. More on that in a moment.

Turning to single-use cards, first of all you should obviously try to run two copies of Pay Day with Borrowed Time. For 0XP cards, Intrepid, Sleight of Hand, and especially Fight or Flight should usually be included in a Borrowed Time deck where feasible. Mind over Matter won't play well with any of the characters so far who can actually buy Borrowed Time, but who knows what the future holds?

Under the current card-mix, the best-case non-Lola scenario seems to be recurring The Red-Gloved Man - take a Rogue who can buy Survivor cards like Jenny Barnes or Finn Edwards, and use A Chance Encounter to replay The Red-Gloved Man, and then use Resourceful to replay A Chance Encounter. That's powerful if it works, but it hardly ever will - you'd basically be building your deck in the hope that you draw Borrowed Time and The Red-Gloved Man early enough to put them to work, which is unlikely even if you doubled up on The Red-Gloved Man for a total of 16XP. It seems pretty clear that Jenny and Finn have better builds available at that level.

Having said all that, I think a Borrowed Time/Encyclopedia combo has some real potential for Lola or for a hypothetical future Rogue/Seeker character. The Seeker class has Research Librarian and No Stone Unturned to improve the chances that the Investigator can actually get Encyclopedia and Borrowed Time into play. Maybe supplement with Quick Thinking, upgraded .41 Derringer, or the normally-inefficient Leo De Luca in order to get even more boosted actions. In Lola's case, she also has access to all those lovely Survivor cards, so a Lola/Borrowed Time deck could be a serious powerhouse.

For anybody else, though, this seems like a pretty dubious thing to throw 6XP at.