Beaten by a Scarecrow, yet Unspeakable Horror came out as a hot topic only (A Touch of Evil)

A friend was passing by through this city and stayed a couple of nights at my place.

We both being enthusiastic board-gamers, we spent a lot of time playing a few games I happen to own.

First were two games of Touch of Evil.

We were against the Scarecrow first, and I was thinking that hopefully it won't go down too easily, since it's only a "basic" villain from the base game.

Heroes were Heinrich the Drifter and Captain Hawkins.

Order of the Crimson Hand sure was active in this game, because during just a few first rounds there were already three or four Order's Influence on town elders!

One of them was, of course, Magistrate Kroft being influenced. This made Captain Hawkins pretty much play without any special abilities.

But all in all, the game seemed to go just fine for a long time, because Shadow Track was moving very slowly. I guess the forces of darkness were waiting for a proper moment to unleash The Horror on Shadowbrook...

The biggest single mistake we did was to pay too little attention to crows. Because once the Town Squares were pretty much full of crows, someone either rolled March of Darkness from Cooperative Chart, or drew the card.

Bam.

Shadow Track down by 5 steps.

This really put some pressure on us, and we had to start Showdown as soon as possible. We weren't exactly badly equipped, our general fighting ability was quite good, but we didn't have enough damage prevention cards for a longer showdown, nor a lot of one-use cards that would give us one big turn of combat with loads of dice.

Scarecrow was brought down to 6 wounds, but after that the heroes went down. Not without a fight, sure, but still failing in the end.

Game 2:

Second game the Villain wasn't randomised, because I really wanted to try out Unspeakable Horror for a change. Base fight dice of 8 and base wounds of 8 seemed really threatening, and I've played against it only once years ago (well, at least before I started writing up this blog!)

Heroes were this time Harlow Morgan, the Inventor and Katarina the Outlaw.

This was curious game, because just about every other Mystery Card drawn was Murder. Game looked like it went fine for a long time, again, because the only thing that lowered Shadow track were the murder-cards. Also all of the Summoning Circles spawned up in different locations (we started to get Void Gates only during last few rounds) and came in with a monster only rarely.

However, faster than we knew, almost every named space was indeed filled with Summoning Circles, so it looked rather threatening, and finally we drew mystery card The Horror (need to roll twice on cooperative chart at the start of every Mystery Phase).

Final Showdown commenced, then, and it was a rather lousy fight. Villain rolled dice really badly (even with 14-15 dice it didn't roll 4 or more successes a couple of times, letting both Katarina and Harlow Morgan to survive at least one round without needing to spend any real resources).

So.

The Unspeakable Horror died miserably and made up for only bad tentacle jokes, while Scarecrow wrecked Heroes face. Where's the logic?