Love skill cards, love this thing. I'll make this review simple and short.

Get an Unexpected Courage. This, in of itself is a brilliant mechanic, making Dream Diary unique among the research cards as being actually useful at 0xp. Also you get a skill, so it combos with Grisly Totem and can also be used on friends. It IS action intensive (takes 2 actions and 2 resources to start seeing a benefit, it starts getting good by the time youre using it for the third time) and takes up a hand slot but still. Very useful. Note that this cards's strength comes from flexibility, so if ALL you want to do is discover clues, look elsehwere, but if you want to make the occational , or test then Dream Diary is great.

All the upgrades then supercharge the mechanic by giving you a free Unexpected Courage to use every single turn that supercharges depending on which variant you go for, the options include being in combat, being at hard locations to investigate or playing the big-hand strategy. By the way, for those types that do nothing but investigating the upgraded variants are still totally worth it!

Brilliant card. Brilliant upgrades.

This thing is extreemely annoying, I looked at the first mechanic, not liking it for the price, then looked at the draw mechanic, started loving it. Tried it and realized that very typically if i'm seeing a second copy of a thing, the first copy is in play or in the discard pile, so I came back to realizing that it's all about that first mechanic... Which I didnt like.

So. Big hand characters like this, Higher Education + Extensive Research, characters in strategies that make having cards in hand a distinctly useful effect.

Cute combo: With this in play and using Old Book of Lore you can snipe secondary copies of cards intentionally to artificially boost your drawspeed. HELLO Daisy.

This is a good card, it's just extreemely unrewarding if you try playing it outside it's niche.

Decent card for a sustained combatant who happens to have great draw speed and deckspace for tank allies and items. (I.E Mark Harrigan's name is written on it).

With a tanky build that can handle a bit of extra horror pain and incentive to wield a non-ammo weapon, several haracters can make use of this thing. The / characters all have great tanking properties making them naturals at using The Hungering Blade.

If you're likely to have a bit of trouble with horror (like a Roland Banks or Joe Diamond), then stay the heck away!

Useful, but hard to deckbuild. slots, while not as contested as, say, deckslots, dont have too much space for tertiary strategies. If you do afford the deckslot for "Fool me once..." its a useful but not terrific card. Diana Stanley loves her some cancels though, so keep this in mind for her.

The mechanics speak for themselves, (although keep in mind that the card is played on treacheries -while they are being discarded-, keep that in mind if you want to hit something like Frozen in Fear), but the inability to surgically hit whichever treachery you like is a drawback. Think of it this way: Sometimes you play Ward of Protection against Rotting Remains to cover someone for whom a failed check equals defeat, but usually you dont block a minor treachery like Rotting Remains at all. "Fool me once..." doesnt have this precision. The most bang for your buck is hitting treacheries that are universally bad, Ancient Evils for example.

Obviously a greater playercount increases mythos drawspeed, so the usefulness goes up a bit, but in this case the chance of you personally encountering the desired target (a requirement for playing "Fool me once...") goes down dramatically, so that in of itself is a problem too.

"Fool me once..." is'nt bad, but it's largely inferior to similar mechanics and it's costing space and resources in a faction that often struggles to generate resources and cards. You will be forgiven for not ever trying this thing out.

Leadership just sucked.

Leadership rocks!

The card gives 1 icon and a substantial resource generation ability. Up to 4 resources generated for no action investment at all is great. In case you forgot, is as resource hungry as ever.

With the icon you're boosting an ally by + or yourself by +, you stand a perfectly reasonable chance at scoring the resources just by dropping this on any old fight check. If there was a 2xp skill card that read "+1, gain 2 resources" I would play it! This is that card, and then some!

Great card.