Asset

Talent.

Cost: 2.

Seeker

Spend 1 resource: You get +1 for this skill test.

Spend 1 resource: You get +1 for this skill test.

Aurore Folny
Core Set #34.
Hyperawareness

FAQs

(from the official FAQ or responses to the official rules question form)
  • You can use fast actions as many times as you want, as long as you can pay the cost; there is no limit.
Last updated

Reviews

Physical Training, Hyperawareness, Hard Knocks, Arcane Studies, Dig Deep - they all have something in common: all these cards give you temporary boosts to individual skill tests at the cost of resources.

The inclusion of these cards is closely related to your investigator's economy. In conjunction with Dark Horse, you may plan to stay poor as a church mouse and cards like this can help you with that. Or, on the contrary, if you are living the dream, and some investigators proverbial float in resources, you can afford to bundle Hard Knocks+Arcane Studies or Physical Training+Hyperawareness to boost all your skills! In short, keep your hands off if you don't have action-free income!

If you are interested in the discussion, i would recommend this thread to you. Hyperawareness especially fuels Rex Murphy's ability, while Daisy Walker already has so many other tools to pump her intellect.

Pros

  • Reliant boosting flexibility. Depending on the difficulty level and the test's danger level, you can boost as much as barely is needed (roughly +2 over your baseline) or sink all your money in it.
  • Theoretically unlimited uses.
  • The asset stays in play. From the moment you play this, you are forearmed.
  • It does not need to be slotted.
  • Goes well along with Dark Horse. Also combines perfectly with cards that have an additional effect if you overfulfill: List, not forgetting Rex Murphy

Cons

  • You have to find it in your deck, it lacks the Permanent trait.
  • Resource-hungry asset (install and activation).
  • Only helps the investigator who plays it.
Synisill · 795

Physical Training, Hyperawareness, Hard Knocks, Arcane Studies, Dig Deep are part of a cycle, and partly share a common review. These cards are really, really inefficient, yet they have unique capabilities and I at least consider whether to take them every time I make a character. They have two main purposes:

  1. Making use of excess resources. Most characters are tight for resources early on, but many times a character will reach the point where they have what they need, or they can't afford the actions to play any more cards, and they start just building up resources. These cards ensure that you can never have too much money, because if nothing else your one resource per turn becomes a flexible, storable +1 each turn. If you really have run out of other ways to spend your resources, a card to turn resources into bonuses can become a very effective play. However, it is important to be aware that just because your character tends to have a few resources hanging around at the end of the game is no reason to take this card, you would be better off taking a skill card. Just playing the card alone will use up 2 resources before you even gain a benefit. You really need to have a character who would otherwise end up with at least 6 extra resources at the end of this scenario, before you start to get excited by this type of card. That is entirely possible for certain characters, but most characters won't end up in that situation. You need to be very aware of what kind of resource economy your character has, and that your character really does spend substantially fewer resources than they earn over the course of a scenario, before you put this type of card in your deck. (Some characters make money more quickly than one per turn, and have stronger reasons to take this card).
  2. Flexibility. Sometimes you have other ways to spend your resources, but this card gives you the flexibility to spend a bunch of resources on two very different skills, in any amount and any way you choose. Normally skill cards are way, way more efficient than this kind of card, but a single skill card isn't going to give you, for instance, +7 on a test of your choice, and this card can. Inefficient though this card may be, if you have it in play and you are forced to make an extremely critical skill check, it is quite comforting that there is almost always something you can do to improve your chances – you can make the decision that a resource you otherwise would have spent on something else would be better spent giving you a +1 on this test. So you don’t really need to have nothing at all to do with your resources, in order to play this card. But you still need lots of available resources. A character who is tight on resources (which is quite common) just should not use this type of card; even though the flexibility might be useful, you can’t afford the action and 2 resources to play it.

If you do play one of these cards, when it is worth using? A really good situation is when +1 skill would turn 3 tokens (about 1/5 of the bag) from failure to success. So if turning a failure into a success isn’t worth 5 resources, you shouldn’t be using this.

I find Hyperawareness to be one of the more tempting cards in this cycle because it has an interesting ability to give evasion ability to a class without a lot of evasion options. It isn't usually practical for a seeker to play permanent evasion bonuses that will almost never be used, and putting a couple one shots kill bonuses into the deck may not be enough to get the job done. But with this card you are only committing half a card in your deck to agility (since the other half of the card is boosting intellect), but if you get into a desperate situation you can spend a whole bunch of money and suddenly become an expert evader. Or at the end of the game, if your seeker abilities have become useless because the goal is now to kill a boss monster, you can use all that money you've been building up from Dr. Milan Christopher to become the party evasion master and keep the boss occupied while your friends kill it. The intellect boosting side of the card is less exciting because it is usually more efficient to just retry a failed investigation attempt, but the scenario designers like to put situations in the game where that is not true and you really want to complete an investigation in a timely fashion, so boosting your intellect can still be pretty useful. Of course, this card is still far from an auto include, it is an expensive card and you still need to believe that your character’s deck design is such that you will end up with a bunch of money saved up by the end of the game (Dr. Milan Christopher helps with this).

ChristopherA · 110
I think this is a fairly in-depth look and I agree with the "not the most efficient" stance but: 0xp, No Slot, decent icons, means you can just run a 1 of in a base deck and always have a resource sink, which I think is important in any character. If my deck doesn't have any other on demand way to spend resources I always include one of these, because a pile of unspendable is even more inefficient. — Zerogrim · 292
Counterpoint: Seekers have a lot of easy-to-include resource sinks such as Working a Hunch, and better ways to deal with enemies (e.g. Occult Invocation, I've got a plan, Occult Lexicon, Mind over Matter). Seekers among all classes have the easiest ways to translate resources into game advancement that Hyperawarness should almost never make the cut. — suika · 9413
Counter Counter point there is limited deck space for enemy problem solving and resource sinks, running hyper awareness allows you to solve issues more than once without having to include lots of cards that might be better spent on other things. (it is also core set, so it being the floor of options and not being really that bad is pretty neat) — Zerogrim · 292
It's a bit of a stretch to call Hyperawareness an enemy management solution when you need to spend 4 resources and an action to play it beforehand before it becomes better than a manual dexterity. — suika · 9413