Small Hand Darrell Repeatedly Asks For Directions

Introduction

"Sorry which way did you say we were heading again?" - Some guy with two compasses (probably)

This is a simple Dark Horse deck designed to support Tool Belt and Mariner's Compass. The compass has always had a place in Dark Horse decks, but it has a few drawbacks:

1. It exhausts upon use, which lessens the impact of the additional clue you can get.
2. It provides no innate stat bonuses, so playing two of them means you will often be investigating at a lower skill value than you'd like. There is the fast action resource ability, but the asset already costs 3, and the whole point of Dark Horse is to stay at a low resource count.

Tool Belt alleviates this issue by letting us tuck away the exhausted Mariner's Compass and swapping it for an unexhausted one. With one Compass on Tool Belt that frees the other hand slot up for cards like Hawk-Eye Folding Camera. There are other cards that can fill this slot, but Hawk-Eye gives us both stat bonuses and another evidence asset.

Small Hand Playstyle

The goal here is to commit our whole hand and then trigger Madame Labranche and Empirical Hypothesis with Pessimistic Outlook. With these two out, whenever you hit 0 cards in hand you can choose to immediately go back up to 2. Later in the campaign you can consider taking Alternate Hypothesis to get an additional card out of this setup since Darrell's stat line and ability are well situated for succeeding test by three or more.

Kodak

Darrell's Kodak is not the star of this deck but it is a fundamentally useful card. This will be the main (if not only) card we actually want to spend evidence off of for Darrell's ability. In general, I prefer using this sparingly on either Winging It or on encounter cards that have a "for each point you fail by" effect. Mainly, you want to stockpile evidence here to avoid having to pull it off either Hawk-Eye or Empirical Hypothesis when Ruined Film hits.