Assets? Events? Robert is the guy with the gun. The gun you gave him, because you didn't want to pay 4 for that .45 Automatic to go into a hand slot you didn't have open, you just wanted a combat trick to defeat the ghoul that's engaged with you. So you discarded the gun ("played the event"), paid the "resource cost" of 0, and did a Fight at +1 for 2 damage. That's better than Monster Slayer. Imagine if every firearm in your deck could just turn into a buffed version of Monster Slayer as and when you needed it to? If the same cards that are your expensive, slow, sustained damage options are also your zero cost, instant, burst damage options? Robert can make that happen for you, and all on the body of a Beat Cop (0).

This can be build altering. The game only has three fundamental types of player cards, so letting one type stand in for another is strong. A reasonable first instinct might be to look at Robert here and think that he's only for the likes of Michael McGlen, or even a placeholder for his mighty, upgraded version. I would contend that he's a perfectly solid ally in his own right, even for flex characters. If an investigator would normally take 2 weapons and 4 fighting events, then they could go down the Robert Castaigne route and just bring six guns. On normal, a character with a fight as low as 3, thanks to Robert's static boost and the likely +1/2 from a gun's accuracy can be testing at 5/6 for both their gun-in-play shooting and their gun-given-to-Robert pseudo-events. And these events are reliable, because they're not really events at all; Dissonant Voices can't stop their use, Torturous Chords can't increase their cost. Think how much more likely are you to have a gun in your opening hand when there's six in your deck compared to just two. The fact that it's locked to one-handed guns is fine for Tony Morgan and Michael McGlen because that's their default style anyway, and flexible investigators can easily leave the other hand free for clue-gathering tools.

The trick is having access to enough decent firearms to be able to build your deck gun-heavy. Guardian access helps, but even Survivor/illicit/generic 0-level access is decent because Robert loves to fire a .18 Derringer. Even "Ashcan" Pete gets to base 5 with Robert backing him up, and Duke gets the static bonus. He'd have to use up all his out-of-class cards to make it to a "mere" 5 firearms in his deck as of time at writing but I think this goes to show how there's much more to Castaigne than meets the eye. He's willing to work with all kinds of different people.

One of the concerns that can arise from having many small guns is that it can spread your XP thin, but those who can take Robert Castaigne (4) don't need to worry about that so much; If every gun with base Robert can be a more-accurate Monster Slayer, then upgrading your Robert to his final form effectively gives all of those cards "fast" and "draw a card" when played through him as pseudo-events; That's gotta be an improvement of around 3 XP per firearm! And he buffs their use as actual guns just as hard.

Finally, Robert scores extra cool points for being a "Castaigne" - perhaps from the same Castaigne family as Louis and Hildred from Robert Chambers' "The King In Yellow"? All hail the new Emperor of America!

I’m a bit confused by this. It seems like an exhaust or a “max once per round” is missing somewhere. You can basically play her for 2, immediately drop 3 antiquities on your location, get +6 for your next skill test, very likely trigger the reaction on her to get 2 resources back immediately. Thoughts?

This card looks bland on the tin but it does so much work on a gun focused deck, it is basically saving you actions, resources and potentially even XP, cause all your guns will stick for a longer time in play before you need a replacement and you may not even need cards that replenish your guns ammo. Also, it is very good with certain weapons that have super powerful singular shots, especially the ones with low ammo count inherently, like Shotgun (Sawed Off and not), Lightning Gun, Flamethrower and the Chicago Typewriter. Another gun that gets a surprisingly big boost from this is the .18 Deringer, that card is low costed and guarantees value for your investment as missing shots gives you back the ammo you used, having an extra ammo on those means an extra "guaranteed" hit, the LV 2 .18 Deringer becomes a 2 cost 4 ammo weapon wich is great value.

At 3XP it is costly but it’s worth it and being a permanent it will always be online. This card biggest weakness is that its impact diminishes with guns that have lots of ammo inherently specially the BAR and the Gatling Gun, as one extra ammo for those would only give you +1 damage.

The accessory slot this occupies clashes with Lucky Cigarette Case. The proposition of this card is to make Michael use his ability 3+ times a turn instead of 2 times, due to the "Limit once per firerarm asset" restriction on his ability. It also let's you search for and draw a firearm asset. The second part is only decent if you are not running Underworld Market because it completely eliminates the problem of not having a gun when a fight starts, making "Viola" Case less valuable. Holding more guns before drawing Confiscation is not ideal, so most of the time you would play this card late, and at that point you might already have missed out on getting a lot of value from "Viola" Case. I guess the main reason this item exists is a built in Bandolier which is a card that makes 2 handed weapons a much better proposition. The problem is that at this point of the game, 2 handed weapons are only necessary for nieche cases like scenarios where a lot of crowd control is needed, or extremely tanky bosses with very high fight values that need to be killed quickly. Most of the time, you can solve these problems another way, and if you are not running 2 handed items at all in a Michael deck, I would only use this as an Unexpected Courage.

I feel like I have been sucked into a parallel dimension or something. This card has some restricted uses but it isn’t good guys, what are you on about? "Not having to care about XP", like one review suggested is not a pro, you can “not care about XP” if you want and you will outpace Ascetic very fast just from incidental XP, there is no need to take this card for that. All the other XP cost reduction cards you can "combo" with Ascetics you can just run without it and you will outpace an Ascetic deck in one two scenarios max. Also 10 XP makes scenario 1 easier and then by scenario 2 you are level with the intended difficult more or less, so it does a super poor job of frontloading anything, you guys are jumping through some serious hoops to find value on a meh card. It's inventive, it helps groups going into the last stretch of a campaign after having an investigator go insane or die and its great for new players joining late into a campaign, and that’s it.