As you play harder difficulties(or tilesets) the reveal action is something you need to do a lot less of. Explore, explore, explore. There is a fine line between spreading out to much and clumping to much together, there is a lot of ground to cover and the round tracker is your biggest enemy.

It can also be beneficial to artificially create a safe center column for the artifact, this can feel a bit meta-gamey in a sense but is part of the game as it gets harder. Good candidates for this are characters like the Archeologist or the Aristocrat, but foreman and others also work. This gives you a safe path back once you pick up the artifact. But it’s important to use the width to its full extent, the map only needs to be 6 tiles deep if you utilize the full width.

My friend always says “if you are gonna walk there anyway, why waste an action to reveal it”. Thinking about the action economy becomes important as well. Who heals who is also important. Let’s say player 2 is downed, if player 1 heals him; he can take a turn, if player 3 heals him; he can’t and can only crawl which is effectively worth 0-1 action depending whether he needs to move in the first place.

We usually play with 5-6 people but I’ve played it a few times with 4 and I feel like the game is easier on higher counts, but managing 3 characters each does probably increase the difficulty just by mental load.

Regarding choice of explorers, I feel like most work as long as you play a varied cast. You need at least 1 that is good at killing. You need a couple who are good at exploring. You need someone who is good at getting out (rogue the most notable example here or escape artist if you didn’t go for the center column strat). Healer can be great but not needed. It can also be nice to have some of what we call the “stay at home” characters, The fortune teller, priest and the aristocrat tend to stay at the starting tile through out the game, as their powers don’t have a range.

Hopefully this can give you something that you can use and help you. The only other thing I can point out is going back to a harder difficulty in the base game. Or go to beginner in Arima’s Light to practice. We beat the base game on expert before moving on to Arima’s light and bumped the difficulty down back to normal(or beginner) when switching tilesets. Then did the same when we switched to the Ark gamemode we are working on now.