- Anti-Climax Boss: Seth Bishop, The Dunwich Legacy campaign's Big Bad and the boss of the penultimate scenario, is a complete joke compared to absolute hell that the investigators had to face in the previous scenario. Despite being a boss, he deals only 1 damage and horror, and his health is below that of the bosses you can meet in tutorial scenarios (especially on low player count), which makes him very easy to put down by an experienced and well-geared team; he even gets easily overshadowed by some generic enemies you can meet. That's assuming you fight him at full force, or event fight him at all, as, depending on your prior actions, he may be wounded, or even neutralised altogether, before you even make it to him. In the Return version you can have a rematch with him in the final scenario, where he is a bit more of a threat however, having more health and attack power than before... But that will only happen if every kidnapped victim got sacrificed in "Blood on the Altar", which is extremely unlikely to happen unless you got really unlucky, screwed up incredibly badly... Or intentionally resigned at the start and left the victims to die.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: In the Night of the Zealot campaign, cultists claim Umôrdhoth is a just god who claims only the dead and the guilty, and notably it does willingly leave if you deliver the one who destroyed one of its lairs to it. Lita in contrast claims that the cult is sacrificing innocents to sate it and the ghouls' hunger, and while we only have her word for that they're clearly willing to strongarm civilians like the mortician into aiding them and kill anyone interfering in their actions.
- Base-Breaking Character: This incarnation of Lola Hayes is by far the most divisive Player Character in LCG, purely on a gameplay standpoint however. Her deckbuilding options including all cards below Level 4 from all classes is seen as either fun to use, for giving an incredibly multitude of ways to play Lola, or boring for giving no identity or interesting gimmick to Lola herself beyond her vast card access. Some players see Lola as a pretty strong Investigator, if you know how to use her, who gets a bigger power boosts than anyone else with each cycle introducing new player cards, thanks to her broad deckbuilding; while detractors see her as Low-Tier Letdown whose balanced statline makes her good at nothing in particular, or alternatively see her gimmick as more awkward or annoying to play with than anything else, as it requires to memorise your current class each round and whether you used her class change feature or not to keep track on what cards you are allowed to play and/or use. Taboo rulings giving her a Balance Buff did little to quell arguments, as there are people who found that necessary to make playing as Lola less of a bother and think she is in a better spot now, some that think the Taboo went overboard and took away the main balancing and challenging aspect of Lola, and those that say even with the Taboo Lola is still bad or not fun to play as, as the Taboo doesn't fix the core issues of her gimmick.
- Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- Every class has certain cards (especially the level 0 ones) which are commonly considered to be "must-have", resulting in these cards showing up disproportionally often, overshadowing the other cards. Several popular cards were hit by "taboo" rules specifically for that reason, particularly low level ones, mostly by increasing their experience cost (but not level) to encourage the players to consider other options, and preventing certain cards from showing up in starting decks. Amongst the most infamous cases are "Machete" (Guardian-class Weapon)note and "Mr Rook" (Seeker-class Ally).
- If you see a Survivor on the table, expect them to run as their allies Peter Sylvester and Jessica Hyde, a strategy colloquially known as Pessica: that is because both allies provide useful stat boost (Peter gives Agility and, once upgraded, Willpower, while Jessica boosts Combat), have regenerating sanity and health respectively and they are fairly cheap to run on both Resources (3 for each) and exp (Peter is a level 0 card with an optional level 2 upgrade, Jessica is level 1 and using both just merely requires a 3 exp Charisma). It's really hard to pass being made so hard to kill with so little effort.
- You are probably not going to ever see an Alessandra Zorzi deck that doesn't run the "Fine Clothes" body asset, which lowers the difficulty of all Parley tests by 2. As parleying is the central focus of Zorzi's gameplay, she gets a lot of milleage out of the difficulty reduction, letting her pass tests using even her weaker skills (and reducing a test difficulty by zero will guarantee she will succeed, outside of a Critical Failure).
- "In the Thick of It" permanent (you start the game with 3 extra exp, at the cost of suffering 2 Traumas of your choice) is very popular in general despite the drawbacks, but it's omni-present with Calvin Wright decks, because Calvin gets gets stat boosts by having Damage and Horror on him. Usually players give him a Mental and Physical trauma to start a campaign with 1 in every stat, instead of 0.
- Demonic Spiders: While there are plenty of harmful or annoying encounter cards, some have a reputation for either killing players, or putting the entire mission into jeopardy.
- Difficulty Spike:
- Rather infamously, the third and final scenario of the Night of the Zealot campaign, "Devourer Below", significantly ups the difficulty compared to the first two scenarios, in what's supposed to be a tutorial campaign. To make it worse, due to you only having two relatively short scenarios before it, it's very easy to come here with gravely underlevelled deck, especially if second one didn't go smoothly.
- When it was originally released, The Forgotten Age campaign was nearly universally acknowledged as much harder than anything prior to it, not in the last turn due to emphasis on (previously underused) Agility stat, and new Poison and Vengeance mechanics which forces the players to adapt or die. It's telling that Return to the Forgotten Age expansion actually toned down much of it to more reasonable level, instead of making it harder like other "Returns" do. While other hard campaigns were released since then, none had as much of impact in that regard.
- Fan Nickname:
- The system of "blessed" and "cursed" tokens is often colloquially called "blurse" by the players.
- "Pessica", for decks running Peter Sylvester and Jessica Hyde (Survivor-class Allies) together for their ability to regenerate lost sanity and health, respectively and the diverse stat boosts they provide.
- Fanon: The house of the lead Investigator in the Night of the Zealot campaign is meant to belong to whoever happens to be the current lead Investigator, but most people default to say it belongs to Skids, as he is both present in the Core Box, and has both the most personal stakes to refuse Lita's request to set his home to fire to combat the threat of the ghouls, and the most reasons to be traumatised if he does accept for her to do so (as it belonged to his deceased mother).
- Game-Breaker: The "Double or Nothing" Rogue skill, which only provides a +1 skill boost and doubles the difficulty of a test it is commited to while also doubling the all effects of succeeding if you manage to pass the test. The card was supposed to be balanced around with the fact that the hardest test that you would want to get a better pay-off from were also the ones that got the biggest difficulty boost from "Double or Nothing", but beside the card being perfectly usable on easier and trivial tests where the doubled difficulty wouldn't be too high, it is still very possible to pass really hard skill checks anyway, whether by commiting cards out of your ass or boosting your skill value ludicrously high, while also stacking a bunch of effects that trigger on success to hit the jackpot. Then ways to reduce the difficulty of tests were introduced, severly lessening the drawback of the skill, if not completely negating it by reducing the difficulty to zero, while keeping all the benefits. It comes to no wonder the card was outright forbidden from being used altogether by Taboos.
- Goddamned Bats: The game features massive amount of encounter cards which, while not lethal, actively hinder the players' progress.
- Low-Tier Letdown:
- Some investigators are commonly considered to be much weaker than their colleagues from same class:
- Carson Sinclair (Guardian class) is a Support Party Member, with all his abilities, including signatures, being geared towards helping the other players — the others, but not himself; his main selling point is the ability to trade his actions to the other players. But, unlike the other support characters, he's also crippled by having no stat above 2, which makes him fall behind his colleagues, both in and outside of his class. To add insult into injury, effectiveness of his main ability drastically diminishes at low player count, as Carson can't buff each player more than once per round, meaning that it only reaches full potential in full groups.
- "Skids" O'Toole (Rogue class) fell victim of his Jack of All Stats design, which doesn't synergise well with him having Guardian as a secondary class and doesn't let him do anything the other Rogues can't. His main ability (turn resources into actions) was actually good at release, but suffered the Uniqueness Decay over the years, as the cards that grant the player extra actions became so widespread in Rogue card pool, they're one of the class' selling points now.
- Amina Zidane (Mystic class) has mediocre 3-3-3-3 statline, in a class that is dependant on Willpower to fuel their magic, and has few means to boost or benefit from other stats. She's restricted in deckbuilding, as her only off-class option — the Charm assets — generally occupy the precious accessory slot. But the most glaring issue is her core gameplay: she's intended to represent the "Doom control" archetype of the Mystics, but to be effective, she requires lots of tools that cost lots of exp to purchase, and lots of time and resources to put into play, while her ability to get discounts by putting Doom tokens on assets may drain your precious time, as it doesn't come with the means to remove it by default.
- Calvin Wright (Survivor class) has interesting concept of initially-weak investigator who grows stronger over time. But the time is exactly what team has in short supply, while 6/6 Health/Sanity and the weakness that randomly drops traumas on him (together with immediate direct damage/horror) makes it hard to actually keep him alive (especially in the long terms), given that his entire playstyle is focused around trading health and sanity for stat boosts. For a long time, he was also very restricted in his deckbuilding (due to Spirit not being very common trait), but that was gradually rectified.
- Lola Hayes (Neutral) has access to wide range of cards of all classes, but, because of her Roles system, can only use non-Neutral cards from one class at the time (she can't even trigger effects on already played cards, or commit cards), the one that matches her current "Role" — which is a problem, as she needs these cards to compensate for her subpar statline, yet changing class will basically make entire parts of her deck arbitrarily unsable. She also struggles to focus on any specific class because of her deckbuilding requiring to have a good amount of cards from three different classes. She's commonly considered a very gimmicky and awkward to play, and overall one of the weakest investigators in the roster.
- The "Blood of Thoth", Mystic-class asset, became an immediate meme on reveal. It grants the user an extra action, but requires placing three Doom tokens on the other cards first, one by one, at three different turns — in the game where Doom measures your remaining time; and the first action you get this way just refunds the one you spent on playing the card itself. The community frequently questions how it ever made it through playtesting. It was quickly given a Balance Buff through the next Taboo update, which at least made it realistically possible to reap the reward before the game ends.
- Some investigators are commonly considered to be much weaker than their colleagues from same class:
- Magnificent Bastard: From The Scarlet Keys: The Red-Gloved Man is the most mysterious member of the Scarlet Coterie, having evaded the Society for years. After being rescued from his kidnapping and supplantation by the Outsiders, he thanks the investigators before setting out on his own research. He later interrupts the investigator's trial, sneaking behind his impostor and shooting it in the head, proving that the Coterie had been infiltrated while its members were focused on the wrong priorities. After calling them out, he gets them to join forces against their doppelgangers, following them to the City of Remnants, their home dimension, to settle the score.
- Memetic Loser: Amina Zidane, the Mystic Investigator from the The Scarlet Keys expansion, is often the butt of many jokes by fans, out of a combination of her being seen as the absolute worst Low-Tier Letdown, having extremely situational deckbuilding in the form of "Charm" cards that while good on their own most did not benefit her in particular, and her main gimmick of using Doom to play and power up cards is regarded as Awesome, but Impractical and far more likely to get her and all the other members of her team killed. It's common for players to joke she is secretly on the side of the Cultists and trying to intentionally sabotage the other Investigators to stop them.
- Nintendo Hard: While not as infamously hard and lethal as the Second Edition of the main Arkham Horror board game, this is still one of the hardest cooperative card games out there, with dangerous enemies and events that can easily terminate unprepared players, punishing penalties for failing objectives, an unforgiving time limit that WILL run out if you aren't playing optimally and making progress fast and the risk of Permadeath. There is a reason Failure Is an Option in this game, as it's expected you will probably lose more often than you win. Each Expansion Pack added extra tools to make the lives of the Investigators a bit easier, and some campaings do tone down the difficulty, but others ramp it up even further! Difficulty Levels also only affect the likelihood of failing skill checks and the value and effect of tokens in the Chaos Bag, but eveything else is left unchanged, so even the Easy difficulty can be quite a challenge for beginners.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: For years, Father Mateo was ridiculed for having virtually zero off-class options, due to how uncommon the "Blessed" trait was: on initial release of The Forgotten Age (expansion which introduced him), he had grand total of two non-Mystic cards granted by his deckbuilding, one of which he couldn't even use on himself, and two following expansions barely improved the situation. It wasn't until The Innsmouth Conspiracy and The Feast of Hemlock Vale introduced blessed and cursed tokens (along with large selection of cards that interact with them), when Mateo finally found his niche.
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- Some scenarios feature the Agenda (and sometimes also the Act) deck reshuffling the encounter discard pile back into the deck when they advance, undoing all the work in getting rid of various annoying and sometimes outright lethal treacheries and enemies. To everyone's relief, later campaigns generally either dropped that practice completely, or balanced the deck around frequent reshuffling, to prevent Cycle of Hurting situations.
- Encounter decks featuring cards that add Doom directly to Agenda, together with the cards that add Doom to the playfield (most common combo being "Ancient Evils" + "Dark Cult", both of which are already wildely-hated sets), are generally viewed as recipes for disaster, especially in bigger groups, as it's entirely possible to get situations where players draw enemies with Doom on them back to back and then one card that adds Doom to the Agenda, causing it to immediately advance before anyone gets a chance to react. Later expansions generally either feature only one method of extra Doom generation within a scenario, make placing Doom to Agenda preventable, or alter the rules to prevent cheap instant failures.
- "The City of Archives" scenario from The Forgotten Age campaign takes away your investigator, forcing you to play as a Yithian with overall terrible stats and not very useful abilities (they do contribute towards main objective, but little else)... and also takes away all unique Items, including signatures. Some investigators gets completely crippled by that, as it ruins their preferred playstyle and takes away the cards that are the core of their gameplay. While overall alien aesthetics of scenario can be memorable, few players have fond memories of this particular restriction. And then there's a risk of staying this way permanently if you don't perform well enough on the scenario.
- The Circle Undone expansion introduced new "Haunted" mechanic, where failing to investigate "haunted" location triggers various negative effects. While the mechanic itself was fun, the campaign overused it, to the point that locations without the "Haunted" keyword were greatly outnumbered by locations that did have it. Add to the fact that many of those effects can be crippling when repeatedly triggered and investigators who don't specialise in clue gathering, or rely on failing "safe" skill tests to get various bonuses (especially Survivors), usually can't afford to risk investigating at all. It's made worse by the aggressive deployment of encounter cards that either add more "haunted" effects, or make existing ones worse.
- While generally liked expansion overall, The Innsmouth Conspiracy has one design decision which very few would defend: that players aren't allowed to spend exp before starting flashback scenarios (meaning that players can't update their starting deck for two full scenarios), which can't even be excused as Gameplay and Story Integration, as traumas do carry over, and any flashbacks past first one use your updated deck instead of the starting one, reinforcing how arbitrarily this restriction feels. Additionally, on initial release, due to the "Mythos pack" release model, it was entirely possible to get new cards from freshly-released pack, only to be unable to include them into deck until one more scenario.
- Edge of the Earth campaign features some scenarios with really massive amount of locations (ten and more at once), which heavily punishes small groups which just can't split up to cover such vast areas efficiently, making heavy investments into mobility cards a necessity to just play the campaign at all — when being on a strict time limit, you can't afford spending whole turns just getting somewhere. To make it worse, when playing on a difficulty above Standard, you may start some scenarios already having some Doom on the first Agenda, further cutting off your time.
- Self-Imposed Challenge: Playing as Carson Sinclair in "true solo". Carson is a Support Party Member who requires at least another player to use his unique kit, meaning that in single player, he is stuck with no abilities, no signatures and with subpar stats. Yet some people managed to build decks for him to be effective on his own still.
- Solo-Character Run: So-called "true solo" runs — to start and finish the campaign playing by alone as one specific investigator, and keep them alive right until the end. Such runs are very popular, and it's not uncommon for the players to share their "true solo" decks.
- Spoiled by the Format: In most scenarios, it's easy to tell how close you are to the end of the scenario simply by looking at how many agenda or act cards are left.
- That One Boss: Night of Zealot is supposed to be a tutorial campaign, but its final boss, Umôrdhoth, is commonly considered to be one of the most cruel and unfair bosses in entire game, for several reasons: next to zero preparation time the final scenario gives before you have to face it; Umôrdhoth having very high stats and being all but impossible to exhaust; and the campaign's short length simply leaving no chance to earn enough exp to build up the deck to face the boss. Mercifully, it's possible to win the scenario before Umôrdhoth awakens.
- That One Disadvantage: Some basic weaknesses are more devastating than the others. One of particularly painful to deal with is "Silver Twilight Acolyte"; whenever it attacks, it causes the Doom to be placed directly to the current Agenda (which means, you just got one step closer to losing), and it has just enough health to survive one attack unless you're prepared for fight. It's also not so easy to run away from, as it has decent agility and would keep pursuing its prey, being a Hunter.
- That One Level:
- The third scenario of the Night of the Zealot campaign, "The Devourer Below", is infamous for its unforgiving difficulty (challenging enemies, little time and brutal final boss), especially since it comes right after two mostly tutorial scenarios, in a campaign which gives little chance to stockpile experience and gain higher-level cards.
- "Undimensioned and Unseen" scenario from The Dunwich Legacy campaign has you pursuit several monsters that you can't hurt by anything but one scenario-specific card, and who're all to eager to kill you if they run into you. The most annoying part is that the monsters you're after keep moving around erratically, forcing you to waste time on pursuing them. And you want to kill them all, as letting even one to slip away would cut your time on the next scenario (failing which ends your entire run).
- The Forgotten Age is considered a very hard campaign in general, but couple of scenarios are particularly disliked, both for being harder than average even by its standards, and for being very mean to the players:
- "Boundary Beyond" makes progressing very tedious, as you have to stand in location and keep exploring it, hoping that the exploration deck would actually send you a matching Ancient location, so it would swap and let you start to actually gather clues: you need to fully clear 6 locations before you even reach the Act 3, which lets you do your actual objective. If you draw location with the wrong symbol (or worse, an encounter card), you would waste that exploration. And then you can get a treachery dropped on your head, which threatens to either cut your precious time, or undo all the progress for your location, cutting even more time. Unfortunately, winning this scenario is one of conditions for the Golden Ending.
- "The City of Archives" strips investigators of their abilities and any unique Items (signatures included) with no prior warning, instead giving them Master of None replacement they would spend the rest of scenario playing as. This scenario can completely disrupt carefully thought strategy that you've built throughout the entire campaign up until this point, and yet you still must somehow complete your tasks within the time limit, or entire campaign would end in a failure prematurely.
- The Circle Undone is commonly considered one of the harder campaigns, rivalling the infamous The Forgotten Age which directly preceded it, but two scenarios commonly stand out as particularly cruel to the players:
- "Wages Of Sins" starts with all locations revealed, letting Investigator to gather clues from connecting locations if they have the tools to Investigate from a distance... And that's where the advantages end. Your objective is to "banish" the spirits of various Heretics, which can only be done by defeating them and then performing a time-consuming task, while being hunted by various enemies and The Spectral Watcher in a very tiny map with plenty choke points where they can corner you. And if you fail to exorcise all Heretics, you will start the other notoriously hard level, "Union and Disillusion", with Doom already on the agenda for each spectre that got away.
- In "Union and Disillusion", advancing through the forest is painfully slow, as it throws lots of difficult tests at you just to progress into next section, and frequently dumps the players with all sorts of treacheries to drain their health and sanity before they even make it to the site of final battle.
- That One Sidequest: "Laid to Rest" (Jim's Challenge scenario) is based on already much-maligned "Wages of Sin" from The Circle Undone campaign, and manages to make it worse, by making the time limit even stricter, and adding Luck-Based Mission elements: the Heretics you need to put down are all in Jim's Beyond deck, meaning you have to find them randomly, and then pray to Cthulhu that you manage to spawn them before they gets randomly discarded (as they obey the same rules as any other card in the Beyond deck), or you may simply run out of time before you find them again. Additionally, this scenario alters the way experience is distributed, meaning that Jim only gets the victory points from the Ravenous Spirits, and other party members only gets them from locations (which you can't even fully clear until the final cycle of the agenda), while still charging them exp to even play the scenario.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Revised core set replaced the art for some player cards, all five investigators, and for some encounter cards, as well as for Night of the Zealot campaign's Final Boss, Umôrdhoth. Not all choices for replacement art were received equally positively: some players prefer old art for investigators over new, while new portrayal of Umôrdhoth is viewed as a generic tentacled monster, which makes it less otherworldly and eldritch.
- Woolseyism: The pun of Barkham Horror doesn't really work in italian, where the sound of a dog barking is "bau", and the word for bark is "abbaiare". Instead, the scenario was renamed in Italy "Arcan Horror", an italian pun between Arkham, arcane (arcano) and dog (cane), losing the meaning but keeping the spirit of the joke.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/ArkhamHorrorTheCardGame
Go To
