Arkham Horror

Does anyone here play Arkham Horror? I heard it was quite popular among veteran board game players, so I'm surprised no-one's talked about it on here...

There's a Hobby Board Games topic, where a couple of us have discussed our experiences with it.

I play it, we just had a game a few weeks go. We defeated Nyarlathotep with only one fatality.

I owe a copy but most people I know aren't willing to put in the two to three hours it takes to play it

Yeah, it certainly is decently long.

Beat them until they want to play.

We didn't play the game for nearly two years after one of my former friends threw a temper tantrum. He had the extreme misfortune of being caught by the God of the Bloody Tongue which then camped in front of the hospital. Nobody could help, that thing is one of the most powerful monsters in game, and he decided to just keep charging it, getting beaten, losing more gear, and "returning" to the hospital.

That was a shitty night.

Great game. A friend owns a Comic Shop which has a basement that serves as a designated Board game/Card game/RPG playing ground. Lots of hours spent on Arkham Horror down there. Haven't played in years though.

Do you folks play with all the expansions at once? I find that it's a bit of a waste, personally. Particularly when the base game is so good already.

I'm trying to convince my friends to filter out the stuff for a 'Best of' version/compilation, but that's not gained much traction so far.

I don't have much experience with the expansions, but my friends and I don't play the base game much any more—we find it too easy to win unless we handicap it by turning it into a drinking game. There's one group of guys I know who played it so often that they memorized where all the companions can be found, and now just keep having encounters in those places until they've got two or more apiece—they can generally stomp almost any of the monsters by that point.

Playing with all expansion at once makes the game pretty near impossible, as it's very difficult for the players to be everywhere at once.

I only run two of the little expansions, adds some chaos, over quite overwhelming.

My roomies and I play with Kingsport, and we're planning to pick up Innsmouth next. Had a victorious game tonight against Nyarlathotep. It woke up one turn before I (as Wendy "what is combat?" Adams) would have closed the last gate needed for a no-gates-open victory, but we pulled off the final battle with no deaths, thanks in large part to an armed-to-the-teeth Darrell Simmons.

I like the game well enough. It does take a long time to play, but so does my personal favorite board game - Twilight Imperium.

My main beef with it is that I prefer games where you compete against the other players. Or at least a living gamemaster, like Descent.

Lesson learned: Charlie Kane turns Hastur into a pushover.

Anyone playing the card game?

I do. It's a blast. And you only need a normal-sized table to play it Also, a campaign of the card game is equivalent to a single game of the board game, so you can easily play in multiple sessions (I recall the board game being very long).

I've played the first two scenarios of the card game, and it is pretty good, even if I do have a big problem with it: it's no fun when you're doing badly. You can commit everything you have to a skill check that must succeed and still have it fail, and then have no choice but to try again with basically no chance of success. I realised only the other day that the reason it bothers me so much is that this is a campaign game; if it was a single-session game where you can have a bad time but start again fresh next time you play, I don't think I'd mind, but here you'll end up in the next scenario with disadvantages if you do badly enough.

Of course, it is thematically appropriate that things go badly in a Lovecraft setting, but if it comes at the cost of actual fun, I don't think it's worth it. I also think my group had a lot of bad luck in our campaign. We mulliganed the Essex County Express scenario when we lost on turn one.

The default mode is campaign, but you can do any scenario as a standalone. Also, if you play with a single box (or 2 for 3-4 players), you're going to have a harder time, because your deck lacks consistency (you need 2 core boxes per pair of players to remedy that). Beyond that, the other boxes and packs will give you more options in addition to more scenarios.

Two core sets per pair of players seems like overkill to me. Only reason I can think to have that is if people are using the same types of character, when it seems to me you'd want to be playing different types. You're only allowed two copies of most cards in deck, and two core sets (which I have) will give you two of everything, and four of most if not all (I forget the exact numbers in a set) of the neutral cards.

That said, of the group I play it with, I have two core sets and someone else has two core sets, but we just both wanted the game, we didn't do it to have a broad array of options.

You do want different classes in the group. However, the investigators in the core set each have a secondary class, so with 4 investigators, 3 classes will be used by 2 investigators (the classes the missing investigator cannot use); with 3 investigators, 1 class will be used by 2 investigators (or 2, depending on the lineup). Also, there is only 1 playset of the neutral skills in each core set (everyone needs willpower boosts, those tests come up really often in the encounter deck).

So Asmodee Digital (who have pretty much on their way to make digital versions of any board game) is making a narrative-driven tactical RPG called Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace

Peek your interest or do think it is too different?

Edited by jormis29 on Feb 4th 2021 at 10:52:01 PM

Doesn't look much like the card game, but that's fine. Maybe something to keep half an eye on.

Piques my interest, sure. I find I always like the board game adaptations and roguelike Lovecraft games more than the full first-person triple-A stuff. The former leave something up to the imagination, the latter never live up to how I picture it.

This is a little too bright and Sims-like for me, I still kind of prefer the older editions' art. But I'll get over it. Still, something darker, more monochrome, or even full retraux like Paratopic or Life in Vivo. Stygian, that was a great art style for Lovecraft. But this is okay. Models and animation are decent, and I like the judicious use of still characters and moving camera.

The art-style of the new game reminds me quite a bit of Cluedo, which seems like something that could very easily be combined with the Cthulhu Mythos. That boardgame is also a good source for miniatures of 1920's-style characters to use in a Lovecraftian tabletop game.

Someone must have come up with a house rules hack to combine the two at some point, surely...