Board game analysis: Arkham Horror

Hello Peons.
I ask for forgiveness in this late Post. By attending to dreamhack i lost the time to post this so here goes.

Arkham Horror.

It’s a game based of H.P. Lovecrafts universe created with the object to work together against the ancient ones. In the game the players play as investigators that work against the different cults and to stop the ancient one from entering the world. There are several ways for the player to prevent these disasters from happening. During the game several rifts will open where monsters pour out and take over the city. To do this the player collects Clues, fights monsters, travel to other worlds.
Arkham Horror is the game where you fight the ancient ones from the books basically.

The Rules
representing the players in the game are the investigators. The investigators have premade a sheet that describes abilities, skills and the starting equipment. There are several different variables that comes into play with the investigator sheet. Many variables who influence the outcome of decisions made throughout the game, for example the speed/sneak variable influences how fast a character can move. By making a character faster he’s ability to sneak becomes harder and vice versa.
Representing the health in game are sainty and stamina tokens, they represent the mental and physical health of the player.

The enemy in game is represented by different monster cards throughout the session and finally by the ancient one sheets if it awakens during the game. The players choose before the start of the game what ancient one they would like to battle. Depending on what ancient one is chosen the players the ancient one has effect on gameplay from turn one. For example Cthulhu affects his worshippers with innsmouth look that gives his Cultist a horror rating of – 2 and a horror damage of 2 sanity. Cthulhu also invokes on the investigators during the gameplay by reducing their maximum Sanity and stamina by 1.
All Ancient ones affects the gameplay in different ways to give different difficulties.

There are several ways the Ancient one can be awaken, the two most common is that the doom track gets filled. For each round that passes a doom token is places upon the ancient one’s sheet. The amount of doom tokens needed for ancient one to awaken varies, between 8 to 16 doom token is needed. When the doom track is full and the ancient one awakens.

Other ways that the ancient one can awake is trough to many gates being open, if there are seven gates open with four players the ancient one will awake the moment the last gate is open and the game will enter the final battle.
Final Battle
Before the final battle begins the players will discard any active environment cards or rumor cards. Additionally the systems for money, bank loans and retainers stop being accounted for.
The final battle consists of several phases that each fighting round includes. It starts off with the investigators refresh which enables the investigators the refresh their skill cards, use abilities and adjust their skill sliders. The investigators may also trade their items as if they were on the same tile.
The next phase is the Investigators attack phase, during this phase the players use combat check against the ancient one with the combat rating as modifier. The ancient one, unlike normal monsters can’t be defeated by one attack. If the players accumulate enough successful attacks equal to the amount of players. If this happens the players may remove one doom token. The ancient one is defeated when there is no more doom tokens.
After the players made all of their combat checks it is the ancient ones turn, it unleashes attacks on each of the investigators once. The attacks varies for the different ancient ones some makes the investigators make a sanity check others may give the investigators to lose a sanity or one stamina. After the ancient one has attacked each investigator once the round restarts. By defeating the ancient one the investigators has saved the city and the day. There are also other ways that the game can be won trough, if the investigators managed to seal enough gates before the last doom token is place the ancient one can’t enter the world and the arkham is saved.

System
What makes this game go forward? and what it’s the most important system working at play?
During the game there is a card called mythos card, the mythos card acts for the monsters in the game. There are three major categories of the mythos cards and how they affect the game.
The environment mythos card that gives a description of an ongoing event in Arkham, the ongoing event may be positive or negative for the investigators depending on what modifiers the mythos card is holding. The environment card will stay in place until the next environment card comes into play.
The headline mythos card is a one effect card and the most common type of mythos card in the game. These mythos cards do different things depending on card but they may be beneficial, harmful or neutral. When the cards text is done the rest of the mythos phase is complete, the card is discarded to the bottom of the mythos deck.
The rumor mythos card has an ongoing effect (much like the environment cards) but also consist of a pass and a fail condition. For example the mythos card “Disturbing the dead” will have the ongoing effect that a die will be rolled at the end of every mythos phase. If the die lands on a 1 or 2 the terror level in the city is increased. For the card to reach the pass condition a player need to discard two gate trophies in the rivertown streets during the encounter phase. The fail condition for this card is when the terror reaches 10, if this happened every investigator will be cursed.

The mythos card also has two other important uses for the game. Firstly it spawns clue tokens around on different areas of arkham each time a mythos card is drawn.
the other use the mythos card posses is the monster movement. Each monster that is summoned into arkham have different signs and the arkham map have two different paths, white and black. These mythos cards tell monsters with a certain sign to move one step on either a white or a black path.

Good
the game focuses on having investigators with big differences, this opens up for the player to support each other through their different strengths. The game encourages its players to work together to achieve the victory against the ancient ones. This creates a sense of competency with the other players. Every player need to feel that they are contributing towards the common goal the team in the game. The game does that trough the different strengths and weaknesses. For example there are investigators that have great strengths in fighting monster but in sealing gates or traveling the other worlds have great difficulty. This can create scenarios where a gate needs to be sealed and the gate is guarded by a great monster. In order to seal the gate one investigator needs to kill the monster before the greate sealing investigator steps in and seals the gate for good.

Bad
The bad part of the game is related to the best part of the game, and that’s because it’s a NPC based game. The fact that everything the ancient one does is automated makes every encounter highly predictable. Though the mythos card section is randomized in what mythos card that will be drawn but for an experienced player the mythos card is a known part and not a hard part to deal with. This is something that is hard to avoid when creating a game where it’s the boardgame vs its players. A way to avoid this could be to have 1 player play as the ancient one and the rest to play as the investigators. This could create a more unpredictable experience but the difficulty could sky rocket. For this to work there would be a lot of limitations of what the ancient one could do and not, but it could prove out to be a more interesting way of playing the game.

Audience
As the game is centered and designed around the Cthulhu mythos and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s pretty understandable that a fan of the universe would enjoy playing with a game that offers the players to battle and banishing the ancient ones. Otherwise, the other player who knows vaguely about H.P. Lovecraft would more think about the mechanics that the games provides. The type of player who enjoys this would arguably either be a killer or a socializer who thrives on working together against a common goal.

Conclusion
I see Arkham horror as a great game where the first couple of times can be really tricky to get into but as the players understand more about the game and the mechanic the game will provide a great joy. I understand that the game is possible to play alone, controlling several investigators and working against the horrors that lay within Arkham.
I personally think that the game was very hard to understand and to get into. It may have been a problem that one of our team members was a big fan of the game and told us more what to do than why we did it. There were several occasions where I was told to roll a die but did not understand why and what numbers affected the outcome of the roll.
I enjoyed the game from what it was but I openly think that a design revolving around one player controlling the Ancient one and the rest playing as the investigators could provide a more interesting gameplay.

 

Board game analysis: Citadel

Hello Peons.
This past two weeks we’ve been playing board games. Going back to analyzing systems and to understand the systems.
Me and my group have been playing Citadels, a game where you try to raise the most magnificent citadel with beautiful districts.

Citadels
Board game

In Citadels, the players take rounds to build and erect a city, in order to do this player’s takes aid from different characters to lend their different abilities. The goal in citadels is to erect the most magnificent city, to outshine the other cities in the land. In order to do this the player needs to outsmart and outplay his opponents with the different abilities that the characters offers, a wide range of different abilities, some abilities are used to murder a other character, other abilities are used to steal all the other players gold.

Rules

The District cards
to be able to build the city the player needs district. These are made up by the district cards. Each district card has a color and a certain numbers of coin on them. These coins describe how much each district

The Character cards
each game of Citadel contains eight character cards. These cards will influence the round with giving each player a number, this number gives tells in what order the players are going to play. The characters also have abilities that aid the player in certain ways, for example; the assassin card takes out another character for the following round, other characters helps the player gain more gold during the round.

The Gold
Gold is used to build the districts in the players city, and to pay characters like the warlord (You receive one gold for each military district in your city. You may pay to destroy one district of your choice.) to destroy another districts. Gold is gained through the action phase or the different abilities.

The King
In the start of the game the king Is chosen by age. The oldest player always starts with the crown. From then the player with the King Character card receives the crow until the following round.

The game consists out of two types of cards, gold tokens and the king token. A round starts with the king to remove a random card from the character deck and to place it face down on the table, next the king draws a second set of cards and place them face up on the table (this depends on the number of players)

Next the players will choose a character card from the remaining cards in the character deck. The player chooses a card and then passes the deck to the next player on his left. This is done until the last player shall choose a card, this player have the opportunity to take a look at the card that was faced down earlier.

The round starts with the king shouting out the different ranks of the player characters, from the number 1 to 8. The order of the players is decided by what character they’ve chosen for said round.
When a character is shout’ed how the players turn start. Within the turn for the player one can decide out of the actions, either take two gold from the bank or draw two district cards from the decks. One of the card is put in the players hand and the other is discarded. After these actions have been chosen the player may build something with a district card.
Districts is built by paying the required amount of gold on the card. Gold is gained through character abilities or through the action in the start of a players turn.

Then if its stated by the abilities on the character the player may take the action stated.

After all players have played their round the sitting king collects all character cards and the round starts all over again.

cost and how much they’re worth in the end of the game. The color has a number of uses where more of one color adds more point in the end of the game, character abilities may as well use the districts for the players benefit.

System
the game is in the core as simple but heavy on the tactics, for a smart player needs to figure out what every other player chooses as the character of their current round, as well as picking a character that can counter their character. This is the mind game from Citadels; it’s a big part of the game to read your opponent trough probability, “poker face” and chance. Depending on your placement in the match you’ll always have to try and figure out what other character the other players have chosen, In order to do this you count from the two character cards faced up and the ones you see in the deck on your turn to figure out what the other players have chosen. If one may do this correct he’ll be able to control the flow of the game.
The districts in the game is important because they hand the player the points in the end of the game, when a player reaches 8 districts the game will end, that round that the last district is built will be the last. If there are players able to destroy one district before the round has ended the game will continue. District cards gathered and built during each player rounds, there are five different types of colors on the cards. Each color can provide income for the different character types or give special benefits that is describe on the card. These are the main focus of the game, to win the game the player needs as many valuable districts as possible. Having one of each color gives the player a bonus when the points is counted, having 8 districts gives the player a bonus, even more if the player was first with receiving the eight district.

Good part
The game requires and encourages the players to play mind games with each other. To gain an advantage the players need outsmart. For example if you a lot of gold from earlier round and another player sits on a lot of district cards on his hand, then the other player would want to pick the thief
( Announce a character from whom to steal. When the player with this card is revealed, take his gold ) in order to steal your gold. What the thief character need to do is to figure out what character you’re going to pick. Of course, nobody knows what character you’re going to pick but they can figure it out. Depending on what order the characters are picked and what characters were left on the hand when they had the character deck. For this it is needed to figure out what the other player needs to do and act against it.
For the player with the lot of gold the best way to defend himself would be to pick the assassin and assassinate the thief before the thief is able to steal the gold that the player possesses.

The Worst part
it’s quite easy to fall behind in this game. Playing the game and falling behind makes the game real hard. The player will spend most of his time trying to regain the gap that can be created by this. Same thing for the player who gains the advantage will have no trouble keeping the advantage. Maybe in order to make the game easier for the other players need to have more cards that can sabotage for each other, In order to make it harder and easier for players to regain the same level throughout the game.
Some characters have a decent drawback where the characters abilities work against the flow of the game. The Witch character card takes over the powers of another character that the player announces during his turn. The bewitched player can only take the action where the player chooses to take gold or draw district cards, after that the witch takes over and uses the players turn for her.
This character card takes too much power from another character, similar to the assassin the character abilities removes one of their turn. The assassin makes sure no one gets it, where the witch takes the other players power

The Audience
Suggested by the board game itself, is ages 10 and up. Most likely because that the rules of the game are fairly simple to the core and few different cards that is needed to keep track of. The fact that the game contains very little to nothing at all in violence and a simple core would give it the reasonable age limit for the game.
With this in mind, one would need to define what types of players that would be interested in playing this game. If one goes with the bartle test of players, one can see how the different parts of the game attracts the different personalities and individuals. The killers might enjoy thinking ahead of the other players and sabotage to gain victory, while the socializers might enjoy the whole experience of playing with the other players not focusing so much on the game itself. Achievers might play the game for the sole reason to build a city in different ways or simply to achieve victory over the others, the explorer might play it solely to explore the possibilities of a new game.

How it Correlates
with the character cards and the district cards the game works fine, having the characters in game adds another level of tactics that would be lost without them. Without the character cards the turns would go get boring. The rounds would only be about whatever the player needed gold or more districts for his city. The character cards add an element of tactics that gives the game the depth it needs to stay interesting.

Have a great weekend. 😀