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.
AdamWrange 
Hi Adam!
You have told us a lot of how the game plays out, the rules etc. But I would have wanted to read more about what kind of mechanics you have found, this makes it a bit hard for me to review on so I will try to fill in as much as I can through my review on this matter.
First off I would want to figure out what kind of core mechanics the game have (and this is of course according me);
The main thing about this is the core game play and that is to cooperate to win against the game, gather cards, close gates and defeat monsters.
There is also some risk and rewards here, and it is so clear that it actually is written in most of the cards, for example; if you use a clue you get an extra dice but if you use it you may not have enough clue tokens to close a gate and prevent the boss from appearing. This also plays out on different cards where you have the chance to gain either better cards or loose sanity.
This takes us to the importance of dice throwing, where you have to rely on the dice outcome where rolling a five or a six would be a success. And depending on what kind of card or monster you are dealing with against the stats you have chosen on your character sheet you may be at an advantage and can roll more than five dices and thus increases your chance of getting a better outcome, this also goes the other way around where if you do not have the enough of the stats needed then you will be at a great disadvantage.
We can keep on talking about the battle system here too. There are a lot of monsters out on the board game and they move as you mentioned here. You can plan your attack or escape by calculating the movements or look at the characteristics of the specific monster tile. When you engage a monster you may first have to do a chance roll, if the enemy have a stat that can damage your sanity you will have to roll a dice on whether you get effected or not.
Moonwalking further in to this throwing dice system… the game gives you an amount of five dices, and sets another rule into the system, making the game a chance based game, where you will have to get 5 or 6 to be counted as a success which may seem like the chances are very slim and yes they are. Here you can see that they have managed to balance the game and its outcomes if even just for a bit. As you can raise you chance of getting the higher dices by offering clue tokens which at the same time correlates with the “risk & reward”- system.
Regarding the card systems, they do indeed have more than the mythos card you have written about here, and that may appear confusing if you do not mention the five different phases (I will add more to that below) that occur when playing through each round, which is pretty different comparing to other turn based board games. One turn divides into five phases (I will only touch the matter):
1. “Upkeep”- only the ones who has cards with upkeep may play this round, and others can only adjust their character sheet stats if they are planning to make a move, but they are not obligated to.
2. “Movement”- Depending on what the players have chosen on their stats they can move a certain distance on the game board.
3. “Arkham Encounters”- During encounter phase, each player standing in a location (not a street or other world) must take a card to see if a portal would open at their location or not.
4. “Other world encounters”- Players residing in other worlds will have to draw one of these. This would tell the player what kind of encounters they may face.
5. “Mythos”- and finally here we got the mythos cards you mentioned.
Of course these are not the full rules of the phases, but I would refer those who are interested to the rule book for that.
The good part of the game:
I am with you on this one actually. I would also want to state that the co-op system in this game is something I like the most, this makes it unique in a way that you would remember this game after playing it.
I would like to give the developers of this game hands down for all their work in balancing this game.
Something that also is impressive is the amount of work they put on the art style.
The bad parts of the game:
I do understand your point here, but for the part where someone have to play as the ancient one would not be possible, this is because the ancient does not have that big of a role when the players are waiting for him to appear (or not). So if a player would play as the boss, that poor player would have to wait for a loooooooooong time! They would also have to remake the game entirely, maybe if they did a computer game of it, then they could just have added an AI to do that job. May that be the thing you would have aimed for? It actually sounded interesting!
I would want to add more bad things about the game here, and that is the massiveness of the game, there is so much things lying around, cards, pieces etc. And not to mention the rules which would be like 26 pages long. This results in long hours of game play.
And this takes us to the matter of the target group: As this is not a game you can just pick out of your back pack and play a casual game, the target group would be narrowed down to those who planned to sit down and play on this for hours. Our first time took us seven hours to play, reading the rules all the time and trying to understand it. This would even narrow the age group to like 18+, as I cannot see any youngster want to spend seven hours reading through a rule book to play this game and trying to understand it. And the graphics would also restrict the age group as we can see some serious cleavage on some of the female investigators. Even though the game is really interesting it takes to much of time for the ones who do not have that much patience with these kind of games, as playing this would have to be on the weekends where you plan to play it with a group of friends.
All in all this was actually fun to play, but I would not sit myself down to play this again.. it was exhausting.
So, here we go again peer review of Arkham Horror, let’s get right down to business.
Core System
This I found really hard, I thought long and hard trying to make up my mind on what I thought was the most important system in the game. It is made up of so many interconnecting smaller systems and random encounters.
I would almost want to chicken out say that the most important part of Arkham Horror is the way it is made up of smaller systems and makes them work together in a functional manner without everything feeling just half done.
But I think I agree that the Mythos cards are the core. Everything the characters do build from the mythos cards being drawn, they change the players paths and force them into doing all the things that the other smaller systems handle. The randomization is the big part of Arkham Horror, fitting since Lovecraft deals a lot with fear of the unknown and the future. And the engine that dhives all the other little sprockets and cogwheels and forces the players to run the maze.
Good things
Any game with good teamwork is a good game. Almost all the characters have good unique “powers” and the balance between their focus and attribute levels are also a nice touch.
The game also encourages item trading, throwing money at your friends and helping each other out more generally.
The teamwork works well, almost too well. If you really work together the game becomes almost too easy. Some of the rules are a bit exploitable for example when a character is killed (not just driven insane or unconscious) the player simply picks up a new character sheet and starts playing that character instead. So giving away your good items and getting killed will earn you a new investigator with new items without much being lost. However this also makes drawing random investigators at the beginning of the game less of a drag since if you do badly because you get a bad character you can switch it out simply by dying without causing much trouble for your companions.
Other than that particular exploit though the game is very well thought through and the randomization keeps you guessing. The problems with the few random encounter card can easily be solved with expansion.
Bad things
I agree here, the somewhat limited nature of the random encounters and mythos cards are the weak points of the game. Even during the few times we played it some mythos cards and quite a few Arkaham encounters cards came up multiple times, this is also partly because some of the locations in the game are more interesting to spend time in than others, or encounters being taken in certain locations more than in others. For example, on player in our group ever took an encounter at the hospital, the asylum, the two item stores and two or three more locations. You never need to visit some locations and others you never take encounters at.
Visiting the hospital or asylum you heal yourself, visiting the shops you shop instead of having an encounter. This makes a few of the encounters almost wasted while others come up multiple times, making them predictable. Especially if a combat-weak character is trapped by multiple monsters and forced to stay in a small area for some time the Arkham encounters cards might very well go full circle.
I should probably add that I liked the predictability in enemy movement though since it helped the players plan their moves and take measured risks while the random encounters should feel fresh.
I would also add that the long setup, long playtime and many rules can be seen as a bad thing since you do not always feel that you have time to play the game. Our first session took 7 hours, our second somewhere closer to 4 than 3. That is quite a lot of time and if you do not have a lot of time you might be inclined to choose another game to play instead. We also got confused as to the function of some cards and missed a few rule changes for different numbers of players.
As to many players vs 1 player I think that Fantasy flight games on purpose had no player facing you to distance it form the pen and paper roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu (and remake Trial of Cthulhu) published by Chaosium about which I have been told that if your players are winning you are doing a bad job GMing.
One more thing I just wanted to add was that player death comes too cheap, I think it should have raised both the terror and doom tracker in order to make the players keep from dying and stop some of the more blatant exploits of the system.
Interresting things
I must say that it was quite hard to choose a most interesting system. The fact that they chose to have random encounters in a board game is pretty cool but as mentioned there are a finite amount of cards and especially among the Arkham encounters decks it I easy to get the same card multiple times as some locations are visited more than others.
That the whole thing is as well put together as it is and that almost no part of the game feels slow and tiring even the first time when we played for seven hours is something like a miracle, or perhaps just a well put together game. The interconnection just works so well between the different ancient ones special abilitirs, the combat, the movement, gate sealing and the random encounters.
But I also found the system from attribute points very interesting where you weigh two attributes against each other and plan for your next move. Though this does not make much sense “realistically” except for the sneak/speed dial it was a cool game mechanic that interacted very well with the game, even if you were shooting blind at times it gave you a feeling of power and control. It was a take on it that I had never seen before and it worked very well.
Target Audience
Here I Pretty much agree totally, H.P Lovecraft fans or people who have heard about H.P Lovecraft and see this as a good point to go into the mythos. Also it was the first game I got offered when I asked for a cooperative board game in the local gaming store up in Ume. As for age and gender, I think that is quite hard for this game, monsters and guns on the box kind of usually means boys are the target demographic, though that distinction diminishes by the day.
Conclusion/Wrap up
I am not really sure what to say here, I was a good game and you had a good overview I felt all I could do was throw in my own two cents to the mix.
Have a nice weekend!
//Max Nordlund