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.