This review won't go too far into the mechanics of the game, as I feel that greater reviewers than I have done that very well. Please check out some of those reviews if this one piques your interest. Instead, I am going to give you my feelings on the game after having played it half a dozen times. This review will deal with the base game, and hopefully I will have time to play and review the excellent looking expansions already adorning my cabinetry.
Arkham Horror is a cooperative board game for 1-8 players. It was originally published during the eighties, and this new edition is truly a reworking of that game in every sense of the word (while the original was fun, this one looks like Fantasy Flight Games took twenty years of play testing notes and really did the work right). The players take on the roles of investigators, which are each well-developed characters in the RPG sense of the word with excellent back stories, in the Lovecraftian staple town of Arkham, Massachusetts, during the roaring twenties while something dark and sinister is happening. Of course, it is up to the investigators to, well, investigate the strange goings-on in the town and eventually battle back the other-worldly forces and destroy the Great Old One that is at their crux. The players interact with each other, collect clues, travel through the many districts of Arkham (and beyond!), and have encounters with Mythos beasties. Finally, they may have to actually fight the Great Old One in a winner-take-all end-game battle royale! What more could you want?
Let's take a look at the physicality of what you get for your fifty bones (yeah, it's pricey, but it's most definitely worth it). The box is that nice textured linen. Those always make me feel like the game is classier. I don't know if that really helps the box hold up over time, but it seems like it does. Opening it up, there's tons of thick, four color counters to punch and sort, tons of cards, both large (normal playing card) size and small (think original Ticket to Ride card) size to sort, and character and Great Old One cards. And the behemoth, six-panel board has a nice finish, too. The box has a molded plastic insert that will do fine in storing the myriad components once they are let loose from their cardboard forms, but there won't be a whole lot of room left to spare. I added a small velvet bag to use as a monster cup, and that was pushing it. The artwork is astounding and in very good keeping with the game's artistic gestalt. Fantasy Flight Games does this very, very well, for the most part, and Arkham Horror is no exception. In fact, I think they raised their own bar with this game in particular in reference to Artistic Direction, as everything they put out after this game seemed to me to be a notch higher than games they put out before. Kudos. Every piece of the art, from the box to the manual to the monster tokens to the iconography on the backs of the item cards are all part of a cohesive and consistent whole, which, given the sheer number of different items in this game, is a feat of no small merit. I believe this artistic gravity was achieved in part by re-appropriating the excellent art that was developed over previous years for use in the very good Call of Cthulhu card game. Some people don't like being "sold the same art twice", but it was a very good call by the folks at FFG. It keeps the prices down for us, creates that gestalt, brand gravity, and cohesion, and allows them to make the game maybe a little more profitable than if they had had to consign all new art. So, again, I tip my hat to the folks at FFG for making some excellent decisions regarding the look and feel of this game. It truly is a very well done whole, with every component visually reinforcing each other. Art-wise, every game should be so complete.
Set up is pretty quick and easy once you are familiar with the game, but there is a bit of a steep learning curve before you get to that point. I don't feel that this detracts from the game at all. It's nothing near the level of Axis & Allies or even the C&C games. It's really just separating cards and tokens, drawing character cards and setting them up with the little skill sliders (a very neat component of the game) and money and items, selecting the Great Old One for tonight's game, and putting your character pawns on the their starting location as delineated by the character card. You then add clue tokens to those locations on the board that need them, and you are pretty much done. I store the different loose components in plastic baggies, but I would bet that putting them in a little plastic divider box would speed things up. There are some excellent card tuck boxes on the web. If you use these, the cards will not fit back in the insert in the game box, and I found that it's easier for me to use the insert in the box and then quickly separate the cards before play. You may find differently and I recommend that you at least try those tuck boxes...they are really neat. In any case, the set up is pretty quick and then everyone should be ready to play. I would think that 15-20 minutes might be an average set up time, and given that this is a set up for a 3 hour game, it's not too bad, and that's why I say that this is a *relatively* quick set up.
Play is broken apart into phases: Upkeep, Movement, Arkham Encounters, Other World Encounters, and Mythos.
Play begins with a Mythos phase and then goes into upkeep, so that the Investigators have something to do during that first round. The Upkeep phase is the bookkeeping phase, allowing everyone to refresh their cards (if they were "tapped" last round), perform upkeep actions that might be on your character card or skill cards, and to move your character's skill sliders. A character's skills (as opposed to skill cards, which you can get throughout the game to augment your character) are set into three sets of converse pairs. For example, Speed is paired with Sneak, Fight is paired with Will, and Luck is paired with Lore. The pairs of skills have inverse ratios such that moving your skill slider to a higher Fight score means that you are choosing to have a lower Will score. If you want to be faster, you are going to be less sneaky, etc. You also have another attribute called Focus, and that score determines how many total spaces you can move your sliders during upkeep. If you have a Focus score of more than one, you can split the allowable spaces between different pairs of skills, moving more than one skill slider if you wish. Since you are able to do this every upkeep, it really feels like you are steeling your character's reserve after deciding on a particular plan of action, and deciding on those plans of actions is what really drives the interaction of the players. Being a cooperative game, anything that facilitates player interaction is a good thing, and Arkham Horror has it in spades.
The next phase is the Movement Phase, in which the investigators in Arkham move about and fight or evade any monsters in their new location, and then Investigators in any Other Worlds move, too, either to their second Other World space or back to Arkham. Other Worlds are places like R'lyeh or Carcosa, and you get their by attempting to close a gate (see below).
The next phase is the Arkham Encounter Phase. Depending on where you investigator is, you will be on a street (between locations) or on a location. If you are in a street, nothing occurs. If you are on a location, then there is either a gate on the location or there isn't. If there's no gate, you shuffle that particular location's deck and draw a card and resolve it; sometimes it will help your character out with some cash or a spell, and sometimes it will spawn a monster on you or drain your sanity! If there's a gate on the location, you have to go through the gate and go to the other world on the gate token, or you have to try to close the already explored gate (someone has already gone through it and returned).
After Arkham Encounters are resolved, the next Phase is Other World Encounters. In this phase you simply draw Other World Encounter cards until you get one that has a border color that is allowable by your Other World and then resolve it. Like Arkham Encounters, these can be good or bad.
The final phase is the Mythos Phase. This is the phase where all the Mythos things happen, and it starts by drawing a Mythos card. It tells you where a new gate opens and to spawn a monster. If there's already a gate at that location, then there is a monster surge and monsters pour out of every other gate! If there isn't a gate already there, you draw a new gate token and put it down on the location, the GOO's doom track advances (when it gets to the end, you have to fight the GOO in the endgame!), you put down a new clue token in the location on the mythos card, you move monsters, and you activate any Mythos activity denoted by the Mythos card. That's a lot of stuff for one card to do, but it's not as bad as it seems. Of particular interest here is the monster movement. Monsters all have their own sets of stats and movement details. The Mythos card will say which monsters move, as delineated by a symbol on the card, like a crescent or a circle. All monsters with that symbol move. Here's the neat part, though. All Arkham locations are connected by a series of lines black and white triangles. The Mythos card will have a black and white section on the bottom, with symbols in the two sections. So, the crescent might be in the black box and the circle in the white box. This means that crescent symbol monsters follow the white arrows and circle monsters follow the black. It is a really neat way to have monsters move by themselves. Elegant, really, and gives you the feeling that monsters are really roaming with some sort of plan that man was not meant to know.
The main drive of the game is to get through the gates and return to close them. Closing them is good, but sealing them is far, far better. You need five clue tokens or an elder sign item to seal a gate, but you can close it with a difficult skill check. If you are able to seal it, no more gates can ever open on that location, and the sealed gate counts towards your total needed to win the game (this number of total needed to win is based on number of players). Closed or sealed, you get to keep the gate marker as a gate token, which can be useful later in the game. In my experience, the best bet at winning the game is to get everyone together to seal gates. Sometimes that means that some people collect items while one person goes through the gate, so that as soon as the gate explorer comes back, everyone is waiting to give him items (or an elder sign) to help seal the gate.
I've played a half dozen times now, and despite the length of the game and the sometimes off-putting horror theme, it has become a fast favorite of my gaming group, which is comprised of twenty and thirty-somethings with an equal mix of men and women.
I love the game, even when putting my Lovecraft-bias aside, and will play anytime anyone wants to. I especially love the fact that the characters are so individual and malleable during play; it's almost like playing Call of Cthulhu (the RPG). This makes the game highly re-playable, as well.
In fact, I think that it is a testament to Fantasy Flight Games’ character that they paid so much obvious respect to Lovecraft and his Mythos with this game. They clearly went out of their way to make this game truly Mythos-worthy, which is not an easy thing to do. Sure, they could have just put together some new artwork and pumped out the same old game, but they didn’t. It makes sense to lose sanity in Lovecraft’s world, and Arkham Horror will help you lose it. There is, very much so, a keen sense of unknowable, alien machinations in this game, and it is a pretty slim chance that the investigators have to help push back the darkness, until the next game. And that is really what Lovecraft’s stories were about. They were about people, out of their comfort zones, oftentimes against their will, thrust into horrible circumstances, finding a way to hold things back just one more day, so that the rest of the world never has to know…Arkham Horror does that.
If you love cooperative games, heavy, thoughtful themes, and have a penchant for the eldritch, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Arkham Horror and invite a few friends over. You'll thank me for it.
Five by Five, B!
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