Beyond the Veil – The Arkham Horror Card Game: Dunwich Legacy - Extracurricular Activity

The Setup
The Dunwich legacy kicks off with your old friend...

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This is a cool series idea. My partner got me the base game for my birthday, so I'm excited to read this one when I get to the Dunwich cycle (if we like it!).

If you want a mostly spoiler free overview of the Dunwich core you can find a review up on my site.

I love this as a series! I look forward to reading them after I play through the Dunwich Cycle.

I actually find Extracurricular Activities one of the weaker scenarios in this campaign. Not that it does anything wrong, but that it doesn't really do anything to stand out. That's okay. Dunwich is probably the best first buy after the core box and shouldn't need to go crazy complex yet, but Extracurricular is less exciting on return plays.

The strongest elements here are probably the RPG-type stuff: you begin the campaign by picking your starting scenario and the three distinct victory conditions in Extracurricular. You have real choices, and they have real consequences, limited as they may be in order to make the rest of the campaign happen.

One complaint I do have, and this comes up several times in the first half of the campaign, is that the presence of the monsters doesn't really make sense. Yeah, the Dunwich folk are trying to kidnap Armitage and his friends, but the Experiment isn't their doing, is it? Miskatonic University apparently has an Alchemical Department, and the Experiment was something that just happened to go wrong while you were walking around. On the macro level, I think the campaign narrative of Dunwich is one of the strongest alongside Forgotten Age: this happens, so the investigators do this. Armitage fears someone wants to steal the Necronomicon, so the investigators need to find it first. Makes way more sense than some of the leaps you make in Circle Undone. Witches are bothering Arkham? Well, there are a lot of accused witches buried in the graveyard. Let's spend the night there. Unfortunately the story within the Dunwich scenarios doesn't always make as much sense.

And thanks for doing this series. Any excuse to talk more about Arkham.