Arkham Horror 3rd Edition

Gary Sax wrote: Thanks for the update, uba.

Can you speak to the not-fun-ness at all more specifically for you? Is it too narrative focused?

No, I found the narrative only slightly more focused than EH, but to achieve that it adds far more set-up time, overhead and fiddliness. This makes me wish I had spent the time playing Arkham Horror: The Card Game, which gives you a tighter, more compelling narrative without all the mucking about, and down time of 3rd edition.

The most un-fun part of 3rd is that it is very pandemic-y. Doom tokens pop up and spread and you have to remove them. So most of the game is played squatting on a couple of locations playing wack-a-mole. This makes it feel more abstract and like an efficiency puzzle, and not much like an adventure, which contrasts awkwardly with the attempt to push the narrative into the forefront. Also, it's kind of fun for about 45 minutes, but after a couple of hours of removing Doom tokens, it just gets tiresome.

Some other annoying stuff and quibbles about 3rd

The clue cards (encounters that award clues) and the rift cards (encounters that remove doom) are supposed to hang together with codex cards (the on-going story that sets the victory conditions the game, kind of like the Acts & Agendas in the Card Game). However, the clue cards and the rift cards can come out in any order, like the clue cards in EH, so they don't actually further the narrative, but rather just add atmosphere.

However, unlike EH where there is simply a deck of clue encounter cards, in 3rd edition, when clues come out you draw a card from a deck which indicates where the clue goes and also has the encounter for that clue on it, then you take that card and shuffle it with the top two cards of the location deck for the spot you placed it on. Then when you have an encounter that is a clue card, if you pass that card gets discarded, but if you fail, it gets shuffled back in with the top two cards of the location deck. This means that when someone fails an encounter, you have to be really on the ball and note whether or not the card has a clue symbol on it, and remember to shuffle it back into the top of the deck. If you don't, you really f*ck yourself. This pulling from one deck and shuffling into another, and then re-shuffling doesn't sound like a big deal, but over the course of the game, it just gets annoying. The payout of having the clue card be specific to Ma's Boarding House or the Train Station, when it is really just atmospheric and doesn't propel the story forward in any specific way, just doesn't feel worth all the shuffling (and remembering to look for that clue symbol on the card).

3rd uses the same monster combat as the Card Game, with the Ready, Engaged and Exhausted statuses, and each monster having it's own unique way of moving. Engaged monsters are removed from the board and placed in a players playing area. So, let's say, on a player's turn, a player attacks a monster, but does't kill it. Then all the other players take their actions. And then we come around to the monster phase when the monsters get their chance to wack players, which is also when a lot of players kind of check-out mentally, and forget that they are engaged with a monster. And because the monster card is in the player's area, the GM misses it. Then comes the encounter phase and everyone gets their encounters (except people who are engaged with monsters), and that person still forgets that they are engaged with a monster. About half-way through the mythos phase, if you are lucky, they will finally remember that they were engaged with a monster, and then you have to try to roll back like half a turn. If I liked this game and was going to play again, I would make a big, over-sized, neon standee that says "I am engaged with a monster."

The codex cards say stuff like flip card 22 if you get 4 clues onto the scenario card; flip card 23 if you get 4 doom onto the scenario card. Then when you flip the card, it furthers the story and gives you new goals, or tells you that you have won or lost the game. Since you never know when you are near to winning or losing, it robs you of that excitement you get as you approach the end of a game.

I like the card game quite a bit. But if you don't like the tile pull in the card game, you probably won't like that the mythos phase in 3rd is a tile pull x2 for each player. It is another thing that makes the game sluggish. It is obviously a clever way to control exactly how often certain things happen, and scale them with the number of players in the game, but damn, it takes a long time to pull all those tiles and make each thing happen.