Arkham Horror: The Card Game

I have been intrigued by the possibility of a Father Mateo who optimizes for elder sign pulls, but I feel like it really needs a second character who goes all in on the seal mechanic to make it consistent (and probably a third or fourth to progress the scenario while those two are kitting up). Unfortunately, that's probably not happening for me anytime soon. I own one set of cards and let everyone else pick their character first. More often than not, that means I'm left playing a clue finder and support. Not that I mind, I do enjoy the roles, but I'm not telling anyone to play a super-dedicated role just so I can try my niche deckbuild.

Finished my Forgotten Age run with solo Silas. Made the secret scenario after taking a mulligan on Shattered Aeons because I was that close. I don't know if I'm going to bother trying for it again anytime soon. It was a stomping. Without a dedicated build that can also handle City of Archives and all the rest of the nonsense that the campaign is throwing at you, it is quite possibly the most difficult scenario yet. Maybe a Rita with a Baseball Bat, Will to Survive and Ace in the Hole could do it, but I don't know how she's finding clues the rest of the game.

Otherwise it was a pretty great time. Silas is almost certainly in my top three of investigators right now. His stat spread isn't my favorite, but his ability is so powerful, and he moves so fast with so little card waste. Timeworn Brand was one of my earliest purchases. I am without pluss. Consensus within the community generally seems to be that every weapon pales before it, but I probably only played it once or twice the entire campaign. It was just too expensive, and it was faster just to evade things for the most part.

Also got in three plays of the latest standalone, Murder at the Excelsior Hotel. It's pretty great. One of the community's more prominent members designed it, and it has ten possible finales. Some really cool mechanics regarding innocent characters, but maybe just a touch too many mechanics on the cards and too much text. I'm sure I missed more triggers than normal.

Finally getting into Dream Eaters tonight. Looking forward to taking a run, though I have played the first dream scenario already. Taking Mandy and Patrice in.

Two plays of the standalone scenario The Blob That Ate Everything in the past week. Where Excelsior Hotel was wide open and tested the investigators in every way, Blob is a straight monster fight. You need to be able to find a few clues, but mostly you just need to kill, kill, kill. I kind of love it for its purity of play but pity the poor artists. The commission couldn't have said much more than "A green blob is eating everything. Draw it eighteen different ways."

Play of the game? The bounty hunter chucked a Dynamite Blast at three blob bits, and the federal agent ran in with a Flamethrower to finish off the survivors. That left the mother blob with a single hit point, and my waitress managed that by activating a location ability. Of course we could have just tapped that location ability three times to guarantee the victory in the first place, but that would have been too easy.

I've been thinking about following my beginners guide with an intro to deckbuilding guide. Would that be a useful thing for people? What would you want to see in it?

Would be quite useful!

The answer to what you need for a given campaign is kind of nuanced. Basically you should be able to just play with the core for a given deluxe + the core. I would say if you are going to do that you probably want 2 cores to just have a slightly bigger card pool. I sort of addressed this in the Beginner's guide on my site. Some investigators definitely benefit from a bigger card pool and inevitably, as the game grows, the investigators get more specific and more nuanced. So you could easily run someone a bit straightforward like Mark without too much bother with just the core and deluxe. Some like Diana really needs the denial cards to trigger her ability and so will benefit from a bigger card pool. I really want to go back and try some of the campaigns with just the deluxe and core.

Gary, anything in particular you would like addressed in such an article?

Any simplifying framework for what I'm trying to do with the decks conceptually while building. That and some example cards that fit into each framework would be vitally helpful.

Someone mentioned an interest in a Father Mateo bag diver. Here is one I ran.

arkhamdb.com/deck/view/406699

It doesn't have as much of the seal stuff but it is a lot of fun.

Halfway through the Dream Eaters campaign and really enjoying it so far. Feels kind of like a reset so far. No crazy gimmicks, just clean, solid, fun scenarios. Depending on how it finishes, I think it could be a solid choice as a follow-up to the core campaign. Outside Patrice, none of the investigators are too crazy or feel limited with a smaller cardpool.

The linked campaign system is also neat without being such a big deal that I would feel like I was missing out on something if I ran just part.

Also played Carnevale for the first time in three years. It’s still fun but definitely feels like an older design. Crazy finish. Mateo was the only member of the three-investigator team to make the final act (a top five all-time Arkham moment for me). He then needed to pass a roughly 50/50 test 12 times to win. Between Ritual Candles, Olive McBride and dumb good luck, he did, including three passes in the final turn before he would have lost. Mateo passed 75% of his pulls on that 50/50 test. Cool.

My spouse requested we play the second mission today. It started a little slow and grumpy because the game is complicated and we just hadn't played it in forever... but I liked the second mission of the initial campaign a *lot* better. I barely survived, we only found 2 of the unique cultists, and that motherfucker who hunts you down was a very effective mechanism.

We escaped for the third mission just before the clock ran out. I messed up the rules because I forgot all doom tokens on table count for the mythos agenda but it probably didn't make a huge difference.

Cool. Midnight Masks is a high point of the core campaign and game in general, creating the sandbox-style scenario with a single act and degrees of success. My wife and I probably pulled only two cultists in our first run, too.

Don’t feel bad if you get blown out by the final scenario. It’s a real jump in difficulty and has a hard chokepoint if you don’t have the cards to deal with it.

I usually say to people that if you play Midnight Masks and don't enjoy it especially when SPOILER happens then the game is probably not for you. It shows that the designers are willing to break the rules they have established to give you narrative and mechanical surprises.

Fantasy Flight announced and spoiled a pile of cards for its upcoming solo investigator packs. Looks like the Arkham take on the Marvel Champions model. Sixty cards in one pack with an original investigator and signatures, full level zero deck and twenty-odd upgrade cards, the majority of which haven’t been seen before and won’t be printed elsewhere. One of the designers estimated it was a cycle’s worth of player cards of development.

Seems like a pretty great product. Newbies can pump up their player card pool immediately, and veterans get a lot of new cards that immediately flesh out some heretofore minor mechanical themes. I’m most looking forward to the big success rogue and failure survivor. Also of note, only two of the five investigators have appeared in Arkham before. The other three are brand new: a Korean boxer, American Indian pilot and trans letter carrier, so there’s that too.