Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Need to give her a try.

Nate Cho on the other hand is a riot. He just plays so different. I think Guardian / Monster handling is my preferred role, and he just is so novel in the way he does it.

Poison is such a motherfucker in Forgotten Age. Feels like your top priority is avoiding it, though running Silas is helping me with that. His net was MVP in the first scenario, it's incredible for the trickiest situations, even though most people don't think it's that great based on arkhamdb.

Forgotten Age is infamously rough on blind plays. Poison is definitely part of the reason, but it doesn’t feel so bad on repeat plays when you understand it better. Some investigators can eat it fairly easy. You also know how to mitigate them.

But, until then, enjoy the pain, I guess.

Playing my TTS waking campaign with two low horror investigators (Trish and Zoey) and hoo boy can I feel it.

Just finished and beat The Circle Undone, our fourth campaign. This was also my first time playing with three people and the first time beating a campaign. We normally played with two and the experience was so much better with three. Now, I am curious about four. We averaged about 2 hours and 45 minutes with setup per adventure which was definitely our longest average. Dunwich would take 90 minutes or less for the most part.

We had Rex the Seeker
Akachi the Mystic
William Yorick the fighter (me)

I just love this game so much even though I want to flip the table so often while playing it. Part of it definitely is that it has been an occasional part of my life for three+ years, but the fact that so much story and mechanical gameplay innovation can come out of a deck of cards blows me away.

We use pre-built decks from ArkhamDB (or at least two of us did) as I hate deck building.

Man, I had so much fun with him:
arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/4351/william-...achine-hard-mode-1.0

What made 3p so good to you? Sounds like fun.

Gary Sax wrote: What made 3p so good to you? Sounds like fun.

I believe the third player added a bit more flexibility to game giving each of us some breathing room to explore and avoided wasted turns which just suck. For example, in 2p, if the fighter was overwhelmed, the seeker might try to "help" which means wasting turns trying to engage and fight when they have no chance of hitting. Likewise, the fighter might have a lot of pressure to get that last clue and waste all three actions on a 5% chance of success. The mystic really allowed both the seeker and fighter avoid actions where the success chance was so low that there was no point in drawing (other than encounter situations) of course.

Won my second campaign of Innsmouth Conspiracy. I missed the secret ending because Devil’s Reef blew me up hard, but it was generally smooth sailing. Good stuff Wendy was boring and efficient. Roland ran his challenge scenario and earned his advanced .38 Special upon which he piled upgrades to vaporize pretty well every monster that poked its head out. It’s a special feeling when you draw a five fight, seven health enemy and don’t feel particularly concerned.

I would like to talk about the Tidal Tunnels encounter set. Like the Jungle set in Forgotten Age, it’s a collection of locations that reappear throughout scenarios, and the tunnels serve as the most common way to implement the key tokens. I think the set is a failure both with regards to gameplay and narrative.

To take gameplay first, the biggest problem is that the tunnels are used in five of the campaign’s eight scenarios, and they all feel very similar. Again and again you are flipping a location and discovering a Tidal Pool, and again and again you are running fetch quests as you look for the keys and the locations that use them. It doesn’t help that the keys can be particularly swingy depending on when you find the various locations and how close the keys are to their destination.

The tunnels also fail narratively. Innsmouth uses a fractured narrative that jumps back and forth in time as the investigators recover their memories. It’s supposed to be a surprise late in the campaign that these caves connect the town to an underwater city, that the Innsmouth townsfolk aren’t just insular dicks but are and are in league with the Deep Ones to flood the land. It doesn’t land because these are the same locations as we’ve been visiting all campaign. The gameplay already gave away the twist, if the subtle descriptions of bulging eyes and fleshy neck flaps wasn’t hint enough that these are monstrous fish people.

I could see ways this could work. The locations could be more distinct and memorable than Underwater Cavern. The locations could not have randomized connections, allowing the players to remember them and play better as they return to them again and again. Or, perhaps overly complex, we could go back through our collections for prominent caves and tunnels in earlier scenarios and see them all come together as we learn how connected everything is in Innsmouth.

I don’t hate the campaign. Horror in High Gear and In Too Deep are real standouts in the game as a whole. There are no bad scenarios like Heart of the Elders or Echoes of the Past. I get why the keys were so pushed. There won’t be new tokens in every campaign. This was their chance to include them, and they took every opportunity. Unfortunately they just didn’t show the same high level of creativity with them as they did with the bless and curse tokens.

I started a third run through of the Dunwich campaign this week with Jim Culver and Skids taking a crack at it. I haven't played them before and am mixing things up by using the Return To cards for the first time also.

The first scenario Extra Curricular Activities was fun, however last night's game of The House Always Wins was a classic with...



I really dig this scenario. There's a lot happening, it's fun and interesting and the story is throughly compelling.

Thinking about it afterwards I also realised that The House Always Wins is always the scenario where the investigators personalities really introduce themselves and the character narrative I'm building inside the campaign really begins to flourish.

Congratulations on that finish. I think there’s even a pretty good reward for it later in the Return. I still haven’t managed it yet myself though there are a lot of movement cards coming up in Edge of the Earth to help.

Now here's a conundrum for me!

My spouse mentioned to me that she would like to play Arkham LCG again in the future, but she has so much bad will built up toward it that it should take 0 effort on her part so she'd like a legitimately good deck that she doesn't have to construct or think about. Her last experience was with core set investigators getting completely wrecked in Dunwich so it won't be hard to get a better deck if I get a good netdeck.

She said she likes gathering clues more than fighting, so I'll just get some big muscle guardian to go with her character. But here's the question: what seeker or off brand seeker would you pair her with who would roll a campaign? The easy answer is pre-taboo Rex but also pre taboo Rex is kind of boring so that's not showing the game off in its best light. Maybe a really good daisy books deck? My spouse ILR loves books so I think she might find that kind of fun and Daisy is really good with that fourth book action.

Any thoughts from the crowd? Maybe especially from the more casual crowd who still like the game? I have everything for the game but Carcosa, so that limits things a little bit since there are some really good Carcosa staples.

I find Daisy to be supremely uninteresting and yes, Rex is pretty boring to play. Seekers in general don't do much for me. Joe Diamond is maybe a good choice as he should never really be hamstrung, there's always an enemy to punch or clues to gather so she can avoid feeling like she can't do anything on a turn.

Edit: I forgot the part about her not liking fighting. I'd recommend Minh then. Committing Skills is pretty straightforward and can be quite fun. If you're not using the Taboo list then adding Mr. Rook into her base deck and looking for Analytical Mind helps make the both of you powerhouses so you get to see the coop aspect of the game without being bound into a support role.

Edit2: I forgot the missing Carcosa bit so Minh is out. Well then my recommendation is Trish. She pairs nicely with a Guardian working alongside her.

Trish is pretty cool too and the evade is nice to keep you from getting trapped. I think she might be a good choice if I get a super strong broken deck especially.

I really enjoyed playing Jenny Barnes. She's 3 stats across the board so you can lean into investigating but also ensure she can hold her own when baddies show up.

And she's cool as hell. That always helps.