Arkham Horror: The Card Game

I’m pretty excited both to see a new Wendy because she’s so generically good and because they said she’s the last parallel investigator from the core. Makes me hopeful they’ll do Dunwich, too, because that is a murderer’s row of generic abilities. They have their place, but the most exciting thing for me about revisiting that crew is their deckbuilding.

sornars and I played the Innsmouth 2nd scenario. It was good and we were absolutely put up against the wall by our token draws, it was insane how close we came to losing. And if he had been defeated, he was dead because of Charon's Obol. We had a literal last gasp win against the suspect.

It's weird. I like scenarios like Harper and the related core scenario Masks. But not even *close* to how much the internet is deeply in love with them. This one was good but again ran into a bit of a overlong scenario problem. I like this game when it's pretty tight and short.

I agree that Harper is a fine scenario. Not great but perfectly adequate and playable. It’s greatest strength is creating investment. Unlike Midnight Masks where you’re trying to find anyone and everyone, trying to find the one kidnapper makes it personal.

What bothers me is that you can play well and narrow it down to two suspects and still lose the coin flip on making the accusation like I did in my last run. Fortunately the consequences were minimal for that mistake.

That's what happened to us in this one as well. We had two options on the final turn for location, and we guessed the wrong one. The way the deck fills with crap... I'm not sure it really accomplishes what they want it to accomplish.

I had an interesting realization with my fight focused Jenny Barnes... I don't think I included enough money events even though it was a well connected focused deck. I put a few more things in, we'll see.

The fan campaign Dark Matter is absolutely worth a play. Whether you print it at home, shell out for professional printing or run it on Tabletop Simulator it is worth your time. After one play I easily rank it alongside Path to Carcosa just below my favorite campaigns Forgotten Age and Dream Eaters.

It does so much right. The story is very strong in providing the investigators motivation and connecting the scenarios together. The art is well sourced. I would happily replay any scenario in the campaign. The encounter cards are well integrated into the particular mechanics and goals of each.

I particularly appreciated that scenarios made me as the player feel clever. It’s one thing to build a well tuned deck and romp through three chunky enemies in a turn. It’s another to discover a way around those same enemies using the much of the game.

Fan creations have a real opportunity to blow up in the new release schedule. Hardcore players who burn through the new campaign in two weeks are going to need something to hold them over in the months before the next release. As more fan campaigns come out to fill that need, Dark Matter should be the standard they hold themselves too.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2021/...reliving-the-legacy/

We knew it was happening but it’s good to see that it’s happening pretty soon (early 2022)!

That's great! Maybe I will just wait for the Carcosa big box rerelease if they're doing it with some hustle!

What would be the likely schedule for these re-releases do you guys think? Two, three or four a year?

Drip feeding them fuels the hype train but the new format has so many advantages for FFG, retailers & the consumer that getting them out asap is only beneficial for everyone. Be interesting to see which way they go with it.

I have no deep insights into retail logistics but I get the feeling that they won't be slow rolling this. I think they want to get this in the hands of consumers and retailers ASAP and maintaining multiple SKUs must irritate their retail partners. If FFG is smart, this new model could have the impact of a second edition of the product so I could see them rolling these out as quickly as possible.

It only makes sense, right? As a new player I hope you're right.

Yes, now that there is a huge amount of backlog content it's so much better this way. Drip format made a lot of sense initially.

Gary Sax and I made our way through In Too Deep with six out of seven keys. This was a fun scenario as it ended up building up into a very stressful chase as intended and it's all thanks to one very well implemented encounter card, Deep One Invasion. Prior to that we were managing enemies without much issue. Both of our deck suffer from long setup times and weak investigation hinging on a few cards coming out but I think the decks themselves are reasonably strong. What this means is that every scenario has us feeling like we're blundering around barely scraping by for the first half but by the mid point we're tooled up and able to clear the scenario in just the nick of time. This was by no means intentional but it creates a nice narrative arc each game. What it also means is that we're barely able to generate any Victory Points as high shroud optional investigate locations get skipped.

The seventh key in this scenario seems like a really challenging one to get. You'd need a dedicated fighter that can do heavy damage while a secondary character that can keep the other deep ones busy in order to get that.

I was short on time when picking a deck for this campaign so I netdecked a solo optimised build for Sefina which uses Crystalizer of Dreams and no spells, thinking it'd do just fine in multiplayer. I was very very wrong. There are so many assumptions about the cadence of enemies coming out of the encounter deck and how often she'd be engaged that means half of my events are extremely situational. I was initially overwhelmed by Sefina's options but she turns out to be pretty fun to pilot once you understand which events to put in your special draw pile.

I hadn't thought about the narrative aspects of our weirdly slow decks!

Curse and bless are so good now that I've played decks with them (and Sister Mary). I don't know if they'd be nearly as good without Sister's auto bless generation, but it's cool that such good design work is so recent in the campaign order.