Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Our scenario 3 still definitely felt like simple intro level rules, so I think your supposition about a reboot intro campaign makes sense.

A bit late, but ICYMI, the recent FAQ update included an official clarification on the Current cardpool:

"Players who wish to play in the Current Environment may only deckbuild with core cards and the most recent investigator expansions, as follows:

The Arkham Horror: The Card Game core set (2016 or 2021).
The five starter decks (Nathaniel Cho, Harvey Walters, Winifred Habbamock, Jacqueline Fine, Stella Clark).
The three most recently released investigator expansions. (For example, if playing with the Current Environment as of FAQ 2.4, this would include all player cards and weaknesses from The Scarlet Keys, The Feast of Hemlock Vale, and The Drowned City investigator expansions)."


So the five starter decks are evergreen. No mention of campaign plans, so I do wonder if the Dunwich and/or Carcosa campaigns will become evergreen or if their time is done.

I had a FOMO splurge after seeing a big increase in people posting about not being able to find things anymore. I picked up the Dreameaters and Innsmouth campaigns along with the Jaqueline Fine deck as I thought she would be discontinued. I also bought The Drowned City campaign, which wasn't FOMO, but because it was in the shop when I grabbed Innsmouth.

I'd planned on being content with having the investigator boxes up to Circle Undone (and 3 starter decks Harvey, Jaquie and Winnie), but that plan was a giant fail. All the posts about the finality of the increasingly dwindling stock got to me, and yesterday I ordered the Dreameaters box.

I know panic buying this probably wasn't the smartest move, especially as we don't know how FFG is going to handle card reprints in the new investigator boxes. But it's got me thinking about all of this again. FFG have drawn a line between current/legacy, but filling investigator boxes with reprints/reskins isn't going to go down too well with big chunks of the player base. It's a dilemma. Especially for someone like me with a collection that's sort of stuck in the middle. I probably should just sit out until the new format, but that's easier said than done.

It's been a lot to ponder, especially with my mouse hovering over the Buy Now button. But the DE investigators look cool and fun, so no ragerts. My next crunch decision will be whether to buy into the Inssmouth & Hemlock blessed/cursed combo pack.

As far as actually playing the game goes, I just started Drowned City. I played the first scenario last weekend and thought it was fun. I didn't mind it being mechanically straightforward, and I thought the climax was cool. But I'm a sucker for scenarios where you're running around Arkham. Planning on playing scenario two this weekend.

I have very mixed feelings about their rotation plans. On one hand, I think rotation is good and would help the game. On the other hand, they have not prepraed for rotation and their base set sucks absolute shit. Making this work would require an additional core set that at least made the basic archetypes of arkham even remotely workable. And to your point, even if they stuffed each new release half full with reprinted old cards it still wouldn't work because those would age out. I mean really go to arkhamdb and filter for core set and investigator packs. It's miserable. I'm kind of coming around to Ah Pook's thinking that this should have just been a new edition where they can tweak a few things and then build from the ground up with rotation in mind. I'll be very curious how they handle it.

If you want to see just how miserable rotation currently is, rather incoherent's youtube channel has him trying to deckbuild from the last three sets. It's grim. Rogue is so bad, it doesn't have the capability to do almost anything that it currently does because the core set doesn't include it.

Shit, "prepared for the worst" isn't even in the core set.

I'm also starting to think Arkham Second Edition would have been the way to go now. Ending with Cthulu and Drowned City would have made for a graceful and fitting conclusion, considering he's been the expected finale Old One for so long.

A Second Edition would have made for a clear and clean cut-off and stopped all current and future FOMO conversations about all the out-of-print campaigns etc. I get why they didn't because people would have moaned hard about it, but people are moaning now anyway, plus there's all the added confusion around products and how it's all going to work with reprints etc - especially as you point out the game isn't designed for rotation at all.

I'm very glad all my cards will work with the new stuff, but the more I think about it, maybe they should have gone with a Second Edition. I find it hard to see how they can completely wipe the slate clean every three years.

My pet theory is that they won't have investigator boxes at all. I think they might move to the Marvel Champions model of campaign box and five or six individual investigator packs per cycle.

A competent FFG could have change managed this is a less disruptive way but I still believe that there is a way this turns out okay. They are really only missing one product to make this idea work within the proposed framework; all they have to do is once the first cycle or two of campaigns are printed in the new format, announce a new core which can provide a better foundation to build upon. Time it to be released with the launch of the third set for the current environment (so that TDC is the set that rotates out) and bam, you have a fully planned for environment and legacy players can do whatever they'd like but as a business, you can focus on the new core. This gets you to 80% of what Arkham LCG 2e might offer while keeping your old timers on board as much as possible.

Your proposal to focus more on investigator decks which are evergreen might also make sense and is still compatible with this vision. It means the core cardpool can be grown by filling in the gaps of the existing core by stuffing these decks with reprints but still keep the number of cards to balance around under control. Combined campaign/investigator cards with gimmicks is also not incompatible with this vision as the gimmicks can be focused on the campaigns they're associated with and will get rotated out after 3 cycles.

In any case, I'm far more optimistic than most on this and I do think this was needed for the health of the game. All current analysis is backwards looking on the existing cardpool but without knowing how the product offering will evolve, this analysis is of limited value.

This is a great take. The idea of a new core coming in makes a lot of sense, as does the timing you suggest.

I (finally) finished my Drowned City campaign over the weekend. Due to time factors I was only able to get a game in every few weeks. So it took a while to complete, but I found myself really looking forward to getting it to the table and enjoying it a lot when I did.



All up, there were things I liked about the Drowned City and some things I didn't. It's a decent campaign, and I enjoyed my time with it.

I've been cool on Arkham recently, schedules meant we didn't finish Drowned City. But I didn't play it solo either, which is unusual. I just need to get decks and get into it, but for some reason it is such a high barrier right now.