Review - Arkham Horror
By Alex White
- 6 minutes read - 1157 wordsNormally I review RPGs, but I've enjoyed the Arkham Horror board game so much that I'd like to talk about here. I went to a games cafe with my daughter and we picked this off the shelf and thought we'd have a go at it. Learning as went along we spent three hours and unfortunately just ran out of time and couldn't complete the game. We had so much fun that I went out to look for it immediately and scored a pristine copy on eBay.
This is the second edition of the game. I understand that there is a more recent version of the game, but it has many changes from this version.
The Basics and Playing the Game
The game is for 1-8 players. I've played with 2 players and with 1 player, and surprisingly both the games felt tense but doable. I won the single player game, and I felt we would have had a chance with the 2 player game.
As a big board game, I'm not going to go into great detail, but here are the basics. There are lots of cards! On the player side there are cards for common items (guns, motorbikes, maps etc which give bonuses to movement, fighting, or other things), unique items (magic swords, magic books, elder signs), skills (make it easier to use some of your skills), and spells (you use lore and perhaps costs sanity to do fancy things).
There is a set of character cards, each of which has a role, a picture, a special ability, some fixed resources, some random resources, and three skill tracks. Each skill track is a pair of related skills and as one increases, the other decreases. You choose what combination of movement or sneak, fight or will, and lore or luck you want. These are not static values though - you can tweak them at the start of each turn to move them around.
There are elder god cards, which have an impact on the how the game plays, and which have distinct ways of fighting if you get to the end game and have to take on the awakened evil.
There are encounter cards for each of the locations on the board, and encounter cards for the strange dimensions at the side of the board. There are also mythos cards which tell you where dimensional games appear and other horrible evil stuff.
Then there is an assortment of other cards - blessed/cursed cards, retainers, allies, memberships, and counters for health, sanity, money, and clues.
Each turn you perform upkeep operations, then all move, then have encounters, and then a mythos card is drawn which opens up more gates and lets monsters in.
When you need to overcome a challenge (combat, sanity, stealth etc) you roll a number of d6 equal to the appropriate skill plus any bonus from equipment, looking for successes. Normally a success is 5 or 6. If you are blessed then you succeed on a 4-6. If you are cursed then you need a 6. Sometimes a single success is all you need, at other times you need several successes to win.
Why I like this game
There is a wealth of detail which has gone into the locations and the various encounters which can be met at each location, and they are full of horrific flavour - for example
"The corpse you are examining isn't quite dead yet. It reaches out and grabs you by the throat. Lose 1 Sanity. Then, you must fight the corpse. If you pass a Combat (-1) check, you defeat it and gain 1 Clue token. Otherwise, move to the street."
or useful encounters such as this at the Police Station
Deputy Dingby accidentally drops a case file as he makes his way past you. Pass a Sneak (+0) check to search the Common Item deck for a Research Materials card and take it.
The common items are all useful, but there is a great range of them - from the rifle the two handed physical weapon that gives you +5 on combat checks, to the motorcyle which you can use each turn to get 2 extra movement points.
There is a real sense of your character growing throughout the game as you accumulate spells, unique items, other common items and so on.
I also like that each of the ancient evil foes gives the game a different flavour while playing it (Yig's cultists are venomous and do you more damage, while Azathoth's mad cultists are tougher to kill). This is all quite apart from the different kind of threat they embody should they awake at the end of the game and you start a desperate effort against them.
There are so many combinations of characters, character cards, encounters and threats that the replayability of the game is high - and since you can play with a single character it is great for those occasions when there isn't anyone else around to play (although you could easily play solo with 2-3 characters if you wanted)
Overall, I love that the games create a story. In the first game I played with my daughter I was Monterey Jack (an Indiana Jones homage) who was lucky enough to start with a holy sword as well as his trusty whip and pistol. He was great in a fight and loaded with money, but seemed to spend an awful lot of time accidentally lost in time and space! In contrast my daughter played Sister Mary, who without much to help her except her natural blessing, was travelling all over the map picking up clues and shutting down gates! Right as the game was drawing to an end she picked up a 'common item' and it happened to be a shotgun - and the image of Sister Mary racking the slide on the pump action shotgun and ready to take things up a notch made us both laugh! My solo game was with Dr Lee who started off with both a motorcyle and a map which helped him speed around the town quickly, as well as several useful magic spells. Towards the end of the game he had managed to get a blessing from the church and was tooling around Arkham on his motorbike killing cultists with his rifle left right and centre. He was able to keep himself healthy, but couldn't do much about his deteriorating sanity, but he held it together long enough to seal enough gates to keep Nyarlathotep out.
Something I struggled with
When first learning the game the organisation of the rulebook left something to be desired, and although there is a small index it never covered the details that I actually wanted to look up (money for instance - how do I get more of it?)
Those were basically teething troubles though, and this has jumped up to my second favourite boardgame spot (just after Terraforming Mars)