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Tally ho! It's time... for HORROR!
This right here is the Board Game Geek page for this little gem. I just wrote a long review of the game for BGG, so I'm going to extract some chunks from that and add bits to it to try to summarize the game (more succinctly) here...
I've long felt that while Lovecraft's writing was more, er, enthusiastic than straight-up talented, his imagination was first-rate. And that imagination has given us some fantastic things, from a plethora of spin-offs and rip-offs and inspired-bys to some genuinely brilliant material.
And making your own stories from the stuff of Lovecraft's nightmares is often as much fun as reading the source material yourself.
Enter... Arkham Horror.
Essentially, in the game you and a bunch of other people (up to 8, but they recommend 4-5) play Investigators in Arkham, randomly drawn from 16 profiles, while one of eight Great Old Ones (GOO) begins to fight its way through from the Other World.
Gameplay is essentially running around trying to seal the gates that are opening all over the city, fighting the monsters that come out of those gates and trying to stave off the Great Old One from rising as his "doom track" creeps towards his awakening. At which point you kill him... or you all die.
Atmosphere: Full points, FFG. The game is fun. And it feels like Lovecraft, with a ton of appropriately spooky locations sprawling forth with encounters of a very Lovecraftian nature -- 1/3 creepy, 2/3 sort of endearingly Saturday-matinée lame (but that's all part of the fun).
The board is full of different streets, leading to different Arkham locations, and the encounter system for the various locations is fantastic, giving 7 different encounters for each individual spot but in an efficient combo system so you only need nine "mini-decks" of cards. It will take a long time to see all 189 things that can happen to you in Arkham locations (9 decks x 3 encounters per card x 7 cards per deck)... to say nothing of the mounds of encounters in the Other World, which is where you wind up when you pass through a Gate (and you can only close Gates by visiting their Other World and returning to Arkham after surviving them). The investigators, too, are brilliantly varied, tinkering with game mechanics to give them all unique "personalities" and strengths and weaknesses.
Full marks for bits and presentation, too. There's a breathtaking number of little tokens, some of which are more useful than others (do we really need a special token to show us which stores are now closed, or that an Investigator has "explored" a gate when it disappears if he moves off that spot?) but all done up to the nines.
The rules, however, are massive. 22 solid pages of rules, exceptions, and special cases... the rules often plunge into the realm of the fiddly. Don't get me wrong -- there's nothing horrible about fiddly, especially, but it's a heck of a game to learn, and one gets the feeling that the game started out pretty solid but had fixes for minor problems grafted to it like barnacles without anyone ever stepping back and considering stripping things back down. When you need a six-page flowchart to navigate a single turn of the game, it's fiddly.
It's also a hella time commitment. Plan five hours per game. Period. It's a long one, but it's time-consuming without being time-dragging, except for the aforementioned monster move phase. It also takes space. If you don't have a good 36" x 60" table at your disposal, consider clipboards for players to hold their sheets and stuff on. I'm currently wondering how the heck I can get Dunwich, because my table, at 35" x 56" (and curved at the ends) just barely supports the core Arkham kit.
The great irony about Arkham Horror is that if you're playing with decent strategists (and middling tacticians), the Great Old Ones are less of an extinction-level event and more of something that can screw up your lunch order. A few plays under my belt and it becomes obvious that a [STRATEGY SPOILER] Gate-sealing strategy makes it impossible for the GOO to ever rise, and only Hastur really impedes you from sealing gates. [END STRATEGY SPOILER] After an hour or so of play, if you can't see a path of least resistance to an inevitable victory, you're probably doing something wrong. Which to me kind of violates the spirit of the thing. I woudn't mind a game where you know you're going to lose, and your goal is to see how much you can delay the inevitable, or even a game where you lose half the time. But after several plays of AH, the ease of triumph is leading me down the path of houserules (see other forums) or expansions (see above) for ways to increase the difficulty level so that we're facing the End of the World rather than Something That Will Make Me Late For My Bocce Game.
So yeah. If you love Lovecraft, and can put your poise on the shelf to utter a shrill scream as you realize what exactly is in that pie you were served at the diner, this might just be the game for you. Come expecting a diversion, not a challenge -- and you'll be happy. Come expecting a challenge, and you might be a bit let down, but the experience is rewarding in and of itself.
There doesn't seem to be that much board game love here on the 'lith, but if anyone out there loves some Lovecraft, this is worth checking out. You absolutely positively MUST download the rules summary sheets from Board Game Geek -- it's an invaluable way to parse the rules after you read through the big book.
And set aside an afternoon.
Sure, it looks expensive, but if you get five people together twice, it's cheaper overall than going to the movies... |
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