For a good long while, some friends and I have been having a regular board game night every week. The four of us get together, have some tasty food, share some conversation, dispense libations, and play a board game. It started, innocuously enough, with Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of Catan. Fun game, a classic if you’ve never played it, and diverting enough. Then it was expansions for Catan, the 5-6 player expansions, the Seafarers of Catan. Then it was Carcassonne. Then we were on a card game kick for a while. Well all of that can move over, I have a new love and it has tentacles. I first heard about Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror from a friend. I never had much like for traditional RPGs. Too much was left to the imagination and there were too many dice to roll. But, I’d toyed with the idea of playing a pen and paper RPG for a while. Shadowrun was suggested, but the mixture of science fiction and fantasy wasn’t that appealing to me and then someone suggested the Call of Cthulhu. I’d never read much Lovecraft, but what I did was pretty good. I think the mistake that I made was reading At The Mountains of Madness first. It put me to sleep. But I tried a few others and they were much better. The Mythos was always interesting and gaming in that environment was certainly a draw, but again the sheer drudgery of dealing with the mechanics of a D&D based role playing system was a big turnoff.
So Arkham Horror was described to me as a board game and an adventure game, with RPG elements. I think that is a very apt description of that game and having played close to a hundred hours and sinking several hundred dollars into it, I guess I can call myself a fan. In Arkham Horror, the players are set against one of the Great Old Ones stirring in their slumber and it’s up to the investigators to attempt to find and seal the portals to the mysterious other worlds.
The first thing that is immediately obvious about Arkham Horror is that this isn’t your daddy’s board game. The rules are complex, some of the game mechanics can be cumbersome, and there is a ton of stuff to remember to account for that can make a dramatic difference in the gameplay and the experience. Arkham is not a typical American style game that most of you are probably familiar with, it’s not like Risk or Monopoly or Scrabble. Nor is it a European style game ála Settlers of Catan; as I mentioned the mechanics can be clunky and obvious. What Arkham is, is a delightful blend of both the good and the bad aspects of both styles.
As I mentioned this is set in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, which allows the wonderful theme to stand out against some of the rougher edges in the base game. You are cast as an investigator, plunging through the streets and locations in Arkham, Massachusetts trying to unravel a mystery that prevents the malevolent Great Old One from awakening and devouring the whole of creation, starting of course with you. A player chooses an investigator from a healthy stack of quasi-typical role-playing archetypes, but with a distinctive pulpish twist. As the theme is 1920s Arkham, the highlights include a healthy blend of mysticism, pulp fiction, occult, and Prohibition-era politics. For example, instead of a magic user like a wizard or a sorcerer, one can play as Professor Harvey Walters, a visiting professor at Miskatonic University and a sometimes dabbler in the arcane arts of the Mythos.
Characters play a bit lit they would in an RPG save for the fact that you can’t build them or chose their names, but they do have statistics that are generally related to their ability and to the roles they are assigned during the game. While players choose characters to play as investigators the role-playing in this game is significantly reduced, which for many players like myself is a very big bonus. In the city of Arkham, there are unstable locations that a are spawning gates to the Lovecraftian Other Worlds and spewing monsters from them. The main goal of the players is to use their Investigators to work together to close and seal the gates to the Other Worlds, thus preventing the Great Old One from awakening and destroying all that we hold dear. Investigators travel the board, collecting items, clues, and allies which they will use to seal the gates and prevent the Old One from awakening. Monsters of various dimensions and strengths roam the board thwarting investigators and the weight of the ever-prevalent Mythos leaves little rest for the weary as they trundle through Arkham denying the Ancient One.
There are many portions of this game that have a “RPG-lite” feel to them. Modifiers and checks are all made with dice. Items grant increases to the modifiers, spells are cast with sanity and grant increases to combat modifiers, and allies provide stable, omnipresent, and stackable bonuses. Gathering clues is a key part of the strategy as they are used to stop more gates from opening. There are dozens of mechanics that litter the field of Arkham Horror and they are transparent to the user, transparent in that you watch the machinery of the game chew up your character. See, boys and girls, Arkham is hard. Being a cooperative game means the the objective needs to be all that more difficult to reach. Sometimes if feels as if you’re fighting a maleviolence; no not the Great Old One that you need to vanquish, but the game itself.
Arkham Horror is many things, but it’s not for people who aren’t sure that they like board games. It’s also certainly not for people who are beginners in the board game universe. And that means people who haven’t played anything but Beach Boys Monopoly* or Cluedo probably wouldn’t like having to make sure that their combat rolls all account for physical and magical immunity on the Colour Out of Space. That is of course not saying that this game isn’t fun or engaging, but fair warning needed to be given.
On of the places where this game shines is with it’s atmosphere and its setting. H.P. Lovecraft was one of the most influential horror writers in the 20th century and created a eerie, horrifying and maddening universe of “weird fiction” that still sits today, some 80 years after being written, as incredibly bizarre and unique. So it’s heartening to me that t he designers of this game didn’t just take the monsters and the great old ones slap a patina on them, bundle them together with the mechanics and call it a finished game. One of the more integral parts of the game is encountering, which involves moving your token to a location in the game, say the Witch House, and leaving it there a turn. Then a card is drawn from a stack, flavor text is read and the investigator often has to do something, pass a certain check to gain something or even to just not have something bad happen to them. The is quite a bit of great text, characters, locations, events and pure environment that is drawn directly from Lovecraft’s works and presented in an accessible and interesting fashion. It works wonderfully to bring you into the pulpy, campy, larger-than-life style that is Arkham Horror, while blending it with a genuine dose of Lovecraft.
In one way the game is driven by the story, in a more accurate way, the story and the environment are layered atop the vicious cardboard beast that eats players alive. Stopping the Great Old One from awakening is really the only good way to win. Obviously one is not going to have much luck fighting great Cthulhu with a tommy gun and a magic sword, but even defeating a “balanced” old god is nigh on impossible. No, Arkham Horror really is the game where you lose more often than you win, that is until the game mercilessly beats you into submission and you start playing it the way that the game thinks you should. Then the fun begins.
All in all Arkham Horror sessions last about 3-4 hours, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, depending on the Mythos pulls. It truly is a game where you can see the working parts, the machinery of the thing. In fact, you often watch it first hand as it slowly devours you and your teammates. Arkham is also a game that I get sick of while playing and almost never want to do back-to-back sessions. And yet come every successive game night, Arkham Horror is there right near the top of the pile staring at me with its loathsome eye.
Ia! Ia! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Linky -
Arkham Horror at Fantasy Flight Games
Arkham Horror at Board Game Geek
*Seriously I checked for this. I would have been fucking terrified if this actually existed. Thankfully, my faith in humanity has been partially restored.
