Card game babble: Arkham Horror LCG

 For the past couple of months, I've been part of a trio of friends who play Arkham Horror LCG (the living card game) on the weekends. As I fell into the lore and the story and the mechanics, I felt myself being consumed by this game - enough so that I've decided to make the financial commitment to get the game for myself.

What's it about?

Each player takes on the role of an investigator who is thrown into various scenarios that need to be uncovered and resolved. For those familiar with the Cthulu mythos (be it the books, other games, etc.), you'll know you're in for a tangled web of crazy cultists, monsters and a sleeping ancient one (or ones... who knows?). 

What do you get?

The first box, gives you the rules to play the game, the tokens, the cards (of course) and a booklet with the first three-part story, or three scenarios, to get your feet wet. You're given five investigators - each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses - and decks that you can either build yourself or trust the initial assembly as given in the book by the creators. 

As someone who has never played a deck-builder game before my venture with my friends, this is an awesome help.

How does it work?

I'm not going to go into the exact round order and phase order because I will confuse myself and, in turn, confuse you and make this game inaccessible. But I am going to ramble about some things in the game.

The scenarios each have an agenda deck and an act deck. The agenda deck shows you the bad thing that is happening and what needs to happen in the game to make it worse. The act deck shows you what you need to do to try and keep the bad thing from happening - usually this objective is something like gathering a certain amount of clues or discovering a particular area.

Each investigator gets three actions on their turn which they can use to investigate, draw a card, fight, evade, get a resource, etc. There's a really handy card with each investigator pack that lists the phases of play as well as all the actions an investigator can do. I think this is a wonderful addition.

Each investigator has statistics for Willpower, Intelligence, Strength, and Agility and will, through the game make tests based off of these four stats. You can add to the skill check by playing cards or having other investigators who are with you in that particular location give you a card to enhance the skill. 

Then you draw from the chaos baggie! The chaos bag contains chaos tokens which are either numerical modifiers or pictures which means something unique in each scenario. This is a very interesting mechanic for me as the 'auto fail' token seems to be magnetically attracted to my fingers whenever I try to pull a token out of the bag *harrumph*.

The bad of the game

Arkham Horror: The revised core edition has a lot going for it. But the truth is, it is only a taster. To truly appreciate the depth of this game, you're going to have to play a campaign, which is more money that needs to be spent. 

The mini-campaign provided only consists of three scenarios, that's about... four hours of gameplay. Granted you can play multiple times with different investigators, there's flexibility in things not ending the same way every time, but it's still only just a taste. A full campaign has between six to eight scenarios packed into it. That's a lot of hours of gameplay with each scenario having multiple endings and so the branching out of the game is huge... but expensive. Well, at least in South Africa it's expensive. 

I guess it brings the whole debate of what you're paying for. The quality is excellent, the game is well written and thought out. There's a lot of replayability and you're definitely going to want to infect someone else with this addiction so there's that. But it's still an investment.

What to get?

If you're also interested in getting this game, be careful. You'll see that there are a multitude of options out there and you have to do a little homework.

Arkham Horror The Card Game was originally released in a blue box (below).

Don't buy this one.

Then came the revised core edition.

Buy this one.

Note 'campaign expansion'.

You'll note that the cover is the full picture, not cut off by blue. It's the better one to buy. So get the revised core edition.

As I said, in it, you'll find the five investigators cards, the chaos tokens and other tokens, and the mini-campaign. Now, if you want to buy more campaigns be aware that they were initially sold in little bite-sized packets, but now you can get each campaign in one box. BUT, if you want more investigators and investigator cards, you may need to consider also buying the Investigator box for that campaign.

Yeah, that's part of the bad stuff, right there.

In summary...

... do I regret my choice? No. Do I think it's a bit of a money scheme? Yes.

But I also know that I thoroughly enjoy this game and am going to play the stuffing out of it. Especially because you can play this game solo. And that really wins it for me.

Ironsworn: The "riveting" tale of loss, horrible dice rolls and ultimately death.

Made with Inkarnate.

Welcome to the Ironlands: a place of beauty, rugged terrain, fierce beasts and, not always though in my case often, death.

This is the default setting for Ironsworn by Shawn Tomkin. As you might recall, I babbled about Ironsworn in a previous post, going into some of the mechanics but I didn't really feel as if I captured the awesomeness of the game in that post. I don't think I can really do it justice in any post and I don't think I'll do that in this one. Especially because this post will tell you how terrible my dice are and how much they hate me. So not necessarily the uplifting, magical explanation that would really sell the game to you.

Anyhoo, let's begin.

The story begins with Katrin Cera, an Ironsworn living in the Flooded Lands with her father Hersham who is a seer and the village mystic/nut. For years he has been going on about the Iron Pillars (mysterious objects that litter the Ironlands and are worshiped for their power) and how something was wrong. Katrin ignored it until she received a dream of the pillars cracking and falling. Fed up that her father's ramblings were piercing through her dreams, she decides to take Hersham to the nearest Iron Pillar to prove that they're still standing and whole. 

When they get there, they find that the area has been closed off and that you can only gain entry via recommendation of the elder at Stonehill - the nearby village providing for the priests. To get that recommendation, Katrin offers her services as Iron Sworn to help the town with their current ailment - raiders. Recent raids have made a dent in the village's supply and she sets off with some folks to do a counter raid and get the goods back. 

She has a miserable time of it, returning with the goods, both wounded and stressed, only to discover that the initial raid was a feint. That the baddies had come back to attack the village a second time, this time emptying its stores and kidnapping villagers - including the elder and Hersham. She follows the trail of the baddies, attempts to sneak up and take out the lookouts, but fails to do so, alerting everyone. Not that it mattered, in her wounded state, she is no match for a couple of lookouts and is easily slain.

That was five hours of solo gameplay. Very annoying gameplay, I should add. I had spent so long building the world, building the character and when I actually got to play her things just went sideways. Why?

The bloody DICE!!

Never have I rolled consistently high on the wrong dice and low on the right dice. But that's the nature of the beast, I suppose. So I decided to try again.

Instead of creating a different world, I decided to use the same world but a different person in a different location.

In steps Kataka Sayer, a veteran fighter-turned-Ironsworn who is working on one of the Barrier Islands with a priest to investigate troubling events within her town. New dice were hauled out and the evil ones that caused the death of Katrin were returned to the stash. Surely it would go better this time, right? 

Well... not really. The pair of investigators couldn't find the baddies, were attacked by all kinds of assassins and only barely survived. But at least, they discovered that this whole plot was due to the machinations of a priestess dum dum dummmmmmm who has withdrawn to the Flooded Lands while her evil plans are carried out.

So now the pair are on an perilous quest to go to the Flooded Lands, to capture the wench, and to return her to the settlement.

Frustrating, but fun. I just hope my new character survives long enough that she finally finds out that the apocalypse, that the previous dead character dreamt about, is a possible reality. I really liked that idea and I'm loathe to discard it just because of something as inconvenient as character death. ;)

I tend to mostly play over the weekends. I find that the exhaustion of a workday isn't really conducive to playing a solo TTRPG. 

So I guess I'll find out what happens next in a couple of days from now. Maybe I'll give an update here... Maybe.