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.