So as I’m getting set up, I thought I’d share a few tips that some of you might find helpful. These aren’t specific to Arkham Horror, either, so you might also find them helpful for other games.
#1: Tracking Actions, or “Wait, whose turn is it?”
This is the dilemma of solitaire gaming: there’s no one to answer this question for you! One of my deep-seated boardgaming dogmas is that you should always be able to tell what’s going on by looking at the board state. If something happens that I have to suddenly stop playing for a week, I want to be able to come back a week later and by looking at the board, I should be able to tell exactly what was happening. This is a necessary feature, and if it doesn’t exist in a game, I will create it. Otherwise, I get scattered when I have to look up a rule, take a bathroom break, run an errand, eat a meal, or just do something else for a while.
So here’s something you can do with three little red cubes:
Since investigators can take their turns in any order, I just start removing the cubes as an investigator takes actions, like so:
And when it looks like this, I know I’ve passed the Investigator Phase and I’m in upkeep:
And for the refresh step, just move them back onto the investigator cards. It’s a simple mod, and most of the time I don’t even need to use it. But when I’m working out complex actions, or having to look something up, it’s a great way to track where you are.
#2: Tracking The Turn Itself!, or “Wait, where was I?”
Even with a handy indicator for investigator actions, it’s easy to lose your place in the turn sequence. Track it with a cube, such as this yellow one, which will be featured again shortly!
#3: The best player aids are DIY player aids!
You might wonder about that list of phases. I made it. I feel strongly that one of the best ways to learn a game is to make your own player aid. That way you can be sure it has as little or as much info as you need. My own personal goal is, over time, to whittle down the info on a player aid, to make it as small as it can be while still keeping the game flowing. And for me personally, that card-sized sheet is all I need for Arkham Horror, worded as it is to remind me of specific things I sometimes forget (i.e. whether a phase in is player order), and not to include stuff I already know (e.g. the start and end step of every phase, or available investigator actions).
I recommend everyone make their own player aid for any game they’re trying to learn. It’s a great exercise, as well as helpful when you’re playing. And let your player aids evolve. You’re the player, and as such, you know how much or how little aid you need.
#4: Tapping is for chumps
Here’s an interface tip that I use for pretty much any card game. Tapping is a common way to show a card has been exhausted, or otherwise temporarily unavailable. You go from this neat layout:
To, uh, this bit of elbowing, like the family in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Family trying to sleep at night:
It’s just going to get worse as more cards are played, and more of those cards need to be tapped. Ugh. So remember that yellow cube I used to mark where we were in the turn order? Here’s a bunch more:
Instead of tapping a card, just put a dang cube on it and I won’t have to mess up the neat layout or jostle everything around:
I use yellow cubes for maximum visibility. I was using black cubes, but they didn’t “pop” as well. And because I’m using the same cube to track turn order, it’s also a reminder when I get to “refresh” to remove all the other yellow cubes from the table.
#5: Component Containment, or “You gotta keep 'em separated!”
I’m super obsessive about storage solutions that can be integrated into actual gameplay, so I keep my tokens in a tiny Plano box:
And I’ve got it arranged to play directly out of the box. The lid snaps off to hold cards that have been “put aside”, because they’ll enter play later. I went looking for an Amazon link to the exact same box, but they don’t seem to carry it? This is pretty close:
This lets me keep the tokens, act and agenda, chaos legend, encounter deck and discard, and player aid/turn tracker along the left side of the play area, freeing the bottom for the investigators’ hands and threat area, and freeing the rest of the mat for the map.
Speaking of…
#6: Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me A Move
This won’t matter so much for Night of the Zealot, but later scenarios do some relatively intricate map stuff, including a lot of one-way routes that are easy to confuse. So I just use pairs of matchsticks to indicate a two-way connection.
For a one-way connection, just place a single matchstick with the match head pointing in the direction of travel! It’s super easy to read at a glance.
#6: Downplaying discards
Speaking of easy to read at a glance, something I do with most games is put the discard pile face-up under its corresponding draw deck. This gets it out of the way and frees up a ton of space, particularly with games that have multiple decks in play. But that’s not feasible in a game like Arkham Horror, where you’ll sometimes interact with the discard pile, and at the very least, you’ll want to know the size of your discard pile. So in those cases, I just keep discard piles upside down:
It’s a quick visual shorthand that I don’t need to pay attention to the card itself, that it’s not in play. As a table gets more crowded, and especially if you try to play with multiple investigators, this sort of visual shorthand is invaluable. When your attention is a precious commodity, everything the interface can do to shift your focus where it’s needed is helpful!
So when I look at the table, I can easily tell which information isn’t directly relevant, because it’s upside down:
Hope those are helpful to some of you. I’ll be jumping in myself later, with cop Tommy Muldoon from the core set and astronomer Norman Withers from one of the expansions.