Seriously, it’s really, really good.
Yep, it’s become my favorite solo game, card or otherwise.
Don’t do it. You’re buying less than half a game. And I’m not convinced that the game is particularly good even when you’re sunk enough money into it.
Specifically, the game design and the fiction seem to be actively fighting each other. Are you suppose to spend the first few turns of each adventure digging through your deck and building out your tableau? Are you supposed to intentionally fail each mission, and then come back with a specifically tailored deck to beat that mission?
I read this as “I have the core set sitting in my car” and thought “Mate, it’s already too late!”…
I’m not sure how you’re defining failure or “beating” a mission.
There are very few actual failure points such that you can’t continue with the campaign, unless you actually run out of new characters to play. Most of the time “failure” of a scenario just means your character is saddled with some awful physical or psychological condition that may make future scenarios even more difficult, but that’s just Arkham. These games are supposed to be unfair.
Well my thinking was I’d play it solo. I had a semi regular board game group, but that has gone away now. (The nerve of some people moving away and other having their first born child!) I can get my wife to play some lighter games, but I thought this solo might scratch a bigger itch. Richard Holt is scaring me away though…
It’s perfectly possible to create broadly effective decks, or at the very least decks that can generally deal with what a particular campaign tends to throw at you. But the broader your card pool, the better your decks will be, so you might not do quite that well out of a single core. At least you know exactly what you’re getting when you do buy more cards. They even put a QR code to scan for details on the packaging.
It’s a fine game. I somehow managed to play through the first adventure set of three scenarios included with the game – twice, with different character sets – before I wanted to move on to the next set of adventures, the Dunwich Legacy. That’s a lot of gameplay for $35, and a chance to then decide whether you dig it or you don’t, and whether you want to buy more…or just want to sell it or give it away and move to something else.
And the intentionally failing each mission thing is weird. As charmtrap notes, you may fail a mission…but it’s rarely campaign-ending. This ain’t Chutes and Ladders. This is Lovecraft. Failure and worst-case scenarios are what’s supposed to happen! And no one’s keeping score, either. I mean, I guess if you’re an inveterate min-maxer this may be something to struggle with, but…don’t be that guy.
And if you find that you’re getting your ass kicked, the game makes it very easy to adjust the difficulty with the omens in the bag.
This – more than any other Lovecraftian boardgame that I’ve played (I’ve not played Study in Emerald, sadly) – gets the atmosphere, theme, and storytelling aspects right. I find the gameplay mechanics to be clever, but it never feels like someone’s stapled a theme onto some mechanics. Rather, they work well in concert together.
Here, we even have an Arkham Horror LCG thread going:
I’m going to put myself in the “don’t do it!” camp. If you want to play a persistent deck-building game, I think Pathfinder does a much better job of getting you invested in a character and folding the progression into the gameplay. If you need a horror setting, Apocrypha is the evolution of Pathfinder and I find it pretty fascinating. And if you really want Lovecraft, I’m more inclined to recommend Eldritch Horror for its scale. In fact, I’m about to take issue with triggercut! Stand by!
That said, I’ve bought all of the first two campaigns, add-on packs and all. So I have no room to talk.
Okay, now this I don’t get at all. Maybe it changes later on, but the basic mechanics of Arkham Horror are a reskinning of the Warhammer Adventure Card Game. Characters drag monsters them into their encounter area and whale away at their hit points, or they evade they the monsters. Then they move on to the next bit. There’s certainly a lot of nice theming surrounding it all, and plenty of room for variety and clever rules exceptions and so forth.
And the idea of shuffling disadvantages into the decks is cool. But the basic gameplay is almost literally theme stapled onto an established card game system.
Again, I’ve never gotten past the first set and they’re on, what?, a fourth set now. So I’ll gladly defer to anyone who knows more about how it’s evolved over time. But the first campaign is, to me, the very definition of repurposing gameplay mechanics.
-Tom
Haha! You played the Warhammer Adventure Card game! (I haven’t played it, and didn’t know that it was the “source engine” of the AHLCG mechanics.)
The setting of the Arkham Horror LCG is Lovecraft, but the theme is Indiana Jones vs. The Evil Dead. In fact, the theming is literally the opposite of his: that human genius, courage, and resourcefulness can conquer the unknown and unknowable.
As to fighting sacks of hit points, well, the game all comes down to skill tests and action efficiency. Some of those tests involve sacks of HP, but there are far more non combat things to do than in the Warhammer card game. I just put a pure combat character against the first redone scenario in Return to the Night of the Zealot, and he absolutely slaughtered every monster but… It did Not Go Well.
I’m not convinced it is. Not least because Arkham has you building whole decks of cards with a huge variety of effects, there’s a resource system, etc. Whereas the Warhammer ACG has you pick one of four actions and sure, those actions have slightly different potency and additional effects based on which character you’re playing, and you can potentially mildly improve them, but it’s a much much more constrained (and combat focused) game.
The beta for Terraforming Mars is now available for Steam:
https://account.asmodee.net/en/profile/betatests
Oh man I missed the Mille Bornes beta …
Thanks. Got into the beta just now.
I remember playing that about 55-60 years ago! Just showing my age. :)
What does it take to get in the beta?
French fluency and a rocket to Mars.
Actually, I have no idea. I just signed into my Asmodee digital account and it let me sign up. So you probably just need to register for an Asmodee digital account. Besides that, probably nothing besides being devastatingly handsome.
It’s out of keys currently :(
Psychological horror card game, comin’ through.