1966

Happens to a lot of people, all the time.

1967

The most story 'tell a story game that not really a game is Tales of the Arabian Nights. My next fav, which is more of a game is Agents of SMERSH

I would say to a lesser degree Fallout, The 7th Continent, and Fallen Land (though that is heavy but makes up for it by you controlling a whole gang, including equipment and vehicles)! Also the old Star Trek: The Adventure Game definitely qualifies! :)

If anyone knows more kick them in, I would like to know about them as well :)

1968

I just started playing EH and I actually think there’s a lot of thinking and strategizing and less of an along-for-the -ride felling in this game. The gates popping up, the clues coming out, the mythos cards…seems like a lot of thinking and changing plans and moving meeples around with new information, etc.

But, I’m coming from Wargames like B29 superfortress and a few other…“along for the ride” games and so those make this feel like Mage Knight.

1969

This review from a fan of the series makes me want to try it:

I do like his thoughts on where it fits in comparison to AH 2d edition, Eldritch Horror and the Arkham Horror card game.

The storytelling and feeling of mystery sound very appealing. I’ve only played the card game and Eldritch Horror. So it would be neat to get to experience it.

1970

I see The Arkham/Eldritch Horror line of games as story games with random events primarily via a mythos deck and board encounters. Sometimes these random events can combo and spiral out of control with insane bonus multipliers and there is little you can do in time before your fate is sealed, although I’ve never had this actually happen in Eldritch.

Optimal play in these games comes down to just game knowledge, particularly in Arkham Horror: Knowing which locations have high frequency gate spawns, which stats to focus on when, where to get certain helpful items, etc. Although I think just bumbling your way through them is suited to their design.

1971

I will play more tonight or tomorrow, but after 2 play throughs tonight I really like the new Arkham

1972

Longer thoughts after two plays. I really like it. I’m not going to get into too much of comparing it to AH and EH, other than to say it feels more like an AH game than EH.

The basic tenets of the two games are there: You have an action phase, the monsters all get an action, you encounter your space, and the mythos phases occurs.

Instead of encountering an ancient one, you have a scenario. There is a numbered deck that scenarios tell you to draw and activate depending on setup and conditions during the game. The closest analogy is a legacy game type mechanic.The two scenarios we played involved placing doom and clue tokens on the scenario card. When you had “x” of either one on, scenario would tell you the next actions.

Each scenario also has its own event deck, but don’t think of like a mythos deck. Instead of drawing a mythos card, the game tells you which tokens to put in the cup. You draw the token and you might have to take a card from the event deck and feed it into the encounter decks for a location. You also use the event deck to randomly determine where clue and doom tokens spawn. The token may tell you to draw a headline card, which has text closest with a mythos card that will tell you of a rumor or some effect like “lead investigator takes damage” or something. Also, every player has a mythos phase. When you are out of tokens, they all go back in the cup and you just draw again.

There are no gates or otherworld encounters. Every investigator also has their own set of starting gear to choose from, so you aren’t hunting through a massive asset deck for a shotgun.

The second game took us about 2.5-3 hours counting setup. It plays fast though. Every player does their 2 actions (there are about 8 or so actions you can chose from), the monster cards all have instructions and they all activate at the same time. You then encounter your space, everyone draws two tokens, and repeat.

The game is not fiddly. The biggest complaint I had about EH near the end with the expansions was the decks were massive, if you drew a reckoning mythos card you could be 15 min resolving all the reckoning effects. There is typically 1 or 2 reckoning tokens in the pool and not many things have reckoning effects.

With a little bit of careful storage, you can set the game up fast. I am going to try and put each investigator and their starting gear into a zip bag and just hand out the bag. The monsters and event cards are specific to the scenarios so they can get stored in a bag with the scenario. Putting them away just requires sorting out some event cards from the location cards.

The game seems built for the endless parade of expansions that are inevitable. It looks like it will scale well with the board and scenario cards. One thing I noticed was even with two players, it was pretty common for us to be near each other, so we ended up using a lot of trade and “investigator on your space” actions. I also think the game will be a true solo game and you can play it with just one investigator.

1973

Thanks for writing that up, Mark!

1974

So, um …

Hmmmm.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1824330791017106/

Seems like a reimplementation of this game:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36932/claustrophobia

“Hell Dorado” … heh heh heh

Also:

Not historically accurate.

1975

Thanks Mark for the writeup. I think you have done enough to steer me towards forking over some dollars for yet another FF business model. Main thing is the reckoning effects being trimmed down. Oh man I hated that, so much that when I’d solo, I had a row for each investigator that just had reckoning effects grouped together. It would still make the table messy and all too easy to forget things while resolving encounters.

1976

When I ran Eldritch Horror on the forum, Reckoning turns took probably six times as long as anything else.

1977

Whenever someone says “AH is too fiddly” I remind them of the Reckoning effects in EH.

That said, I do still really, really enjoy EH.

1978

Claustrophobia is really great fun! And most of the demon models are cute little fellers, so the badass humanity trope mentioned is historically accurate for the Hell Dorado universe.

1979

I’ll have to bow to your insight about the relative power levels via a vis the Hell Dorado universe, but I can absolutely attest that the Claustrophobia boardgame is great fun. The original base game had a bunch of scenarios that honestly felt very same-y, but the expansion added some neat stuff, and the designer released a bunch of free scenarios online that were much more varied, including a progressive campaign. I actually bought a couple collected volumes of them off Lulu.com that a fan collected and put together with the designer’s permission.

The base dice-manipulation mechanic is neat and novel for a dungeoncrawl/few-against-many asymmetric skirmish game. Honestly, I’d play it over something like Space Hulk any time.

1980

Moar games in the last few days. Played Airship Cities, a cute little Japanese game. It’s got some tile-pushing, some resource collection, some area control. Definitely think-y, but just this side of brain-burning puzzly. It was nice fun.

Got a game in of Monster Lands. The guy who taught it was a big fan- he’d played it the night before at least once, and then set it up for another game with a different group immediately after we finished. I was pretty lukewarm on it, to be honest. Kind of a dice-management, worker-placement hybrid thing. As far as I’m concerned, it overstayed its welcome (four players took three hours or so). Oddly, the randomness wasn’t much of a factor for me, it was just that it wasn’t that interesting.

Played a 3-player game of Root, my third time playing. I played the birds, which, as far as I’m concerned are the most difficult of the base factions to play well (I haven’t played with the expansion factions)- timing is key, and very, very difficult to get right. I didn’t get it right. I stayed with a bit of an unconventional (at least in our group) strategy of planning on forcing a failure of my regime early, started with the leader that helped recruit, then shifted to the conquest leader. That part all went well, with only a minor disruption of my momentum. The problem came from a lack of good cards to build the new regime with, and that collapsed before I wanted it to, setting me back. While I was the first player, I ended points-wise a turn behind the other two. Ah, well.

1981

I loved the original Claustraphobia. I’m interested to hear about the new version.

1982

So how do you think replayability is going to work out with AH3 with the limited number of scenarioes and all the events/agendas being tied to them?

Every time I see “scenario based” with Fantasy Flight I know I’m in for a $15/scenario milking, whether it’s Mansions of Madness (just do more $4 DLC scenarios, already!) or the Arkham card game.

1983

It’s a good question I don’t really have an answer to. My guess it, the replay with be decent. SO much about the game is really the local flavor of the encounter cards. It’s not much different than knowing what the different mysteries are in EH, or what the AOs are like in AH 2, and the headline cards are decently random. I mean, usually you knew what the spawn effect was for an AO in AH.

It doesn’t feel like a legacy-style game in that manner.

1985

Dozens. But what sort of theme, weight, etc would be desirable?

1986

I adore Spirit Island, and I think it would work great with two players.

edit: I should note that I consider Spirit Island to be moderate complexity, and therefore not suited for beginners, if it matters.