Arkham Horror

Got in an actual game last night, Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror. My brother owns the game and so my son and I sat down to play it with him last night.

For those not familiar, Arkham Horror is based on the H.P. Lovecraft stories about Cthulu and the occult. Your investigator has been drawn to the New England town of Arkham where strange goings on have been on the rise. Gates to other dimensions start opening, releasing monsters and bad guys of various descriptions and abilities upon the town. The Investigators job is to ultimately seal the gates to stop the Elder Gods from coming into our dimension.

From the Wikipedia Entry

My brother hadn't played in awhile so it took him a little bit of time to re-acquaint himself with the rules. He did say that he learned a few new things and perhaps played the most correct game to date. The rule book is a little verbose and it seems hard to find examples when you have a rules question.

I played Monterey Jack (Archaeologist), my son played Joe Diamond (Private Eye), and my brother played Harvey Walters (Professor). You can find stats etc about them here.

So the game started out pretty simply. Not too many monsters gates seemed easy to close. I soon realized that I needed to focus more on sealing gates rather than just rushing around to close them and found my self struggling to gather the clue tokens necessary. The general gameplay went as usual when the three of us play. My son was mostly interested in combat and so used his guns to slay a lot of maniacs, zombies and cultists. He was powerful enough to dish it out to a few monsters, but struggled with ghosts and the like due to a lack of magic. My brother was the magic heavy hitter of our group and did most of the heavy lifting in sealing about half of the six gates needed to win. I floundered around trying to get clues and husbanding my low sanity (something that I shouldn't have worried about so much because I had a special healing item that I forgot about most of the game).

Anyhow we were sailing along, had three gates closed, and then all of a sudden things got tough. We started having Monster surges, a special event had monsters stacking up in Miskatonic square and the outskirts started filling up with excess monsters pushing up the terror track. We came within one space (out of 11 total) of having Nyarlathotep come on for the final battle.

Low lights: getting lost in space and time, my brother getting killed once and loosing both enchanted knives, loosing my blessing the first turn after getting it and then getting cursed. My brother rolling only one success out of 8 dice (he needed a 4-6 because he was blessed), when he needed three.

Highlights: Rolling three successes with the last three out of eight dice to kill a Nightgaunt! (In your face!) Closing and sealing the final gate to win the game. For my brother and son who knows.

It took us about three and a half hours, including a break for dinner, and was fun if not a little tense. I in particular had a hard time remembering all my stuff so I forgot modifiers and bonuses. We also had a few untimely ability shifts, miscalculating when we would need more luck or will.

All in all fun. Just make sure you have enough space and time to do it.

Welcome to RSpears192 of Lucky Joe's Place (it's not on your google friend connect). Zombies and survivors in 15 and 28mm. I'm really liking the paper buildings he has been making.