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Introduction
Once again we were tasked to analyze a boardgame and this time we choose to play and analyze Arkham Horror, published 2005 by Fantasy Flight Games and was designed by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson. The game is based of the books written by the Horror-writer H.P. Lovecraft.
The good things about the game
One of the things that I really liked about this game that might not seem like it would make that much of a difference is the ways the player takes their turn. First one player draws a Mythos-card that shows if and where a portal will spawn, if and where the enemies on the field will move and if something will happen on the board such as removing all of the enemies in a specific area or if there will be an effect in place during this turn such as adding or removing points from every check for a specific stat.
Then it is time for the Upkeep-phase, here each player is able to modify their stats a bit and use any effects they may have acquired during the game that they are allowed to use during this phase. This phase is sort of a set up for this turn where all the players discuss and prepare for the coming turn.
After the upkeep phase it is time for the Movement Stage where each player can move where they want depending on their Speed-stat. They can even fight or sneak past enemies during this phase if they encounter one.
Now it’s time for the final phase, the Encounter phase. In this phase each player take their turn to take their action if they are standing on a shop for example, or if they are standing on a location without a specific encounter written on it an Encounter Card will be drawn in the same colors the district that location is located in.
Now, the reason I really liked how the each turn was set up is because it was split up in smaller phases. This way it never really felt like someone was taking forever to finish their turn and this made the game much more enjoyable and I’d say that this is one of the reasons that this it doesn’t feel like you’ve sat there for four hours when in reality you have.
Some bad things about the game
The thing I was the most disappointed about in this game was the difficulty, due to the fact that most of the Old Great Ones can be defeated in three ways and two of these ways doesn’t even include fighting The Great Old One, which seems to be to be the hardest by far. The two other ways to win is; one: to close every portal that is currently on the map. If you are lucky closing all the portals can be fairly easy due to the fact that all it is RNG that decides when a Portal shall open.
Two: to seal six portals. This was the most common one when we played and it seemed to be the most natural way to play the game for the first time for us new player.
One other thing regarding the difficulty; there is a huge difference in difficulty depending on how many people that plays, that is the game is way easier the more players there are because the game barely changes anything when there are more players. The only thing that changes is that there can be more enemies on the board at the same time, and the difference didn’t feel big enough at all.
This however is, from what I’ve heard, is only a problem in the vanilla version of the game. The Expansions will supposedly add a great deal of difficulty.
One thing that I didn’t really thing was bad really, I just felt it was way less interesting than it could have been was the Sanity System. Sanity in this game is basically just another HP-Bar (the other HP-bar is your stamina) and the only difference when you lose it all is that you wake up at the Asylum instead of the Hospital and to regain sanity you have to pay the Asylum two dollars instead of paying two dollars to the Hospital. It just feels a bit like a missed opportunity.
One last thing to complain about was a sort of game-breaking strategy we tried. Due to the fact that when a player dies completely, which doesn’t happen that often as you would expect, and when they die they will have to throw away all their gear and start from the beginning with a new character whit all of the new characters starting-gear. This combined with the fact that you can trade and give how many items you want to any other player as long as you stand on the same location in the game makes it so that you can just die and die over again if there is an enemy on the field that will actually kill you completely instead of just sending you to the hospital like most enemies do in this game, just to stack as much gear on one player as possible and then just repeat this until the old one awakens and then the geared player can split her gear between all of the players and then The Old one becomes very easy to deal with. Sure this tactic isn’t very rewarding to use, but was still pretty fun to see how much gear you could get that way.
The Most Interesting System
To me the most interesting system in the game was during the Upkeep-phase when each player could change their stat a bit by moving a Skill Slider back and forth. There are three different sliders with 6 stats on them, and on each slider the more points you take in one that the less you will take in the other one. The starts are paired like this, Speed and Stealth, Strength and Will, and Lore and Luck. Every character has different ratios of these and different maximum and minimum points. The thing I thought was interesting about this was how you could modify your characters stats to fit your play-style instead of just have static numbers. This also allows players to change how your character plays during several turns depending what you character needs the most. It also allows the player to change their stats to a lesser extent if the notice that they don’t need will for this turn but need more strength.
The Core Game System
In the beginning of each round a Mythos card is drawn, this card decides if a portal will open or not and where it will open if that is the case, it can also have lingering effects such as stat-buffs and debuffs. Or it could start an event on a street in Arkham. This is important to make the game progress in a non-predictable manner and to keep every round feel fresh, you might also have to play around this in the Upkeep-phase.
The way that rolling dice works in this game is that you get to roll several dice every time. Unless anything else is stated rolling a five and six means success. There are several things that decide how many dice you may use, such as your strength-stat, your weapon-damage and so on. Simetimes you might have to succeed with several dice at once.
You can either fight or try to sneak past enemies in this game. Every enemy has a Evade stat that modifies the number of dies you are allowed to roll in this game. If your roll was a success you may continue move your character as usual.
An Enemy may also have a Horror-stat which modifies your Will-stat. If you are facing have this stat you have to roll and see of you pass before you can fight it. If you lose the Horror-check you lose the amount of Sanity that is numbered on the enemy-card but you may still fight the enemy. If you pass you get to keep all tour sanity and fight the enemy.
The way you fight the enemy works pretty much the same as when you roll the Horror check, except this time the battle will continue until one of you is dead.
When you are standing on a building, if the building have a static encounter you may choose to do that encounter or draw a random encounter from a deck.
Demographic
The box says that this game is for people 12 and up and I do agree with that, I thing that people of most ages can enjoy this game if they are playing with the right people.
The Target demographic of this game is people that is a fan or at least interested in the H.P. Lovecraft books and mythos.
This game is also geared towards people that likes to play a social game that requires teamwork to complete.
Summary
I really liked this game, it was very fun to play a non-competitive board game for once where everyone got along and planned strategies together to take down the Old Great One. It was really something new for me to play a board game where you don’t try to ruin for the other players.
It might seem like I had a lot of negative things about the game, but these things I brought up detract very little from the experience and some of them like the exploit where you can give a player all items and then die and the repeat is very easy to avoid and you have to actively try to even notice it.
Now I just want to try out all expansion for the game!
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: 5SD046, Arkham, Campus, game, gotland, H.P. Lovecraft, Horror, Laban, Melander, Universitet, University, Uppsala 
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