Arkham Horror: The Card Game

18th May 2021

Lockdown restrictions are easing and we're meeting at Simon's on a Tuesday IN PERSON for the first time THIS YEAR!

​Today's game was Arkham Horror: The Card Game, you too can have fun watching your character's inevitable spiral into madness as they get caught up in unsettling investigations and tangle with unspeakable Lovecraftian ​horrors through the medium of flipping over cards!

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What's in a game?
​The first thing to say about Arkham Horror: The Card Game is that it's actually a Living Card Game, what does this mean? It means it's a game that has lots of expansions, extra character decks, add-ons and so on. This is Simon's game and I have no idea what packs were used, but it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this blog post.

​Unsurprisingly, most of the game's components consist of various types of cards.

• Investigator card& mini investigator card: These cards represent the character that a player uses throughout the game. Each investigator has a special ability along with a rating in each of 4 attributes (Willpower, intellect, combat & agility), finally the character will have health and sanity scores.
  The mini card is used in the actual game and placed on locations cards, the main card is kept in front of the player during play.
• Player deck: Each player in the game has their own 30 card player deck that represents a different investigator/character and consists of numerous different types of player cards, including cards unique to each character. All of a player's actions are done through their deck, this means that different characters will not only have different strengths and weaknesses, but they will also employ widely differing strategies when approaching a problem or obstacle.
  Skill cards: These cards will give the investigator a benefit to a specific skill roll and are only played when the player chooses to attempt the pertinent skill roll. Skill cards are discarded after one use.
  ​Event Card: Can be played to give the investigator some sort of situational benefit or bonus, as with skill cards, event cards are discarded after one use.
  Asset cards: Assets can be items, clothes, weapons or even people. When assets cards are played they stay in play and provide an ongoing benefit until destroyed/discarded. There are limits to the number of asset cards a investigator can have in play at any one time.
  Weakness cards: Every investigator has flaws and foibles, these are represented by weakness cards. Every player deck must include them, when they appear, they will hinder the investigator in some way or other.
• Location cards: These double-sided cards represent places that the investigators can go to investigate. Initially, they will be face-down and when an investigator arrives there, they'll be flipped over and the investigator must deal with with whatever is revealed.
• Encounter cards: Inevitably, the players will trigger encounters during play and this being a Cthulhu Mythos game; don't expect them to be pleasant!
• Act cards: This series of cards will represent narrative that drives the characters investigation.
  Agenda cards: As play progresses, so will events in the investigation, represented by the agenda cards.
• Damage tokens: There are 2 types of damage token, for health and sanity.
• Clue/Doom tokens: These double-sided tokens are used to represent clues that the investigators find or the onset of well.... doom!
• Resources: Along with clues, resource tokens are the game's main currency, often spent to activate or track abilities or assets.
• Chaos tokens: Used as the game's randomiser, they range in value from +1 to -8! Some tokens have special symbols that can trigger events in the investigation or investigator abilities.
• Chaos bag: What the tokens go into.

LEGO not included! Some of the photos will include Lego. Let me make it clear; this game does not include any Lego! Simon put together Lego minifigs that looked like the premade character deck portraits. Why? What else is a boardgamer going to do during lockdown.
All of the tokens and cards are made to the typical quality that are expected from games nowadays.
From the cards that I did get to see, they contain a lot of high quality artwork. Iconography is generally easy to read.

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Stats for Winifred Habbamock.

Backstory & deck construction rules for Winifred.

Lego not included! Still, it's good to see Harvey Walters again!

Various tokens.

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How's it play?
In Arkham Horror: The Card Game player's take the role of characters investigating into the Cthulhu Mythos through the form of scenarios and campaigns in a RPG-esque experience that shares the same setting as the seminal Call of Cthulhu RPG.
Setup

• Player decks: Players construct 30 card decks using the available cards. There some restrictions on what cards are used at any time specific time and some cards have levels and must be 'bought' with experience points.
  Alternatively there are several premade character decks that can be bought, which is what we used.
  Player decks are then shuffled and each player draws a hand of 5 cards.
• Resource tokens: each player takes 5 resource tokens.
• Populate chaos bag: Put the pertinent chaos tokens into the chaos bag, not all tokens are used in every scenario, this means that results drawn from the bag will alter according to the scenario's requirements.
  Interestingly; during campaign play, the same spread of tokens is used in the bag throughout the campaign, however, in-game events can cause tokens to be permanently added or removed from the bag, having a ongoing effect during the campaign.
  It's a clever mechanic in my opinion.
• Create scenario location: By placing the location cards face-down the game area is created, they are put in a certain order, such as a 3x3 or 2x3 grid or whatever and is dictated by the scenario. A scenario might take place in a nightclub with cards representing different rooms, a university campus with cards for different facilities or even a town with cards for different buildings.
• Construct act deck: Specific act cards are placed face-up stack in a particular order as dictated by the scenario. 
• Construct agenda deck: Agenda cards placed face up in a stack as dictated by the scenario. 
• Construct encounter deck: Again dictated by the scenario, the encounter deck is however, shuffled and placed face-down.

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Round summary.

Actions summary.

A 2x3 grid to represent Miskatonic U with agenda, act & encounter decks above.

2 clues at the Student Union, plus the chance to heal health & sanity. A good stiff drink helps!

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On to play
Broadly speaking, the objective for the investigators is to accumulate clue tokens by moving from location to location and also advancing the act deck. How is this done? Read on.
In Arkham Horror: The Card Game, a round is divided into 4 phases.

• Mythos phase: The agenda deck is managed during this phase, usually this done by adding doom tokens to the currently active agenda card. If the specified number of doom tokens are placed on the card, then the next agenda card is revealed. Not only does it changed the circumstances the investigators face, it also acts as a ticking clock that the players are racing against because if the final agenda card is drawn is not going to be good news.
  Each player also draws an encounter card during this phase, rarely are they beneficial. Frequently they will be some sort of enemy.
• Investigation phase: The main chunk of the game occurs during this phase. Each investigator will have 3 actions they can perform from the list below.
  Players will often also have to make skill tests, this achieved by drawing a token from the chaos bag and adding its value to the pertinent character ability for the test and getting above the required number. You will note that the tokens skew heavily towards the negative numbers, this is as designed, players will need to utilise strategies and commit cards to tests to increase their stats and chances of success. .
  Move: The active player can move to an adjacent location card, if it's face-down, then it gets flipped and the investigator must deal with whatever is revealed, this is not always bad.
  Investigate: The active player's character can investigate their current location card to acquire any available clue tokens, usually by making a skill roll with intellect.
  Play card: The active player can play a card from their hand as an action.
  Gain card/resource: The active player may spend an action to gain a resource or draw a card from their player deck.
  Combat: The active player may spend actions to engage and fight (Or run away from!) enemies and monsters.
  Activate action: This covers actions which are linked to specific cards.
• Enemy phase: Enemies behave according to their card, some enemies linger on location cards or chase investigators. They may attack and enter into combat or mess with investigators in other ways.
• Upkeep phase: Players update and reset cards and abilities they used earlier in the round.
  Players also draw a card from their player deck and gain a resource before play progresses to the next round.

I've skipped over a lot of the details of the rules, but this is the general gist of it.
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Endgame
Ending conditions will vary from scenario to scenario, generally play continues until the characters are defeated or certain conditions dictated by either the act or agenda deck are met.
There are also various levels or winning or losing, depending on the scenario and what players accomplish during the game, this is especially true during campaign play, where different win or loss conditions will lead to different, branching scenarios as a result.

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Winifred's been busy gathering clues.

Doom tokens accumulate on the agenda deck.

Winifred's assets and resources.

Game end, Harvey looks worse for wear!

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Overall
Arkham Horror: The Card Game has some interesting gameplay dynamics, the exploration and investigation elements blend quite well the unpredictable changes brought about by the changing of the agenda and act decks. Players can't take anything for granted as twists and unexpected events occur. Challenges and enemies provided by the encounter deck are varied and interesting.
Finally, I like how the chaos bag works, I like how it's stacked against the characters and playing skill and event cards is how tests are overcome, it's suitably pessimistic. I also like how the bag's effect on gameplay can be tailored and can evolve over a campaign. It's a nice mechanic.

This brings me to the campaign play, campaign scenarios seem to feature at least 3-4 outcomes that influence the next scenario with interesting changes, which is pretty good.
Characters also earn experience points from scenarios, these points can be used to buy better cards to swap into the player deck, progressively making characters better.
Being a living card game, there are a lot of accessories, expansions and extra campaigns available to purchase, these can extend the game

Rules-wise, there are a lot of rules in Arkham Horror: The Card Game about specific situations and events. Despite this, as a game it's actually in some ways fairly straightforward, player's have three actions to perform per round, that never quite feels like enough, which makes you have to prioritise and try to come up with optimal strategies, which is a good thing.
However, like other games I've played that try to provide GM-less RPG-like gameplay, the game gets fiddly and complex when managing 'GM' elements and this seems to be where the bulk of the rules are applied, especially to enemy behaviour.
It seems like a lot of effort for what somehow ultimately feels a little bit like average gameplay. The rules and glossary run to over 30 pages, in contrast, there're Cthulhu Mythos inspired pen and paper RPGS that have lower page counts.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy playing Arkham Horror: The Card Game because I did, I'm just glad that I played with someone familiar with the game.