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Arkham Horror the card game

Joined
Oct 1, 2018
Messages
2,323
Location
Illinois
Figured I'd make a thread giving some vague praise of it since I didn't see any around. I had been thinking about buying in on Arkham Horror, but eventually got spooked away by the price (Roughly $115 per-campaign (Of 5 campaigns so far) on top of $20-40 core set which is required, and a second $20-40 core set is recommended to have enough cards for consistency). Not as bad as Magic, certainly, but still more than I wanted to spend. I found it available in Tabletop Simulator with a really excellent implementation (Largely automated setup and teardown, easy shuffling, chaos bag is automated, etc) and I've been playing it on there some.

Quick general gist of the game is making a roughly 30 card player deck and playing either solo or cooperatively against pre-made scenarios in a campaign structure, with C&C and XP carrying over between scenarios. It also has the "Chaos bag" which is a nice alternative to dice. Chucking different tokens into a bag and drawing them for results rather than rolling dice, which means it can be adjusted for difficulty (Every scenario has 4 difficulties to play at which just makes the bag more brutal) and can be adjusted over the course of a campaign (The results of some actions can be you getting kicked in the balls by adding another negative token into the bag). The basics are investigation (Simple skill checks based on your characters stats and any modifiers you add) and combat largely, but they do a pretty good job of mixing things up in each scenario.

Not gonna do a full writeup on how to play or anything, but the whole point of this thread was just to say it's pretty fun. Haven't played enough to get a good sense of the deckbuilding (My gut feeling is it's relatively weak, especially compared to something like Magic) but overall it's a combination of card game, board game, and RPG and everything combined meshes together really well. If you've got Tabletop Sim you should check it out. Especially once you get used to Tabletop Sim's controls, then you can zip through actions super quick. Seems to work reasonably well as a solo game, too. Most of the key parts scale on the number of investigators so you aren't completely screwed if you're playing true solo, even if you're slightly disadvantaged just because you can't get as many actions done in a round. Though you could always play two investigators if you really were so inclined.
 

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