Arkham Horror: the card game – a solo review

The streets of Arkham aren’t safe. It never was anyone’s first choice to take a moonlit stroll to begin with, but now the moon is shrouded in dark shadows, people shun the streets when the sun is not around. Something stirs in the shadows, in darkness so thick you’d think it palpable. People are disappearing for asking the wrong kinds of questions. All over Arkham, investigators from all walks of life are discovering the same single answer to every one of those forbidden questions: Umôrdhoth.

Name: Arkham Horror: the card game (2016) (revised core set 2021)
Designer: Nate French, MJ Newman
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Play type: deck construction, action points, campaign game, variable player powers

What the game is about

Can you face the nameless horrors and uncover the truth in Arkham, Massachusetts? In Arkham Horror, investigators will be looking for clues in a series of scenarios. They do this using either custom or standard pre-built decks around a certain investigator. While they are doing so, they will gain experience points to spend on upgrading their decks to withstand the increasing challenge of the various scenarios and campaigns, all based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Interlude – all the things I said before about living card games in general and Arkham Horror in particular

The astute reader may remember my (ultimately feeble) attempts at keeping this game at bay on store shelves and out of my house, as opposed to in my collection and on my table. Yet here we are! I wrote about this game in my quest for an adventure game, claiming I’d probably love it, but I was afraid to get into it because of the price – cheap to get into but expensive to obtain enough variability and replayability. Still, I thought my collection could probably use an LCG, this one being the prime contender.

I also wrote about Marvel Champions and how it compared to Magic, but how it ultimately did not make it as my LCG of choice. I plan to go into this more in-depth in a separate article, but I will address some points later on in this review.

Also be warned: this is a long review. You’re in for a treat though!

How the game works

In Arkham Horror, you will be progressing through a story, either as a standalone scenario or as part of an overarching, multi-scenario campaign. You will be picking up clues, discovering new locations and fighting off enemies to advance the act deck before time (AKA the agenda deck) runs out. How to set up all of this is detailed in the instructions for the specific scenario. In campaigns, the setup can be influenced by choices you made earlier; it might reference things you may or may not have noted in your campaign log, which you use to keep track of everything.

The game is played over four phases. During the Mythos Phase, you will place 1 doom on the current agenda, which may cause it to advance. Then each player draws and resolves a card from the encounter deck. This phase is skipped during the first round of the game.

Players take their actions during the Investigator Phase. After a player has taken three actions, the next investigator is up until there are none left. Players decide who goes when. Investigator actions include, but are not limited to: investigating a location to gather clues, moving to a connecting location, playing an asset or event from their hand (paying with your resources), fighting or engaging an enemy at their location, evading an enemy that is engaged with them, drawing a card, gaining a resource, or activating a card ability marked with one or more arrows (each arrow representing one player action). You can take the same action multiple times in the same turn. Aside from Fight, Evade, Parley and Resign, taking any other action results in an attack of opportunity for each enemy you are engaged with.

Most actions except moving involve making a check. This is done by taking the required skill (willpower, combat, lore or agility), applying modifiers, and drawing a modifier token from the chaos bag. This bag contains a variety of negative modifiers, a few (if any) positive ones, and some symbols – skull, tablet and tentacles – with a scenario-specific effect. And then there’s the dreaded autofail, the one token that makes it near impossible to min-max your way through skill checks. Luckily, there’s a beneficial elder sign token as well – this token’s effect is dependent on your particular investigator.

Enemies act in the Enemy Phase. Enemies with the Hunter trait that are readied and unengaged move once toward the closest investigator. Then, each engaged enemy attacks and becomes exhausted. Damage comes in two variations – physical (health) and mental (sanity). When either of those equals or exceeds the value printed on your investigator card, you are defeated. Some assets you play, like allies and gear (think armour, or a blessed amulet), might have values printed on them too, so you can assign damage to them as well – just as long as you don’t exceed its maximum value.

Finally, during the Upkeep Phase, all exhausted cards are readied again. Each player gains 1 resource and draws one card, checking to see if they don’t have more cards than their hand size allows (typically 8).

Gameplay continues until all investigators have resigned or have been defeated (physical and/or mental damage equal to the respective maximum value), or until the investigators have reached another resolution offered by either the act or the agenda. These can vary wildly – from defeating an enemy, gathering and spending several clues, reaching a specific location, or parleying with non-player characters.

How the LCG model works

Arkham Horror is a living card game. This means that unlike collectable card games like Magic and Pokémon, whenever you buy a product, you know exactly what’s in there. Cards are roughly divided into player cards (that make up your deck) and encounter cards (that make up the scenarios and campaigns you’ll be playing through).

While scenarios always use roughly the same cards, you can combine the player cards into basically any deck you want as long as you adhere to the specific deck construction restrictions your investigator poses. Picking an investigator is the start of your adventure; each one has a unique identity that roughly aligns with one of the five classes in the game: guardian, seeker, rogue, mystic and survivor. Please be aware I’m keeping this deliberately brief; the game is almost seven years old and therefore has built a sizeable card collection that has exceptions to every rule.

Most investigator decks can contain 30 cards, not including any unique cards they might have, like personal assets, their personal weaknesses, and a random basic weakness. These cards, together with their specific deck construction restrictions, provide a basic framework for you to work with – both from a play and thematic perspective. Who are you, exactly, and how does that manifest in the game?

After completing a scenario, if you are playing a campaign, you read the appropriate entry in the campaign guide to see what happens next. Most of the time you will be earning some amount of victory points equal to the total number printed on cards in the victory display, and victory point locations without clues on them. Most often, cards enter the victory display by defeating them. Sometimes, the scenario rewards you with bonus victory points.

Most living card games offer an expanding card pool with the option to build your deck beforehand, possibilities to customize your deck during games, or both – like Arkham Horror does. Each set you buy vastly expands what you can do with your investigators; not only do you get new cards to add to your existing decks, you might even get cards that either enable a previously unviable deck or certain ‘build around me’-cards that urge you to explore in a new direction. The great thing, though, is that there are websites like ArkhamDB where you can find all sorts of decklists. I found this very helpful; it’s a great safety net for when you are daunted by constructing your own deck – like I was, and still am.

And then there’s the post-game upgrading of your deck with victory points, which adds another layer to the customization puzzle that Arkham Horror offers between games. Below each card’s play cost is anywhere between 0 and 5 pips visible. This is the number of victory points you need to pay to add this card to your deck. Adding cards is in most cases done in place of another card; the same name, if you have it, or another card if you don’t. Upgrading existing cards can do all sorts of things – from lowering the cost or letting you draw a card, to making the card more efficient or allowing it to do something much more powerful. How you go about doing this depends on both your investigator’s restrictions (you might not be able to go beyond level 2 of a certain class) as well as your own preferences and what you know of the campaign you’re in. Again, third party resources are very helpful to make sense of it all when you’re starting out.

Theme, setting & narrative

Arkham Horror LCG is set in and around the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. It takes place in the roaring twenties and displays that world through a lens of pulp and film noir. There is evil at hand, but the people who need to know either won’t listen to you or won’t believe you – or they could very well be dead. Drifters, miscreants, opportunists, musicians, actors; Arkham Horror grants the stage to all manner of folk, and it invites you to get to know them. Put on your swimsuit and dive in; how far you go in, or how deep you’ll dive, is limited only by your own captivation.

What I love about the approach of the narrative in this game is that it doesn’t regurgitate the world of H.P. Lovecraft; rather, it builds further upon it, by expanding on the classic tales the mythos provides – The Dunwich Legacy tells the tale of what could’ve happened after the events that transpired in The Dunwich Horror. Some cycles are even based on works by other authors.

How does it play?

I used to pity people playing this game. Fallen for a nefarious FFG business model. Surely they could see? How naive I was; yes, FFG’s making money off me, but the experience I get in return is something much more. It is just that – an experience. And that’s invaluable. Where Marvel Champions failed to engage me for more than a few games, Arkham Horror proved to be the Stidjen-shaped rabbit hole I could fall down.

What are some of the factors that work for me here? Again – I won’t compare it to why Marvel Champions failed for me, that’s something for another time.

For one, the revised toolbox is a great way to get started. You don’t need to buy two core boxes but you get all the player cards you need right away. On the campaign side of things, you could say the Night of the Zealot campaign with its three tiers is too lacklustre, but then again, this gives you all the more reasons to quickly reset the campaign and start again – possibly with a different (set of) investigator(s). In a way, it encourages deckbuilding! But like I said before, excellent resources are available to help you along. I find that it’s like those bowling lanes for kids; even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can probably still achieve something.

Besides the short campaign (with fairly limited replayability as a result), I think the revised core box lacks something that was already lacking from the previous core box – and that’s path markers. Although locations show where you can go from there with colour-coded symbols, making it more visual with a few one- and two-sided cardboard arrows would’ve been appreciated. Given the breadth of tokens in this new box, I don’t think cutting a few tokens in favour of path markers on the punch board would have made a lot of difference.

As far as playing the game is concerned, Arkham Horror offers me an unprecedented level of immersion. Yes, playing true solo requires concessions; your investigator either needs to be able to do everything, or it needs to do some things so good that it can neglect others. But what I get back is unrivaled in terms of storytelling. Yes, it still loses out on sheer deck construction options to Magic, but it wins out in terms of narrative and impactful consequences that carry over from game to game.

One particular thing that Arkham Horror does over the vast majority of other campaign games is allowing you to ‘fail forward’; no matter what you do, you will be able to proceed to the next scenario (barring exceptions). Sure, you might be slowly digging a hole for yourself, but that’s another matter entirely. This adds weight to the decisions you make, since you don’t know all the ramifications (at least on your first few plays). Every time I am instructed to note something in the campaign log (things like ‘I saved person X’ or ‘I abandoned location Y’), I wonder how this decision will impact my later games. Instead of retrying a scenario until you get it, you proceed either way. This doesn’t get in the way of storytelling; it strengthens it, injecting meaningful player agency into the thematic narrative as it unfolds. I can imagine that this also enhances replayability, as you might want to deliberately choose a different path than you did in your earlier playthroughs. Can I save person X this time? What would happen if I abandon this location, or if I resign from this scenario prematurely?

The first time you play a scenario is an experience to relish; you won’t know what’s coming, so every story beat is new to you. But doesn’t that hurt you, in the sense that you don’t know what to prepare for? I didn’t find that to be the case – but there are caveats. I played my first games in the Night of the Zealot campaign with the standard Roland Banks deck included in the core set, and that was fine. Then I bought the Edge of the Earth campaign and investigator expansions, and I designed two decks myself – which wasn’t necessarily a mistake, but not something I’d recommend either. Again, ArkhamDB is the magic word here. Find a deck you like (based on an investigator, play style, or a specific combination of cards) and dive in! When I did this with The Dunwich Legacy expansion, I had way more fun! Having said that, I think Night of the Zealot is an excellent campaign to test (‘goldfish’) new decks.

This brings me to the point of replayability. At first, I was afraid the dichotomy of a blind playthrough versus campaign preparation would hinder this, but I am happy to report that for me at least, it didn’t. Again, failing forward plays a key role here – no matter what you do, you just keep going; making notes (if that’s your jam) to make sure next time you do the other thing, or you do the same thing as last time, only better. Plus, the longer the campaign is, the more narrative branches you might miss in your first playthrough. In the end, I don’t think it’s fair to judge Arkham Horror‘s replayability solely on the campaigns and scenarios – at least as much replayability, if not more, is in the uncharted depths of the player cards and the deck you go to battle with. While probably not exponential, every new investigator expansion you get drastically increases your options; from enhancing your existing decks to unlocking entirely new archetypes of ‘build-around-me’ cards. You might come across that one card that makes your build viable, or you might see a card that tempts you with its uniqueness.

The chaos bag, finally, is a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, pulling tokens from it prevents being able to work out optimal results and provides excitement swings – succeeding against all odds, failing that surefire test, but in general just adding a little tension to a lot of actions you take. I get it. I respect what it tries to do. But that autofail token is a relic dragged straight from the bowels of hell. I know what it’s there for, just like the elder sign. You can’t have highs without the lows! Still, it is the number one source of most of my frustrations when playing this game.

When playing solo, I used to go at it two-handed but I’ve reverted to true solo and have no qualms. The advantage of playing true solo is that you have just one character to worry about; the downside is that deck construction plays a more important part since you basically need a swiss army knife investigator. The advantage of playing two-handed solo is that you can choose which ‘hand’ goes first and you can set up some interesting plays this way; the downside is that things can get mentally pretty intense when it comes down to the wire.

What you might like

• The revised core box does a great job in giving you the player cards to get started (although one could argue the starting campaign has too little replayability)
• Where this game shines in terms of replayability is in the depth of the player cards and everything that expandability enables
• Unparalleled storytelling, narrative immersion, and impactful decisions with consequences that carry across games – further enhanced by ‘failing forward’
• Each campaign is great to play ‘blind’, but also presents enough things to discover during later playthroughs
• Works great playing true solo – although you might need to make some deck construction concessions in order to be a multifaceted investigator
• Works great playing two-handed solo – although you might find that decisions can get quite involved as the game progresses

What you might not like

• The autofail token is a relic straight from the bowels of hell (but I tacitly acknowledge its purpose)
• New release model or not, this is still an expensive game to really get into (but at least collecting it isn’t such a bear anymore)

Expansion

In the before-times, Arkham Horror had a release model that had its, shall we say, eccentricities. For one, to have all the player cards you needed, you had to own two core sets. Having to buy a € 40 box just for barely half its cards was a big no-go for me back then. And the campaign structure, too; you buy a box with a few scenarios and player cards in it, and then you had to buy six more blister packs with one scenario and a few player cards each. I dreaded getting into the game precisely because of this – how would I be able to find packs from older cycles if I were to go digging in the back catalogue?

This all changed with the new release model, heralded by a revised core set with not only enough cards to not need another box right away, but also with some staples included from other sets. And there was a new release model for campaigns, both new and existing. Edge of the Earth, based on the H.P. Lovecraft story ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, was the first expansion to have one campaign box and one investigator expansion. They also announced they’d be retroactively giving older campaigns the same treatment. As of this writing, The Dunwich Legacy was released in March, with The Path to Carcosa coming in July and the new The Scarlet Keys somewhere later down the line.

I have to say that getting into Edge of the Earth as my first expansion campaign was a little difficult at times. It being the latest expansion, a lot of previously introduced keywords weren’t explained anywhere in the rulebook and I had to get online to find the answers. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it pulls you out of the game when you have to look up what a card is supposed to do.

Conclusion

I could go on and on about this game. Not just gushing about it the clever narrative design, the way story and mechanisms integrate, failing forward, and how this game truly works true solo – no, I could talk for hours on end about decks I want to build, combinations I want to try out; about how to get better at this game, how to play more efficiently, or how I can employ my decades of Magic experience. I think Arkham Horror is at the peak of what a living card game can (and perhaps should) look like. It offers engaging, deep content with a low threshold, especially with this new core set we have.

In a time of increasing FOMO and Cult of the New, Arkham Horror shows us how you can take a single game and devote your time to it without it growing stale. As I am trying to focus on quality over quantity, I think Arkham Horror really is a lifestyle game – my lifestyle game. Try it if you can, but prepare to be grabbed.

Rating: ★★★★★

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