(As a note, I demo’ed this game at GenCon, where Fantasy Flight was doing rolling demos. This means that while I watched a few games and played several rounds, I did not play a full game and can’t fully say what the feel of that would be. Instead, this review will be discussing the changes they have made and how I think this impacts the game.)
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Another version of Arkham Horror? or How in the world did they change it this time?
Let me tell you, this isn’t the version of the game where you have one table with the main board and all the player boards and then another larger table for all of the side boards that you can explore. This isn’t a game where you can set up seven different evolving lose conditions that you have to try your best to scramble about in the hopes of keeping ahead of three of them, all the while crying from being overwhelmed. It can’t be either of those games. For one, there are no expansions for it yet and Fantasy Flight needs at least three big box expansions for any of their games to require multiple tables. For two, there is no main board.
Yeah, you read that correctly, the new Arkham Horror doesn’t have a main board. Instead, each neighborhood has it’s own board with the three locations on it and then there are street tiles that can be used to connect them. This was the first clever thing that they’ve done with this edition. By having the maps be modular then by changing the setup of the city, you can produce a different challenge for the players to work through.
This also opens up several options for the big box expansions. While the obvious addition would be to include different neighborhoods that the players can swap between, the other option would be to include variations on the neighborhoods to provide a different flavor. Now I don’t expect this to happen since the neighborhoods themselves are rather iconic, but the possibility! The other advantage here is that any Otherworlds boards can come with attachments directly to the main neighborhoods so that instead of needing a separate board to play it, it can function as part of the main board. It’s also important to note how the doom tracking and gates have changed with this board. Unlike Arkham Horror 2nd Edition or Eldritch Horror where it’s a track that will eventually awaken the old, doom is initially placed in neighborhood locations. Once a single location has three doom or the entire neighborhood has five doom, an anomaly occurs. This turns the entire neighborhood into a gate. The gate persists until all of the doom tokens are removed. Any further doom is added to the scenario.
This leads into the second clever change they’ve made: instead of having just one facing an old one awakening or trying to enter into the world, you instead play through a scenario surrounding an old one. This allows for multiple scenarios surrounding each eldritch abomination and lets the developers play into different parts of the mythos. Each scenario pulls a set of narrative cards together and has a unique event deck to play from. As play progresses, the players will add more narrative cards into the story tableau until a win or lose condition has been drawn and met. These cards are drawn by gathering enough clue tokens on the scenario to move in a positive direction and doom tokens to move in a negative direction. The important thing to note about the event deck is that the cards are the same type as the neighborhood encounter cards, but they indicate doom and clue locations.
The last clever thing is how they’ve streamlined the mythos phase. Instead of drawing a card that has symbolds on it, each explorer will draw two tokens from a bag. These tokens can have a monster symbol, a doom symbol, a clue symbol, a headline symbol, a gate symbol, or a blank symbol. The monster symbol spawns a monster, which will have a specified location requirement, either the most doom or nearest the lead investigator usually. Doom tokens will be spawned based on a location from the top of the event deck. A clue symbol will spawn a clue in the neighborhood on the top of the event deck. That card will then be shuffled into the top three cards, so that the players know there is a clue somewhere in the top of the deck. A headline symbol will draw the top card from the headline deck. This can cause a variety of events to happen across the board. A gate symbol will cause a doom token to be added to every location in the neighborhood on top of the event deck. The blank symbol does nothing. The second bit of cleverness in regarding the mythos phase is how the gate, doom, and clue locations are determined by the event deck which eventually gets combined into the neighborhood enounter decks.
Overall, I’m impressed with what the developers have done with the game. There’s less distinct parts of the gaem that players will have to keep track of. The narrative and headline decks are selected from a variety of cards for each game. The narrative cards are specific per scenario, but the headline cards are selected randomly. The event decks are unique to each scenario and provide the uniqueness that each scenario will need.
Hello, dear reader!
I’m not sure what you intended to find when you clicked through to my writer profile, but welcome none the less! I’ve been a fan of games since I was a child and, somewhere along the way, I picked up an interest in the design of games: how the mechanics are interacting and presented to the players. Sometime since then, I managed to acquire some _opinions_, wretched things that they are, and I can do naught but share them with all of you!
In my reviews, I want to give you a sense of what the game plays like. That way you can make a decision for yourself on whether this would be a game that you would like. I will also call out if I find something interesting and clever or whether it falls flat, of course.
Happy reading! -Chris Galecki
Priority One Distress Call: The Battle for the Dignity and Estate of Nichelle Nichols
About Author
