Ok, you've read the reviews and comments here on BGG and decided that you want to purchase Arkham Horror. You go to your friendly local game store, pick up your copy and take it home. You open the box and...whoa that's a lot of stuff! The game sure can be pretty overwhelming at first can't it. Both in terms of the shear components in the base game and then you've got those expansions. How are you going to organize all this stuff? How do the expansion fit in with the base game? Which expansions should I get? These are questions I think most people who have gotten into Arkham Horror have asked and hopefully with this review I can answer a few of those questions.

The purpose of this review is to help those new to the game understand how Arkham Horror works with the expansions and what are a person's options in blending the expansions into the base game. Also we'll look at how a person might deal with the myriad of components in the game and how they might organize them. The assumption for this article is that the reader has already decided to purchase Arkham Horror and now needs a bit of advice on how to proceed.



Arkham Horror:

This is the base game. It contains 8 Ancient Ones, 16 investigators and 1.4 million cards and game chits. Ok, I am exaggerating the number of game chits but when you are first open the box it sure does feel like it. The thing now is to decide how are you going organize all this stuff. When I first got the game I chose ziplocks which while a good choice for most games simply doesn't work efficiently for AH. There just are to many game chits to make this practical and there are a number of inexpensive and more efficient options. Here's the option I chose in the picture below. I'm sure other people have their own options and I encourage them to share them in this thread.



This is a Plano storage tray and measures 14 x 8 inches. They are available from Wal-Mart in their fishing department for just $4. The one you see above is holding all the game chits from the base game as well as the King in Yellow expansion. After taking this picture I added in the new game chits from the Dunwich Horror expansion and it all fit character stands and all into the storage tray without much difficulty.

There are a number of advantages to this container that make it practical. First it's cheap which is always a practical matter. Second the case can be customized by sliding in small dividers which you can see in the one slot on the bottom left. Also the bottom of all the compartments in this case are rounded. This means when you try and scoop up a bunch of the counters at once they don't get stuck against the side of their little compartment but slide over and then up the side, thus making it very easy to grab a whole handful of tokens at once.

Now since you have now removed all the chits from the game box itself you are free to store all the cards in there without any difficulty. I have found that you can store the entire game including all three expansions inside the base game and Dunwich Horror boxes with the game chits stored in the Plano box. For myself I put the King in Yellow and Dark Pharaoh expansions in their boxes in the Arkham Horror box box and all the game cards in the box for Dunwich Horror.

This is just one of a number of options a person might choose and if you look through the photos on the BGG page for Arkham Horror, you will find a number of other options to consider. Pick the one that works best for you but I do strongly recommend that you stay away from traditional ziplock storage. If not you will have to deal with a mountain of ziplock bags rather than one convenient storage tray. Properly organizing your components will make for a much easier set up and break down and allow you to enjoy the game better.



Expansions:

Ok, you've now bought Arkham Horror and played it a few times. Likely you've discovered that while the base game is fun it is (a) a little on the easy side to win and (b) really could use a few more location cards and a touch more variety. That's where the expansions come in. One cool thing about Arkham Horror is the expansions for it are extremely well done. So often in a game you feel like the expansions just don't add very much or are things you should have had in the game to begin with. With AH however Fantasy Flight has truly done a terrific job.

As of this writing there are 3 expansions out with one on the way. Of the expansions that are out there are basically two types. There is the large box expansion Dunwich Horror and two smaller expansions that are in many ways game scenarios for Arkham Horror, these being Dark Pharaoh and The King in Yellow. The question you are asking yourself if you own just the base game is what expansion should you get first and how do they all fit together. For that let's first look at each expansion separately.



Arkham Horror - Dunwich Horror Expansion:

If you have decided to purchase yourself an expansion and are not sure which one to buy first, look no further than right here. Dunwich Horror is easily the first expansion you should purchase. It adds to the base game in two separate ways. First it simply adds more stuff. More as in more location cards, items, spells, unique items, investigators, Monsters, Ancient Ones and anything else you can think of. It basically fleshes out the base game adding more variety.

The second thing the Dunwich Horror adds is a map expansion as you see in the picture above. This is for the small town of Dunwich which your investigators get to via the train station. There the investigators must deal with the Dunwich Horror itself as well as new other world locations to step into via the gates.

Overall Dunwich is a must have even with the $50 price tag as it adds so much more to the game. It also makes the game more difficult so that if you are finding the base game a bit to easy to beat this will give you an extra challenge. All this meanwhile can be blended in with the other expansions or played separately. I will get more into how the expansions mesh together later later in this review.



Arkham Horror - Curse of the Dark Pharaoh Expansion:

Dark Pharaoh was the first of what you could call the scenario expansions. While Dunwich added more of everything as well as the Dunwich Horror storyline (for lack of a better word) this one adds just the Dark Pharaoh scenario. In this scenario a traveling exhibit of Egyptian artifacts has come to Arkham. The result is of course odd happenings, ritualistic killings and general mayhem. The way this is done is the expansion itself replaces and/or certain card decks to the game. In this case the location decks in the original game are replaced with the ones in the expansion. A new artifact deck is added which players can choose to draw from instead of from the unique items deck and so on.

This is a fun expansion that is well worth picking up, especially as the cost is only $20. It adds a great deal of variety and flavor to the base game and can be played with or without the Dunwich Horror expansion (again more on that later). It also is a touch harder than the Dunwich Horror expansion. I have actually had investigators devoured on turn 2! Over all an excellent expansion.



Arkham Horror - The King in Yellow Expansion:

This is the latest of the expansions. If you think you've got a good handle on this game then I suggest you take on the King in Yellow aka Hastor. The plot of this expansion is that a play has come to town. The play is called the King in Yellow and truth be told it is simply a cover for the followers of Hastor to cause trouble. For me this is the hardest of the expansions and also the one with the best storyline. It introduces a number of nasty new elements to the game that make life even harder for our intrepid heroes. The most notable of these are the blight cards which are downright nasty.

Over all this is another excellent expansion though not one for people new to the game. It truly makes the game harder but at the same time adds more even deeper flavor to an already theme filled game. The expansion itself works very much the same way as Dark Pharaoh, with cards in the original game getting replaced with ones from the expansion.



Arkham Horror - Kingsport Horror Expansion :

This is the latest expansion for Arkham Horror at the time of this writing. It's another board extension expansion similar to Dunwich. It adds more of everything including items, spells, character and just about everything else. It also adds in rifts. Rifts are time space vortexes that slowly form as the game progresses. Once formed they spew out random monsters and sometimes even add tokens to the doom track. Very nasty.

Kingsport is likely the second expansion players should pick up. In many ways it adds to the game in the same manner as the Dunwich expansion in terms of variety by adding new items, locations and such, but it adds more than that. It also adds difficulty. When combined with the Dunwich expansion the game takes on a new edge to it. If you are finding your group winning to much with just the base game and Dunwich and want to add some more difficulty then you most definitely will wish to pick this up.



Putting it all together

Now the question comes of how do all these expansions fit together. This is something I think that Fantasy Flight has done so well. Players basically have two options. Option one is you can take all these expansions. Dunwich Horror, Dark Pharaoh, King In Yellow and the kitchen sink and put it all together and play. Basically story wise the traveling play The King in Yellow and the Egyptian exhibit are considered permanently in Arkham. The result is that the new expansion encounters will happen less frequently but you will never know what you are going to get and all of the story lines from all three expansions will be available every game.



Your other option is to play the expansions individually. This is my preferred method because it changes the game every time you play. In effect each game is it's own separate scenario. This is not as difficult as it first sounds. One reason is it's very easy to keep the pieces separated and you don't actually mix together the game decks except with Dunwich and Kingsport where it adds new gate cards to coincide with the respective villages (Truth is in many ways the Dunwich Horror and Kingsport Horror combined is the new base game anyway). For the scenario expansions they have their own location, gate or mythos decks. You simply take the cards from the base game and put them back in the box and bring out the deck from the expansion. The expansion cards are easy to discern from those of the base game as they are marked with a symbol showing which expansion they belong to which you can see on the cards in the picture below. In the case of items you simply keep the item cards from the expansion separate from the base game decks. If a card does get put into the wrong deck it's easy to pick out because of it's expansion mark.



Over all I really do suggest playing the expansions as scenarios. For myself we use Dunwich and Kingsport now as the base game and swap in King in Yellow and Dark Pharaoh depending on what we want to play. If you want you can even play Dunwich Horror or Kingsport Horror with just one of the two other expansions. It all works together or separate depending on what you want.

In the end feel free to play it either way you want. Just don't feel intimidated by all the cards and the prospect of trying to keep it all separate. I've found after playing just Dark Pharaoh for example that it's fairly easy to clean the game up and separate out the Dark Pharaoh cards from the base game cards.