Mike Kozlowski
United States
Unspecified
Michigan
I, uh, guess I had a lot of geekgold?
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So we had a couple of friends over for a gaming weekend. We kicked off the festivities with Race for the Galaxy, a game where you carefully manage your money, produce goods, and exchange goods for victory points. We then moved on to Age of Steam, a game where you carefully manage your money, produce goods, and exchange goods for victory points. This was followed by Pillars of the Earth, a game where you carefully manage your money, produce goods, and exchange goods for victory points.
As we looked for our next game, and saw Caylus, Puerto Rico, and dozens of other resource 'n' victory point games… well, as much as I love my elegant Euros, sometimes you need a few less goods cubes and a few more eldritch terrors.
So we pulled Arkham Horror off the shelf and started to set it up. And realized we'd need to put the extra leaf in the table, because a big board combined with a dozen separate piles of cards, half a dozen piles of separate tokens, character sheets for each player, a "monster cup," and a dicing area was all just too much for our cozy little kitchen table. It's not exactly Railroad Tycoon, but yeah, you need some space.
We got the leaf out, got all the components separated and set up properly, and started into the rules. As I look at the rules now, they seem well laid-out and organized, but at the time we started reading them, they were bafflingly formatted, with information scattered all over in random ways. I'm not sure which impression is the more accurate or useful one, to be honest, but we really did spend a lot of time digging through the rules, trying to figure out things that should have been (and appear in retrospect to have been) very clear and obvious, like what exactly it means to have a "successful" combat roll.
Rules confusion aside, we quickly got into the game. It's incredibly atmospheric and well-produced, in a way that immediately distinguished it from the wooden resource cube games we'd been playing. There's a huge difference between making an elegant gaming system and then putting a theme on it, and making a game to implement a theme and hoping it mostly coheres into a solid game, for good and ill.
On the good side, well, atmosphere up the wazoo. This really felt like a game where we had characters who were trying to fight eldritch monsters (many of whom were wildly powerful) and close mystic dimensional gates. We felt continually on the brink of doom throughout the game, and as if we could have been snuffed out at any time; and the ever-advancing doom track imbued the game with a sense of growing menace. Sure, we may have been killing cultists and avoiding shoggoths successfully, but none of that would do us a lick of good once Cthulhu awoke. And our characters felt distinctly different, too -- the old professor who was ready with his magic, the nun, the young girl, and the drifter all played differently, and had different strengths and weaknesses. The professor prowled the streets blasting monsters with his powerful spells; the drifter used his hardy constitution to travel through dimensions and close gates; the nun's sanity served her in good stead on her journeys through other worlds, too. And the young girl ran around gathering resources to distribute as needed.
It's an unfair comparison in some ways, but I can't help feeling that Arkham Horrror succeeds in achieving the sort of narrative-driven gameplay that Last Night on Earth tries (but fails) to reach. LNOE never stopped feeling like a game, with a lot of focus on board position and movement and odds calculations; but Arkham Horror really got close to the RPG line without quite going over.
Of course, the "ill" side of an atmosphere-based game is often that the game itself isn't very good. And I'll be honest: Arkham Horror has its weaknesses. The characters aren't balanced (the mage character ended up being insanely powerful with a combination of amazing spells), there's a lot of luck in the game (getting particular spells or items can radically change the odds of success), there are parts of the game that are a slog (the upkeep phase, for instance, devolves quickly into a mandatory rolling of piles of dice), and there are edge cases that aren't well explained in the rules.
But in this case, none of that matters. Because the key element is that it's a co-op game. So another character is more powerful? Work together to figure out how to use that to your joint advantage. There's a lot of luck? Well, that makes for a more uncertain narrative. There are weird edge-cases in the rules? Interpret them as best you can; the game won't argue back if you lean a bit in your favor.
And even the slog parts can be ameliorated by a certain flexibility about the letter of the law. You're supposed to set your stat trade-offs at the beginning of each turn, for instance. Now, to do this properly requires you to analyze what's going to happen that turn, and carefully calculate out all the combats and set the numbers to the ideal maximizing point. But that's boring and slow. Much better is to let people play, and then when they get to a point where it matters, decide right then where they want the number to go. Sure, it's "cheating," but it takes out a lot of non-narrative calculation, makes the game more fun, and speeds up the pace.
Ah, the pace. We started playing at 2 PM. We finished at 11 PM. The box suggests that the game is 2-4 hours, but, yeah, no. Admittedly, we could have played faster than we did, and we were running really slow at first as we spent a lot of time digging through the rulebook, but I really don't think we could have cut off more than three hours without turning the game into an exercise in speed-gaming. And even six hours -- never mind the nine it actually took -- is a long, long time to spend playing a single game.
And yet: We all kept being surprised when we looked up at the clock and saw how long it'd been since we last looked, and at the end of the nine-hour extravaganza (which ended in a very narrow win for the heroes), we were all of us very satisfied and pleased with the game. And that night, I dreamt about the game. Any game that can keep you solidly entertained for a nine-hour block and then creep into your dreams, well, that's an awfully impressive sort of game. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys Lovecraft, to those who love RPG-lite games like Runebound, or even just as a break from cube farming.
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Sam DiRocco
United States
North Lima
Ohio
M42 - The Great Orion Nebula M33 - Triangulum Galaxy M20 - The Trifid Nebula M17 - The Swan Nebula M15 - A Globular Cluster M-8 - The Lagoon Nebula
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Yeah, This is my groups favorite game. We also get surprised with the passage of time. As for game length, it plays longer the more players you have. An 8 player game goes for an eternity. We found out that the game really plays the best with 4-5 players.
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David Neumann
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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Mondior wrote: An 8 player game goes for an eternity. We found out that the game really plays the best with 4-5 players.
Agreed. Even when I play solo, I usually use 4 investigators.
Great review for what is possibly still my #1 game experience.
Dave
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Xander Fulton
United States
Portland
Oregon
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mkozlows wrote: But in this case, none of that matters. Because the key element is that it's a co-op game. So another character is more powerful? Work together to figure out how to use that to your joint advantage. There's a lot of luck? Well, that makes for a more uncertain narrative. There are weird edge-cases in the rules? Interpret them as best you can; the game won't argue back if you lean a bit in your favor.
The key is the co-op element. As a competitive game, or a game where players are TRYING to be competitive ("Haha, I can kill more monsters than you" or "Boy, you aren't very strong, too bad you got surrounded - good luck with that!"), yeah, it's broken badly and would be no fun.
But, as you say, it's not. It's like an RPG - or MMORPG for the PC types. If one player is a 'tank' and another a 'healer'...well, don't expect the healer to pull the same number of kills as the tank. That's not their role!
mkozlows wrote: You're supposed to set your stat trade-offs at the beginning of each turn, for instance. Now, to do this properly requires you to analyze what's going to happen that turn, and carefully calculate out all the combats and set the numbers to the ideal maximizing point. But that's boring and slow. Much better is to let people play, and then when they get to a point where it matters, decide right then where they want the number to go.
Or, alternatively, skip the Analysis Paralysis and just wing it. More 'in character' that way, anyway. And yeah, you'll probably lose more that way, but...I mean, it's Cthulhu fer cryin' out loud. How often SHOULD you win? 
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Clint
United States
Houston
Texas
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Wow! Nine hours?!? Granted, I've only played the game 3 times, but my games generally last three to four hours.
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Adrian Hague
United Kingdom
Leamington, Warwickshire
West Midlands
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A very nice, balanced review. Well done!
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My group, now that we know the rules, takes only about 3 to 4 hours to play. But we do play cooperatively. If you don't then I can see the game dragging on for several hours. The game is meant to be a co-op though: players against the board.
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Mike Kozlowski
United States
Unspecified
Michigan
I, uh, guess I had a lot of geekgold?
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ced1106 wrote:
That's a pretty good house rule. *If* there's a veteran, newbies catch onto the game quickly, but the sliders are always a case of AP (Ameritrash Paralysis). So my own house rule is that newbies can place their sliders on their card anywhere anytime during the first turn. Because of the unusual AH mechanic of subtracting dice rolled during a skill, a skill of 2 in an ability is *not* half as likely to succeed as a skill of 4. (eg. A skill modifier of -2 means the skill of 4 has about a 50% chance of succeeding, while the skill of 2 has NO chance of succeeding.)
Yeah, we tried to keep it within the spirit of the rules, if not the letter. Basically if we fought a predictable combat (moving onto a particular street with a monster on purpose, for instance), we'd tweak the position of the will/fight slider at that point -- because we obviously would have done that at the beginning, and it's just more natural and less fiddly to do it now.
If we had an unpredictable fight, we'd let ourselves re-center a slider that we'd tweaked off to the side from a previous turn (because we would have meant to do that), but not optimize it up completely. The overall effect was almost always the same in the end as if we had done the moves during upkeep, minus careless calculation mistakes or just laziness.
(Perhaps more dubious were the couple of times I'd roll a die while we were debating whether or not to use a clue token to give an extra roll, and let our decision be, um, influenced by the outcome of the roll. Shh, don't tell Cthulhu.)
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Rob Olsson
United States
Baltimore
Maryland
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I've got to add kudos for the review as well. Very readable and balanced.
My experiences are mixed. You do need a certain amount of people remaining focused on the game to get it done in a reasonable amount of time, and you may find that things move faster when you are more familiar with the rules.
The game provides for plenty of dramatic moments. It provides the illusion that you have all the time in the world and then you begin to see that time is very tight.
Thanks for sharing your review!
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Gus Browning
United States
Juneau
Alaska
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Just one thing,
Were you playing the the professor gets to subtract one from the sanity cost of all spells due to his special ability?
Thing is, (you can check in the FAQ) spell sanity is COST not a LOSS, therefor, the professor can't use his power when casting. That might balance him out a bit...
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Mike Kozlowski
United States
Unspecified
Michigan
I, uh, guess I had a lot of geekgold?
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gypsylord wrote: Just one thing,
Were you playing the the professor gets to subtract one from the sanity cost of all spells due to his special ability?
Thing is, (you can check in the FAQ) spell sanity is COST not a LOSS, therefor, the professor can't use his power when casting. That might balance him out a bit...
We were indeed playing that way. And yeah, wow, that'd "balance" him quite a bit.
Oddly enough, I like our interpretation better, because dagnabbit, someone should get free magic.
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this lovecraft were talking about. The only thing you get for free is the hideous tentacled maw that bites your face off.
My first game had 5 people, of which me and 2 others hadn't played before. It took about 1.5 hours to explain the rules (we were eating lunch as well), then 3 hours to actually play. We defeated Mr. Bubbles, more popularly known as Yog Sothoth, by closing all the gates at once, mainly by luck. Spellcasters seemed important but no better than Tanks at handling things. I had fun cleaning up the streets of Arkham with my trusty flamethrower and magic sword, while the casters got to wander the outer planes.
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