Game 1: Base game + all expansions up through Edge of the Earth (The Gathering)
Game 2: Base game + all expansions up through Edge of the Earth (The Midnight Masks)
Game 3: Base game + all expansions up through Edge of the Earth (Murder at the Excelsior Hotel)
Enthusiasm: ❤️❤️❤️❤️
- Arkham Horror: The Card Game is an evolution of Fantasy Flight Games’ previous card game, The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. It took the base concept, shifted it over to their Arkham Horror universe, and in many ways, combined it with the campaign aspects of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game series. It’s effectively become the main campaign customizable card game (the other main customizable card games aren’t built around campaigns, and the other main campaign games aren’t built around customizable card systems).
- There are thousands of cards which can be used to build player decks, with different characters providing small but surprisingly meaningful differences (base statistics, card options, character ability, and (generally) two character-specific cards).
- There’s a lot of text on cards, so you need to be very comfortable with dealing with a lot of reading.
- The plots told via the mechanisms in the games (scenario prologue/epilogues, act/agenda cards, etc.) is very strong, with branching points dependent upon player choice and scenario outcomes.
- As expected from a deck construction game, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had when triggering a deck’s shtick (which can sometimes be difficult).
- Luck is largely controllable, but it can sometimes still go completely bad. In our run of The Midnight Masks, in just a few rounds, we pulled two cultists and two failures between the two of us. This, combined with my wife repeatedly pulling non-trivial monsters during the Mythos phase, we got pretty well blown out that scenario.