Session Report: Arkham Horror [#1]

As my wife blogged a while ago, the recent Bay Area storms knocked out power at our apartment for about eight hours. Her company also fell victim to the blackout, so she remained at home to tidy the place up. As night settled, she quickly became one extremely bored woman (if the fact that she was cleaning – cleaning! – was not indication enough of her predicament) in pitch black darkness with nothing to do. Luckily for her (and myself, if I had been misfortunate enough to return home before power was restored), I had gaming contingency plans. One of those plans consisted of my Nintendo DS, whose plentiful charge was so sacrilegiously depleted when my wife decided to use its screen as a flashlight – a flashlight!

My other backup source, however, came in the form of the boardgame – an oft overlooked medium in an era of digital, high-definition electronic entertainment. I’ve actually found myself thinking on a disturbing number of occasions that if I were ever stuck in some sort of emergency confinement with limited electricity – perhaps if our country were ever to enter a nuclear holocaust, or if our planet were to succumb to some natural disaster that forced us into underground tunnel complexes – boardgames would be my primary source of entertainment. Although, in such circumstances, there’d probably be more important things to think about… but hey, if you’re gonna be there for extended periods of time, why not entertain yourself while you’re at it? But I digress…

In my absence, my wife decided to setup a game I’ve owned for quite a while now – Arkham Horror. I had the rules lying around our office, as I had recently considered jumping back into the streets of Arkham for another go – or, rather, another GOO. Get it?! Okay, I suck. Back to the topic at hand. A friend bought me the “Curse of the Dark Pharaoh” expansion last year, so my wife decided to set that up along with the rest of the game.

But how was she going to play by herself? Here’s the first interesting fact: the game is a cooperative multiplayer horror adventure set in the 1920’s in H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional town of Arkham, Massachussetts – center stage for the various manifestations of the Cthulu Mythos. That’s right, kiddos: video games aren’t the only games with co-op. In the game, the players (investigators) struggle against the forces of darkness to prevent a terrible creature – an Ancient One – from awakening and destroying the world. Since the game has no intrinsic player-vs.-player elements and no hands of hidden cards, it also lends itself to a solitaire mode – one investigator on a lone quest to overcome evil. This is how my wife was able to play the boardgame by herself. The game was also an interesting choice considering the pitch black atmosphere pierced by faint candlelight – candlelight that would burn a hole through the expansion instructions in my wife’s attempt to read them.

Anyway, power returned to our aparment shortly before I got home. Aside from the new burn hole in my instructions and the Ancient One about to devour my wife, things were peachy. Since she had gone through the trouble of setting the game up, I decided I might as well join the monster hunt. Let me rest on this point for a bit – the fact that she set the game up beforehand was a huge incentive for me to jump in. This is because setup takes forever. Among the game’s various components are: a board that alone takes up half the surface area of our dining table, investigator markers, investigator sheets, Ancient One sheet, terror track counter, closed counters, explored markers, activity markers, gate markers, clue tokens, doom tokens, monster tokens, stamina counters, sanity counters, money counters, mythos cards, neighborhood encounter cards, other-world encounter cards, common item cards, unique item cards, spell cards, skill cards, ally cards, cursed/blessed cards, deputy cards, Silver Twilight membership cards, retainer cards, and loan cards. And that doesn’t even include the expansion components! I’ll be quick to point out, though, that setup for this game actually goes a little more quickly than other Fantasy Flight “big box” games, so it could definitely be worse.

After setting up, I had to peruse the rules for a bit before diving in, as it had been a while since I last played. The game turn essentially progresses as follows: investigators perform upkeep, investigators move, investigators deal with “encounters”, and then an otherworldly gate possibly opens, bringing the Ancient One another step closer to awakening. With these gates come monsters that will hinder investigators at every turn. The investigators’ only way to defeat the Ancient One (apart from direct confrontation) is to travel through the otherworldly gates, explore those nether regions, and return to Arkham, closing and possibly even sealing the gates behind them. If, at any point, all gates have been closed/sealed, the investigators win. Investigators also achieve victory if, at any point, they have sealed six gates. (Sealed gates cannot, in general, be reopened.) However, throughout their adventure, the Ancient One seeks to awaken and destroy their world. The Ancient One awakens if there are ever eight or more open gates on the table (out of eleven possible gate locations) or if too many gates have opened over the course of the game. The latter condition is determined by a “doom track” that is advanced with each new gate that opens. If the Ancient One does, indeed, awaken, investigators are given one last chance to defeat it in a desperate fight that only gets progressively more difficult over time.

At first glance, the awakening of the Ancient One almost appears inevitable for a small number of players, seeing how a gate opens at the end of every turn and it generally takes about three turns for a player to close a gate (move to the gate, traverse the otherworld, and then return to close/seal the gate). That doesn’t even count the turns a player would use to fight monsters in the streets, gather clues, and equip him/herself. However, this issue is mitigated by the fact that a gate opening where a gate already exists instead causes a “monster surge,” which releases more monsters into Arkham than usual. A new gate does not open in this case, which buys the investigators some time at the expense of the increased risk of fighting monsters in the city of Arkham. The number of monsters actually allowed in the city is limited to a value determined by the number of players that are in the game, so there can never be too many monsters opposing the investigators at any given time. However, the monsters that should have appeared (but could not due to the monster limit) are used to determine the “terror level” of the city. As the terror level increases, less allies become available for use, and particularly useful shops around Arkham begin closing, making equipping yourself that much harder. In addition, when the terror level reaches its maximum value, the monster limit is removed, opening the floodgates and sentencing the helpless investigators to certain insanity and/or death and the hands of overwhelming odds. The gate/monster dual threat actually worked quite well during the games I played. The threats seemed to progress at a balanced pace, leaving my wife and I desperate to seal gates (lest the Ancient One awaken) without biding our time for too long (lest the terror track progress too far and the monsters overwhelm us). As the open gate count increases, the likelihood that another gate will open grows smaller and smaller but increases the likelihood of monster surges by an inversely proportional amount. A balance of play must be maintained in order to hinder the progress of both the doom track and the terror track. On our second to last game, my wife and I were one sealed gate away from victory when the terror track was filled and the monsters poured into the streets. With several gates already open, the monster surges repeatedly dumped more and more monsters into Arkham. Neither of us had enough clues to seal one more gate; neither were either of us strong enough to deal with the hordes of monsters at our doorstep. We were left cowering at a location hoping for a miracle. That miracle did not come, as the Ancient One awakened not long afterward. On our last game, my wife rolled a more combat oriented investigator, so she was tasked with keeping the monsters at bay while I focused on sealing gates. With the terror track full and all manner of nasty monsters roaming the streets, I was again left cowering in a location hoping for a miracle. Two more doom tokens would have awakened Azathoth and spelled our demise, but my wife’s lucky acquisition of an elder sign unique item allowed her to seal the final gate and secure our victory.

There are two primary characteristics of the game that stand out in my mind: the first is the frequent ambiguity in the rules. This ambiguity generally arises as a byproduct of having hundreds of possible encounters, each presenting an interesting or unique situation that often lies outside of the rulebook’s jurisdiction. Fantasy Flight has had to release several rules updates and FAQ’s to deal with these questions, not to mention the plethora of puzzling circumstances and situations being presented in the forums. Being someone who tends to scrutinize every rule and every exception, I was definitely frustrated at first by the lack of definitive and comprehensive answers. After several games, however, it became clear that it didn’t really matter. Arkham Horror is not a competitive tournament game. Neither is it a rigid electronic game. It possesses the flexibility to become the experience you want it to be. If you want to interpret a particular encounter in a manner that gives the investigators a slight advantage, then by all means, do it! If, on the other hand, you want that extra bit of challenge, you can go ahead and interpret the encounter in a way that makes the challenge more difficult to overcome. In fact, designer Richard Launius released a collection of house rules that players can adopt to adjust the difficulty and the progression of the game to their liking.

The other notable characteristic of Arkham Horror is its randomness. My experiences with the game lead me to conclude that there is a huge amount of randomness in the game. With the random investigators and the random starting skills and equipment, you’d be hard pressed to find two games that play alike. Skill checks are performed with dice rolls, purchasable items are drawn from the top of a shuffled deck, and events and encounters are all determined by the drawing of a random card. Naturally, some games are much more difficult than others. I have friends that despise randomness in a game, preferring the type of game in which skill and practice prevails. Fortunately for Arkham Horror, this is not the case. If this were the case, the game would lose all replay value – players would eventually find the optimal method of defeating the Ancient One, execute it, and succeed every time (under the assumption that little to none of the game is random). This is not how an Arkham Horror game proceeds at all. Even when you think everything is going in your favor, the random encounters and random events can easily put a serious dent into your infallible plan. Failing skill checks when expected values say you shouldn’t (and passing them when expected values say you shouldn’t) is a common occurrence, and though it can be quite frustrating, it’s all a part of the game. After all, isn’t adaptation the true heart of an adventure? Adventures are all about dealing with the unexpected in a quest to reach an overarching goal. Arkham Horror does a great job of embodying that essence.