Arkham Horror

I will start in the end, because much like I teach games, in which I tell people how to win the game first so that they have an idea of what the rules do, readers deserve to know what someone thinks of a game before they actually go through the entire review. Arkham Horror is a bad game and in the end of the this review it will only get 1 angry scowling King Philip out of 5. I personally detest this game and i would rather drill out my own eyes and then use the liquid that comes out to make ice cream rather than actually play this game ever again. If you are shocked and appalled that I would say such words about your favourite game then please A) Find a better favourite game and B) It's just a fucking game, grow some backbone (if it's not your favourite game, then there might be hope for you yet, unless you like Munchkin, in which case your soul has already been condemned to hellfire for Bad Taste in Boardgames). Alright, now that the easily shocked and appalled are out of the way, let's actually get started.

Someone in the thread, in words more eloquent and succinct that I could ever pen, wrote admiring words about Arkham Horror, praising it for it's procedural gameplay that changes at every attempt, with the rules changing at every session due to misreadings of the rules. The fun of Arkham Horror starts even at the rule reading stage, as the unfathomable and insane scribbling with the feared Arkham Horror Rulebook can drive a man insane more easily than even the dreaded Necronomicon. Each page opens a portal to a dimension in which the established rules of flow, structure and layout are radically different, with each step described in such a way that would only make sense to a mind already lost to utter and complete madness. That the designers were able to fit the theme of the Chthulhu Mythos to every single detail of the game is truly a feat to behold.

But madness does not end merely after finishing the reading of the Rulebook, for during the game you will be forced to look upon that dreaded text again and again, the vile words within it drawing you in deeper and deeper while you search for that rule about the fifteen different case scenarios affecting the movement of the Hound of Tindalos, each second becoming more and more scared that the rule will never be found and that you will be lost within that tome forever, your mind forever doomed to wander how does a weird combination of spells and items allows you apparently to have 5 hands available and if this is against the rules.

Mere discussions of the game outside the reach of that vile box of darkness can cause chains of madness: one merely needs to utter one of the myriad rules present within that text to unleash a flood of 'Holy shit, I've been playing the game wrong THIS ENTIRE TIME'. After the floodgates are open, only madness ensues. The forum in question will be locked for pages and pages of people posting their rules clarification and statements that 'man this totally changes the entire game': it is unclear if such disparate renditions of the rules are due to player mistakes or the dark tomes themselves being slightly different for each player.

How does the game actually play, you might ask? Well, to echo the theme of chaos, most of the results are so completely random that's impossible to really feel like victory or defeat is in your hands, again echoing the theme of helplessness and inability to affect the world that is a strong central theme of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. You roll a D6 for any so called skill check, which in actuality should be called Luck Checks because no real skill is involved in rolling dice (unless you are some kind of cheater, then more props for you for cheating in a co-op game). Rolling a 5 or a 6 means a success, which statistically speaking for such a low sample size will mean that the probabilities are all over the goddamn place (more on probabilities and me being bad at maths in another blog entry).

But the randomness doesn't stop there! You also have a dozen different decks, each for a different set of locations in Arkham, which means that your character might want to go to the newspaper to get a job but NO! Instead, he finds a monster stuck in the printing press! And he must fight it! Or maybe he goes to a shop, but shops work differently in Arkham, for they are populated by evil, possessed shopkeepers that only ever show you 3 items at the time. As more expansions are added to the game, the shopkeepers become even more possessed, showing you Cultes Des Ghoules for the third time instead of getting that Elder Sign that you really, really need to win the game.

The main focus of the game centers around portals that must be explored and closed in order to save the city of Arkham. Portals are apparently so big that one immediately falls within them once reaching their location, entering one of the many alternate dimensions. Here, the elements of chaos once again reign as you might get lost in time and space or even devoured by a Great Old One through completely random luck. And once you are back, you can finally seal the gate, an exciting scenario where you either fight the gate with your bare hands by wrestling it into submission or use raw intellect to make it feel academically inferior. Failing this test has dire effects on the sanity of the player, as they are forced to watch the other player exploring locations, fight monsters and dive into alternate dimensions while they are forced to babysit a gate until the turn when they can actually close it. It is also possible to seal gates to prevent them opening again, but this involves the use of clue tokens, which normally are used to re-roll dice, thus forcing you to use them sparingly and thus making it hard to use the single tool you have at your disposal to make the rolls go your way.

The game ends once the gates have all been closed/sealed or once the Great Old Ones has awakened: in the spirit of the theme, the appearance of a real life God does not end the game (although in one case, it does), but allows the players to literally machine gun an alien god to death, an action which surely doesn't clash with any of the established canon of the Mythos, although strangely a 'Boat' weapon card is absent.

With all of the above being said, there is only one recourse and that is to give Arkham Horror 1 angry...wait. This isn't that kind of review. I might be negative, I might hate the game myself, but I am not going to make a list of things I hate about the game and avoid making an objective analysis, without any of my own subjective opinion and my inherent hate of ameritrash. I started this blog with the intention of making reasoned, objective analysis of games (as well as some humour about this way-too-serious hobby) and to be different from other reviews that seemed to just judge the game based on their own biases. Now, don't get me wrong, I feel what i have written above is true for the game, but it isn't the ENTIRE truth and if I left the review like that, I would feel guilty about trying to steer the reader towards a negative conclusion of the game, which just wouldn't do. In other words, get ready for part 2: The Return of the Objective Analysis.

So, Arkham Horror, it's not a bad game. By far, there are games out there that are worse than Arkham Horror and as well as that, there are many good ideas within the game that allow the players to really weave a storyline around the adventures that their characters are going through, without having a tightly regimented script or storyline that must be followed in order for the game to be immersive. I used to describe Arkham Horror as being a roleplaying game for roleplayers with low imaginations  and although it was said in a mock-disparaging way, there is a grain  of truth in that sentence because the game does allow you to go through the events that might lead to injury or madness or even death.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are a boat-load of problems inherent in the game. The manual IS difficult to get through and it can be hard to find specific rules, but the general flow of the game is pretty easy to follow: you move, you fight or evade monsters, continue moving if you evaded, have encounters in locations and then in the otherworlds. The problems are mainly associated with unclear explanations (for the longest time, I played the game in which you could still move after fighting if you won the fight, which makes for a radically different game since you just get one tooled up hero sweeping through entire waves of monsters.

To be absolutely honest, I kind of have a soft spot for this game. It was one of the very first games I ever played when I started board gaming and I even bought the Dunwich expansion without even owning the base game, I loved the game that much. Although in the years between then and now my opinions about game have changed, it's hard to get rid of the memories of, you know, actually having fun playing this game. We houseruled it a whole lot: the best rule change was forcing other players to read your encounter cards and not tell you the outcome of your choices until you had decided what to do, which turned the game from a pure mathetical number cruncher to a 'Do I really want to explore this cold, dark, creepy cave?'. That rule alone amounted for a large percentage of the fun situations that my characters found themselves in.

There are some good mechanical ideas within the game itself, if you attempt to detach the game from its theme, which in this case is very difficult since it is such a theme heavy game. I like the sliders that you get: these both make the characters more flavourful (with brainy professors being useful at certain skill checks while fighters being better at combat), but also they provide hard choices: do I go full Lore? Maybe I need some Luck. Do I go for full movement or do I try to get around sneakily? All these feel like some good choice, although the actual resolution of 5-6 a success is boring and feels like a bit of a letdown considering how interesting the slider rules are. Another thing I like is the resource management of having 'hands': you can't carry everything and you are have to make choices. I like the fact that using some of the more powerful spells make you go insane. I like the madness/serious injury cards you get in the Dunwich expansion, they really give an element of choice if you get too injured or lose too much sanity. I like that everyone can have a role: you can decide to tool up and fight monsters, or dive into other dimensions in order to close gates or go around picking up clues.

It's such a shame then that the good parts of the game are negated by some of the bad parts. The randomness in this game is both a curse and a blessing (yes, the play on words is meant, although only people that have played the game will get it): most of the skill check, although the number of dice can be modified by skills, weapons etc, are still too random. On the other hand, the randomness of the encounter decks does lead for interesting situations. The real problem occurs when the GOO wakes up: for some of the weaker GOOs, defeating them is simply a matter of tooling up and beating the crap out of them. Even the stronger ones in the base game don't provide enough of a challenge. I love playing against the one that if he wakes up, the game ends immediately (which I am told is like what happened in the original game): it means that the heroes can't just give up on the gates half way through and decide to tool up instead. That the combat with the GOOs always comes down to random dice rolls also doesn't enamor me to the game.

Arkham Horror, for all its faults, does provide the right feelings when playing it: it feels overwhelming, but IT SHOULD! It feels like it will be impossible to surmount the odds and in terms of theme alone, it does evoke some of the scenarios that it tries to inspire, while still providing some comic situations which have caused even me to laugh out loud. In the end, it's more of a disappointment than anything else, because the potential is there but seems to be obscured by the bad rules and by the uncreativity behind the roll-for-successes resolution system. Arkham Horror does accomplish what it sets out to do and although there are some games that do it far better, none seem to have the scope of epicness of a game of Arkham Horror. There are, also, far worse games out there which fail miserably to even evoke a fraction of the theme that is present in Arkham Horror or in which the rules don't just make the game hard to play, but completely unplayable from start to end.

So what is my final score after having written so many words about this game? It deserves at least 2.5 angry scowling King Philips out of 5: you could have fun with the game if you are happy to put in the effort and you will get rewarded for it, but a great experience is marred to make the game just average rather than completely terrible (and if you just read the first paragraph and this one to check the scores: shame on you for doubting me in the first place and I feel no regrets in trying to make you think that the score was going to be 1, you Cliff's Notes reading bastard).