Arkham Horror
Arkham Horror is one of Fantasy Flight Games’ “big box” games, and it has a big price to match. But the big box comes with big contents and big return. There are hundreds of cards, sixteen different heroes, eight different villains and a gigantic board – all illustrated in full color. Naturally, Arkham Horror draws its setting from the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, and was originally published in the 1980’s by Chaosium. This new edition keeps all the genius of Richard Launius’ original design, but adds the design ideas and presentation standards of modern times. In fact, in keeping with the style of publisher Fantasy Flight Games, the game isn’t just nice to look at but sumptuously gorgeous. Every image, from the character portraits to the terrifying Outer Gods, is painted in lavish colour and dazzling artistry, not to mention exacting and well-researched detail.
It isn’t just a pretty game, though. FFG regular Kevin Wilson has reinvigorated Launius’ clever concepts so that despite its undeniable complexity, it runs smoothly and is surprisingly easy to learn. Moreover, it uses its narrative mechanics and rich, persistent flavor text to not just tell a story but to evoke a palpable style and mood. Board games with horror themes are becoming more and more common, but Arkham Horror may be the first to actually be scary itself.
The mood begins with the setting. The artwork and flavor text goes to great lengths to bring to life not just the horrors but the 1920’s life of Arkham, Lovecraft’s fictional town not too far removed from his home of Providence or nearby Salem. The board depicts eight different districts in this town, each then broken up into three separate locales. These range from the mundane (The Docks, The Bank) to the mysterious (The Curiosity Shop, The Woods) to places discussed in detail by Lovecraft (The Witch House, The Unnameable). Equally evinced and detailed are the characters, ranging again from the mundane (The Photographer, the Salesman) to the eldritch (The Magician, The Archaeologist) and the solid pulpy fun (The Dilettante, the Gangster). Each comes with their own background, unique powers and a combination of pre-set and random equipment. Each plays differently, and the random equipment and encounters ensure they never play the same way twice.
The game is a collaborative one, with players moving their characters between the locations, collecting weapons, eldritch tomes, sanity-destroying spells and all-important clue tokens. Meanwhile, the players also have to avoid or defeat the lesser but still terrifying monsters lurking in Arkham. Behind all this is a ticking time-bomb of rising evil: each turn a gate opens to Other Worlds, letting in more monsters and drawing closer and closer the final rise of a Great Old One. The characters need to collect enough clue tokens to leap through these gates, experience the strangeness of the Other World and then return and use that experience to close the gates forever. Close enough gates and you stop evil from rising and win.
The heart of the game centres on the fact that there is never enough time to do everything: if you spend too long looking for guns and magic to fight monsters safely, their numbers will grow to unstoppable numbers. If the monsters are kept down, the Old One’s ever-nearing return will go unchecked. Yet if characters rush to do everything at once, their sanity and stamina will quickly vanish and they’ll find themselves waking up in St Mary’s Hospital or Arkham Asylum. With so much to do in town, even with eight players, nobody will ever find themselves at a loss. And with each random encounter, new problems emerge, new powers are gained and new strategies are needed. Thus each turn is different and each game is different. Even when the patterns of success become familiar and easier, this is a game that will never, ever repeat itself – and never gets so predictable that you can be sure of winning.
On the downside, all of these cards and character options make the game rather fiddly and heavy on components. As a result, learning the game the first time can be overwhelming, and setting up can take longer than some games take to play. However, the rules are well written and the tokens and cards are extremely clear, making gameplay smooth. Games can last over three hours, but the experience is so involving the hours fly by – and even players new to complex games will be crying for more. Hard-core strategy fans may also find it more random than they prefer, but it’s a story-telling game more than a tactical one, and if it is less tactical as a result of excelling at narrative, it’s a small price to pay.
So it is fun, but is it also scary? Certainly the relentless pressure on the players to keep their enemies at bay while every turn seems to bring them closer and closer to destruction makes for a game that is often as emotionally exhausting as it is intellectually challenging – and a game that truly fits the relentless terror of Lovecraft’s stories. Meanwhile, there is so much attention to atmosphere, in the rules, the art and the always-accompanying flavor text that it becomes impossible to keep the world of the game from capturing your imagination in a way few, if any games, can match. More than once the game has followed me into the real world, making me jump at shadows or recall the dark events of the woods when I see the trees blowing in the wind outside my window.
I’ve read plenty of horror that stayed with me after the fact, making the real world seem a little darker, a little more mysterious. Arkham Horror is the first board game that’s had the same effect. Lovers of horror gaming should definitely get a copy, and take note: sometimes even the dice can scare you.
July 2nd, 2009 at 17:06
One of my favorite board games. My wife and I play this regularly, partially because it’s cooperative – it’s the two of us against the board instead of against each other. I wish there were more games like this.
There are a bunch of supplements, which generally add to the difficulty level. Some of them add extra locations in the form of nearby towns with their own boards, others just add cards and a rule or two.
July 7th, 2009 at 14:06
Just two quick comments:
1. I disagree that this is a “big box” game. The box is actually small when compared to the real big box games of Descent, Battlelore and even the new Age of Conan. While it has a lot of “fiddly bits” and thus has the feel of a big box game, it just isn’t in the same category.
2. This is one of my favorites. I own all the expansions and wish I had more time to play them.
July 9th, 2009 at 02:56
I really enjoy this game, but I have two big complaints.
This game takes three hours to play IF everyone is really paying attention to the game. If you have a couple of players that like to socialize quite a bit during gameplay, it can take upwards of five or six hours. This isn’t really the game’s fault, but it’s something to be aware of.
Also, “a lot of fiddly bits” doesn’t do the amount of stuff you get in this box justice. It’s insane. There are tokens and markers and cards for everything, and when you throw in the six expansions, three with additional game boards, it really gets out of hand. I don’t have any friends with tables big enough to handle the entire game laid out. It’s huge, and keeping track of all that can be rough.
A good fix for both problems I’ve found, provided you or another player don’t mind not being a player, is to have someone “run” the game like you would an RPG. Hand out the cards, read off the Mythos cards, etc. We were able to get through an eight-player game using all but the latest expansion in around four hours that way.