Let's Play Arkham Horror Already!

I was going to declare this stupid until I looked at it and saw they were doing it with a team-based setup. My cynical self just presumed they'd use some cockamamie scheme to evaluate individual players (cf: Lord of the Rings).

How does that work? o_O

Okay, so if I don't buy any expansions at first, does the game work? Do I need to print a bunch of errata to even out really obvious gameplay glitches (Warcraft, Game of Thrones)? I am really, really interested in a cooperative board game like this; I've had a couple of ideas for my own for some time, and this looks a) awesome Cthulhu fun, and b) a good model to use for my own designs, but I don't want to feel crippled because I didn't want to shell out for more cards and more complication initially.

I own only the core game. The only thing I bought was a small tackle box to hold all the chips and pieces, and I threw a bunch of spare d6s I had laying around in there too.

The rulebook is pretty good. There is an errata section on the first page, so I must have a later printing of the game, but I bet all that stuff is also available on the website (wherever that is) to be printed out.

Yes, the game works without the expansions. The first time I played, all I needed was the rulebook and the errata.

Go to the Fantasy Flight website and get the errata from there.

Me and my group played the first edition dozens of times before any errata or expansions were released. A few minor clarifications caught us off guard when we learned we'd been playing "wrong" for so long.

And my general advice is to skip Dark Pharaoh completely, but make sure to pick up the big box expansions even if you don't plan to use the additional game boards.

Some folks on another forum tried their hand at playing Arkham Horror online. It got all jumbled up fairly soon.

My brother and I lost our first game. Drew Nyarlathotep, and then the first or second mythos card we got was the one that adds doom every round on a die roll. We had that active almost the entire game because we didn't have any Allies to sacrifice to get rid of it. When we finally had to fight him, we got him down to 1 doom remaining.. and then the last character lost due to the clue-sanity trick.

Question:
Can more than one monster be on a street at a time? This happened a couple of times and we didn't know how to handle it.



...I actually had two or three other questions but it's been a week and a half since we played and now I can't remember the others, bleh.

As long as you haven't exceeded the overall Monster Limit, all the monsters can be in the same place. Example: Turn 1: Gate opens at Woods, Turn 2: Monster Surge at Woods. In a 4 player game, you'd have at least 4 monsters in the same space.

When facing multiple monsters, you can choose to face them in any order. If, for example, you are in a street area and are faced with a Mi-go, a Cultist, and a Gug, you can kill the Mi-go first to try to get a unique item that might help against the Gug. If you don't think you can defeat the Gug, you can still fight the Mi-go and Cultist, then try to Evade the Gug. You can't move if you've fought this turn, so you will need to Evade again next turn to escape from it.

Edit:
I just remembered that there's a rule that says if you draw a Rumor as the first Mythos card to ignore it. For new players, I might even expand that for a couple more turns if you want mercy. Nearly all the rumors are bad, but Southside Strangler (I think that's the one you got?) can be especially tough to deal with.

Where's the rule? I think I'm going with it as a house rule in any case, because the card we got - The Stars Are Right (add doom on a 1 or 2 during Mythos Phase, Pass: sacrifice an Ally, Fail: IF THE DAMNED MONSTER WAKES UP, no shit) - was with us almost the entire game, and definitely contributed to our downfall.

Page 5, "Game Setup", step 14

Shub-niggurath got us last week. We pulled some really hard monsters and a lot of people fainted/went insane, and by the time we got our shit together there were already five gates open and nobody was in a position to close any of them.

I'm confident we'll get him next time!

Okay, yeah.. our first card was actually the headline about the expedition returning, so Stars came up on turn 2 or 3. I still think I'll leave rumours out for a couple few turns in any case. -.-

Who were your investigators? I like the interesting little scenarios that emerge just by the investigators that you get. I wound up playing the detective and the scientist (a classic TV combo if ever there was one), and my brother got the professor and the student (again, total chance, but cool and easy to imagine how they would've teamed up to hit the streets).

Let's see... we had five players. Man I can't even remember.

The game before, though, Hastur got summoned and we killed him easily enough, thanks to our Terror Track being zero. I played Amanda (the student) in that game and remember doing precisely dick-all of use to the team as a whole.

My last game, this one guy took that woman in purple (looks like a witch/hooker with guns?) and started with a mission that required a whole bunch of street locations. All his Arkham Encounters were kinda whorish too. Even got handcuffed to the sheriff or something. Quite entertaining.

My boyfriend played as Wendy (little girl in the newest set) and kept getting creepy old men offering her.. things.

I think you're talking about the debutante. Can't recall her name. She's in Arkham looking for a lost sister or somesuch.

Jenny Barnes, the Dilettante
I'm apparently such a nerd that I didn't need to go check...

My new Favorite character is Lily Chen, the Martial Artist (Kingsport expansion)
Her big thing is that she has a Max Sanity/Max Stamina slider and can adjust them with Focus. Each turn she does so, she heals 1 point in whichever stat increased.
She also starts with the Martial Arts skill that gives +2 to Combat checks for each hand not holding a weapon.

Man, now I want to play again; it's been a couple months since the last time I played... :/

I feel stupid for asking such a basic question, but...

What happens when you go to a location that has a gate and a monster? Do you fight the monster first or do you automatically get drawn into the gate? What about when you're leaving the other dimension and there's a monster on the other side?

She sounds... ridiculously overpowered?

Re: playing: I don't understand why the hell FFG doesn't license this as a computer game. There are TOO DAMNED MANY PIECES anyway. I'm so tempted to grab a copy of VASSAL engine and work at some kind of port.

You fight the monster during your Movement phase, then get pulled through the gate during the Arkham Encounters phase. A quirk of this is that if you draw an Arkham Encounter that says "A Gate and Monster appear!" you get sucked through the gate, and the monster stays where you were. Source

Most of the time, when you exit a gate it is during the Movement phase, so you would need to deal with the monster as soon as you get out. Sometime you can get back to Arkham during a different phase, in which case you wait until your next Movement phase to deal with the monster.

At one point I was thinking about whipping up a half-assed version in pygame that would have been a virtual board and that's about it. But VASSAL sounds like a perfect fit for this. How complicated is it?

Her downsides:
She only has a Focus of 2 and her main ability needs it to work.
She starts with $4, 2 Clues, 1 Spell, 1 Common Item
Nearly all of her skills are average (range: 1-4) except Fight (range: 2-5)

She's definitely a good character, but mostly because she's not dependent on getting good random draws. Any character that starts with a Unique Item and gets a Healing Stone would be similarly powerful.

Most of the expansion characters are pretty strong, because the expansion Ancient Ones tend to be pretty horrible (esp. Atlach-Nacha).

My pick for most powerful character is Daisy Walker, the Librarian:

• Never loses Sanity from reading a Tome
• All Spells cost 1 less Sanity
• Starts with a Tome (Livre d'Ivon) that lets you search the Spell deck for any spell you want.

Thanks for that! One more question. Does the investigator get an encounter during the Other Worlds phase if they just arrived there the previous Movement Phase?

Holy shit, that's one monster cup.

I've been playing my games mostly as Mark Harrigan, the soldier from the Dunwich Horror expansion, and while the flamethrower is cool, he spends most of his time going crazy.

Yes. And I should have mentioned that the aforementioned "Gate opening" Arkham Encounters cause you to be Delayed on arrival and have an Other World encounter.

I hate using characters with a Max Sanity of 3. I'm much more willing to play someone with a Max Stamina of 3. Either way, Injury and Madness cards are awesome!

I haven't played with those yet, because I don't feel like I have the proper grasp of the care game to add on the new boards and cards.

It's been a couple of years since I last played with it, but I don't remember it being terribly complicated. Java, comes with network code, pretty good community so you can figure out what you're doing.. it was mostly designed with old World War gaming in mind, but it can do anything (I made a version of Kahuna at one point, made a backup, hard drive died, no idea where I put the backup)

So.

We lost.

Again.

This time it was against Shub-Niggurath. Jenny, Kate, Doc, and Photographer.

Jenny wound up with an accumulated ~$35-40 or so by the end of the game, mostly from Trust Fund.

All of our weapons were physical (except for Jenny, who had Shrivelling and the Curse of Azathoth), but with the -5 penalty to attack, we just gave up. It was.. it was really discouraging.

I kept a pad of paper and a pen this time, to write down every question I had.

There are a lot of questions!

1) Activity. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FOR?! Mythos cards occasionally say, "Activity at such-and-such streets".

1a) There are only 3 activity tokens. What happens when you get to a 4th?

2) When something says to "discard" it, is that to the bottom of its deck, or to a special discard pile? Usually it'll say "to the box" if it's a remove-from-play, but I'm wondering about normal discard (since some just say "discard" and some say "discard to bottom of deck").

3) Do monsters move during setup? You draw your setup Mythos card, set down gate and monster.. does that monster then move to streets if it's the appropriate symbol/card matchup?

4) "Streets". If something is on "Downtown Streets" is it on the square that says Downtown Streets specifically? Or any of the streets connected to that box? Does that box count as a move-step location?

5) Stirring. Every(?) boss card has some effect that happens "when it stirs". I could find no reference to this in rules, and it never came up on a card.

6) An investigator is on a location with a gate. There's a gate surge. Monster appears. You have to fight or evade it on the next movement phase, right?

7) Monsters in the outskirts: do these ever move? If so, how?

8) Undead: what's the significance of this keyword?

9) What happens when you run out of gates and you need to open another one? (i.e. everyone has them as trophies, say)

10) When you spend monsters or gates, do those go to the box, or back to their piles?

11) If a clue is created during a mythos phase on a location that's occupied, does that investigator automatically get the clue or do they only get it if they chose to not move next turn (thus "ending" movement on that location)

I have one more and I can kind of read my handwriting but it's either a duplicate or I've already forgotten what obscure rule question it was.

EDIT: Bonus zenny question: if there's just two real players, would it make the game easier or harder to play with less investigators? I'm wondering if we're making it more difficult by using two characters each.

It's just a quick glance way for you to tell where the effect listed on the card is happening. It's kinda pointless, as the card text tells you anyway, but whatever.
I mean, that's seriously unlikely? But if it happens, it's probably a situation like... an activity of some sort for each of the types of environment (Is there even one for Weather? I have no idea) and then, I dunno, a Rumor or something? Either way, since those tokens are really just a reminder, it doesn't matter too much. Use a penny or a clue token or the insanely useless "explored gate" tokens.
We've always put them on the bottom of the deck, since I felt like cards like "The Stars are Right" mean there has to be some good reason for shuffling the deck... but that very well might be a house rule I'm not clear on. I'll check in a second... Edit: Checked the rules under "Discarding cards" and I am so right, but Damn, Gina, These Rules So Disorganized!
No, monsters don't move during setup.
The colored box that says "Downtown" or "Uptown" or whatnot, is a space, most certainly counts for movement, and is what they're referring to when they say the X streets. The circles with names, such as the River Docks or Witch House or Silver Twilight Lodge are called Locations in rules text, for clarification. Also, the lines connecting Locations to the street location aren't spaces, if you've been counting them as such. Moving from the Library to the Miskatonic U streets takes 1 movement point, and moving from the Miskatonic U streets to the Merchant District streets? Also 1 movement point.
If you are fighting an Elder god, then they are stirring in their slumber, trying to awaken. It's just trying to say flavorfully that that is an ongoing effect if you are fighting that particular ancient one.
That's how I've always played it. The exception to all that is when you come out of a gate from another dimension, you get a "Free turn" of not having to deal with the monsters on that space.
They build up until you hit the max number, (which is based on the number of players. Check the cheat sheet on the back of the manual) then you put them all back into the monster cup and raise the terror level by 1.
Certain cards, such as the Cross, refer to it. It doesn't do anything on its own.
The Ancient One awakens. So go turn them in for something. Although if you seriously have every gate as trophies, you've probably won already by having no gates on the board and gate trophies equal to the number of players.
Their piles. Thus there's strategy deciding to hold onto difficult things as trophies so you don't have the chance of having to deal with them again, or using them for rewards.
This I am also not sure on. We've always played it as they have to stay there to get the clue. Edit: The rules say you get to pick it up immediately, so apparently we've been making it harder on ourselves. Neat! I guess.
I have never tried to play with less than 4 investigators, so I really couldn't tell you. I know that when we play with a full 8 players, we find the game pretty darn easy, though, so I'd say less would be harder, even with the sliding scales on things.