Let's Play Arkham Horror Already!

SPEND THAT MONEY!! One of our stock strategies is to park someone at the Curiosity Shoppe and have them hand out Elder Signs or other powerful weapons.

It means "something special happens at this location if you're here on your Arkham Encounter phase". The event is detailed on the card. Put an Activity Token to signify what's going on.

This is probably pretty rare (if even possible) but just write a "4" on a piece of paper and stick it there.

Keep in mind that some decks get shuffled every time someone draws from them. "Discard" means to the pile. "To the box" means out of the game.

We don't resolve this, because it means someone might have to fight on their very first turn. It probably doesn't make a huge difference in the long haul, though.

"Streets" are the square boxes you can't have encounters in. "Locations" are the circular ones you can. This is very specific, because flying monsters can only attack you in streets, and at least one special monster (the Hound of Thindalafuckyouuptheass) can only get you in locations.

This is a general "attack" that is in CONSTANT effect through the entire game. For example, Cthulhu gives everyone a constant minus to their Sanity and Stamina.

Right.

These never move and can never be fought. They are an indication of how close you are to moving your Terrot Track up once, and nothing more.

Certain items (Cross, Holy Water) do extra damage to undead.

If you need to open a gate or spawn a monster but you can't because those decks are empty, THE ANCIENT ONE AWAKENS IMMEDIATELY. So don't let it happen.

Monsters go back in the cup, gate trophies go back in the stack. This is how you avoid awakening the Ancient One, the consequence of your #9.

They can either take it immediately or leave it there. Since investigators CAN NOT trade clue tokens, someone with a lot of them (or someone who has no real use for them) might choose to let it sit there so another investigator can put it to better use.

We've played everything from 3 to 8 players and they all feel about the same to us. The game does a good job scaling all its variables by the number of players.

HA! Beat you to the answers, Brick. But yours are much more concise. Damn my verbosity!
I totally support this, though. Money is useless until you're buying weapons and such with it, really. (Though, I suppose if you're playing with the Dunwich board, keeping a dollar for the train might be a good plan) Have people with money get what they can for people and then pass it around so everyone can play their role effectively.

Re: activity: that makes sense, they're just markers. I never removed them when they came up, see. -.- Since you have to leave the environment or rumor cards in play ANYWAY, there wasn't an occassion of forgetting, and I kept expecting to run across a card or rule that said something like, "If you are in an area with activity, something terrible happens."

Re: money: she was too busy keeping up with gate traffic. -.- Stuff happened and I was just never able to get her back to the shop.

Re: locations/movement: hmm, maybe we're playing it wrong, then, I thought I read something in the rules or the LP that said the text boxes don't count as movement. Basically, we'd been playing it that, for example, it's three movement from South Church to Boarding House (one out, one to outside house, one to inside house), but it's really four because you stop at Southside?

It's two movement points to get from the South Church to Ma's Boarding house. One point to move from the church to the streets, and one to move from the streets to Ma's. Note that during my LP, I was under an enviroment that was hindering my movement for awhile, making it cost extra to get into stable locations (which are the locations with green diamonds) so that might have gotten you confused?

Wait.. what? What are all the little streets/lines for, then? Those aren't places? i thought those were the "streets".. we were always fighting in those and things...

Also: one reason we lost this last game was a fucking Dhole got out of one of the gates. Those things are murder. Could not beat the thing.

Heh, those are just lines telling you where you can move to from the spaces you're on. Just connectors. "Streets" are the boxes along the middle of the board. "Uptown," "Downtown," "Riverside" and the like.
La dee da, picture from my let's play...

The box that says "Miskatonic U" is a street space. It is the Miskatonic U streets. If anything refers to the streets for this area, that space is what its talking about. The lines are just nice reminders of where the streets connect to, and that you have to go to the streets before going to another location if you're in one. They aren't spaces themselves.

Well hell. That'll make getting around town a little easier.

Stiv and I played this (with a couple other people) last night. It was awesome!

We picked Shub-Niggurath, but forgot completely to keep track of the stirring effect. Whoops! We still got our asses kicked though. We didn't completely finish, but we were totally on the verge of letting it wake up, and then we would've been utterly screwed.

In fact, the game would've finished about an hour earlier (if not more) except we sealed a gate at The Witch House early on and we got a ton of Mythos cards that kept trying to open gates there, including 3 or 4 in a row (which also tried to place clues at the Cave, where we had an open gate for most of the game) at one point.

I was Sister Mary, Stiv had Bob Jenkins, and his friends picked Monterey Jack and Dexter Drake. Bob was an ass-kicking machine a lot of the time, but overall we spent a lot of turns running around somewhat aimlessly and at one point we all got sent to the asylum/hospital in roughly one turn. I got slaughtered a lot since I ran around carelessly, assuming that were I to get in any fights I wouldn't have any chance even at full Stamina. I never got any money and was basically defenseless after blowing my Holy Water, only to fail a vicious back-to-back battle early on.

At the end of the game I was in Another Dimension when I got the encounter that closes the gate and gives you a check to find out whether you're Lost In Space And Time or get transported back to Arkham. I failed the check but since I was the Nun I just reappeared in the Church. All right!

At that point though there were too many monsters out on the streets for any of us to get to the two currently open gates (aside from Drake who was in one) and I really didn't even move for the rest of the game.

Seriously though, so much fun, I can't wait to do it again. I'll need to get this myself someday soon, although I don't know if I'll be able to get anyone in my family into it, at least until my younger brother and sister are old enough.

I just wanted to let you know that I bought Arkham Horror (German version) because of this LP.

As a matter of fact, it was because of the first page, the art and the Lovecraftian theme in general.

YOU WIN!

This thread just won't die, and now that somebody else has resurrected it I feel compelled to mention that my girlfriend bought me almost all of the expansions for Christmas. I estimated that this adds something like another 500 cards, 50 markers, and something like an extra two feet (!!!) to the board.

I'm not playing with them until I actually understand the rules of the game in the first place. Good luck with that!

This game truly is the very definition of ameritrash.

I got this for Christmas! Hooray!

I haven't had a chance to play it yet! Booooo!

Well what are you waiting for.... set it up and go to town... It can be a ton of fun playing by yourself. Thinking about doing a run myself tomorrow... provided I can keep the cats off my table.

Indeed.

Every time this thread pops back up, I half expect to see someone has started a second LP in the same thread with an expansion or two.

Don't give me any ideas.... Oh better yet make the ultimate evil game where you make a mythos deck with 100 cards at 30% Base, 20% Dunwich, 20% Kingsport, 15% King in Yellow, and 15% Dark Pharoh where you make only 20% of all the total cards actually helpful mythos...

Then go to town. Do the same with the Encounter cards as well but just randomly pick them.

Could be a lot of fun.... well for the GOO.

I have all the expansions and everything is mixed together. I think I may have to go into the mythos, Otherworld and Arkham encounter decks and whittle them down a bit; as they are it seems like they could be unmanageable. There are like 25-30 card in each encounter deck, fer cryin' out loud!

Guys, I like European games, but I LOVE Ameritrash.

I'm sorry, Ameritrash? Can someone clarify what that means exactly? I take it it's the opposite of a Eurogame.

Ameritrash isn't necessarily a derogative term, it just means that a game has way too many components to try and simulate realism to some absolutely unnecessary level. These games almost always have rules that are so complicated nobody can understand them, but are often more fun than they should be.

They're not that hard to understand. They're just tricky to memorize.

I played Agricola last night and it was way too long and wished I was playing Arkham Horror the whole time. It was peeking at me from the shelf behind my opponent.

I mean Arkham Horror is longer by far, but I wouldn't have minded it!

Arkham Horror has a lot of rules, but the five-phase structure makes it pretty easy to keep in your head. We do spend a lot of time mining the rulebook to clear up specific situations we fall into, but the general flow of gameplay is simple to keep track of.

Played my first expansion game the other day, my buddy got the Kingsport box for Christmas. The kung-fu girl is my new favorite character forever, usurping Ashcan Pete (who had previously filled the role). Of course, I only discovered her awesomeness after my first three characters got devoured so next time I'll know to use her from the beginning.

This thread just made another sale. Used some Christmas moneys today to buy it.

I concur that the general flow is not a problem. The issue is that the damn rulebook is such a mess organization-wise that you can't easily find clarification on those niggling points you invariably need to check when you play. That creates an impression that the game is complicated, because it takes so long to find it (if you even do), that the game comes to a screeching halt or you end up making some kind of house ruling that might end up being wrong.

BoardGameGeek has some useful rules breakdowns that put things in a more logical order.

The biggest trouble I run into is with the Mythos cards — you do the bottom left first, then the bottom right, then read the effects from the top down. Going out of order isn't always a problem, but it matters in some cases when resolving environment changes, with monster movement and so on.

Well, isn't there some place online where the rules are organized in a more logical...

Whoops, problem solved...Or is it?

Are there more places to find rule consolidations?

Not that I'm aware of. But they should be up again soon, I think/hope. I've seen them go down like that before.

More fun with Strange Eons:



Planning to make the main cast next.

Wait: you have five turns to kill Lavos? That's fucked up right there.

There's other ways to add doom tokens to the counter, isn't there? As I recall from the LP, the doom counter usually goes up.

Not in this case. These counters are separate from the ones on the 12-spot track down there. They just serve as a timer. I dunno, maybe I should reword that? Clue tokens, maybe?

And some of these guys can kill you in four turns. I meant for him to attack the turn after the last token is gone, so I'll put up a revision.

EDIT: OK, now he kills you after the investigators' sixth attack (which is what I intended) and it's clue tokens instead of doom tokens to remove the confusion.

Bottom line with this one: Close those gates. It's your only chance to hurt him.