Arkham Horror is a board game of "EPIC" proportions. The game has so many things going on, the first time someone runs through it might feel the pain of their brain literally bulging with the amount of information going in.
Just look at all those CARDS! Long cards, short cards, square chits, heart shaped chits, brain shaped chits, circular chits, rectangular chits.... the list goes on. The rule book is like a text book and pretty hard to understand if this is one of your first board games to play. But if you're an experienced gamer (in the sense of board games), you will see that there are just a whole bunch of parts, the game actually is pretty simple. In a nutshell, the phases are:
1. Upkeep
2. Movement/Combat
3. Arkham Encounter
4. Other World Encounter
5. Mythos
Pretty simple right? phases 1 and 2 are simple. You do all your paperwork in the first one, and then move in the second one, and if necessary, fight (and hopefully destroy) monsters. The fun is in the third and fourth phases in my opinion. In the Encounter phases, you draw different cards according to where you are in the city of Arkham or whichever "Other World" you are in, and read the adventure that your character is going through at that moment. You might be lucky and find an inscription on the wall that you can understand if your lore is high enough, or you can find money if your luck is high enough. But other times you can run into monsters lurking in the dark, or get jumped by a bunch of goons and lose all your money. Simply its up to your lady luck to see how your character fares.
Then comes the mother of all stress inducing part of this game: The MYTHOS PHASE. This part is pretty much up to your lady luck whether you get an event that helps the characters or drastically turn the fate of the heroes by introducing MORE monsters on top of the monsters that are already rampaging through the streets.
If you survived that night's event, you can start all over and encounter different events over and over until the players seal enough gates to prevent the Ancient One from awakening or.... run out of time and the Ancient One awakens to devour the city and the players must now make a last ditch effort to destroy the ultimate monster.
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Summary:
That is basically how the game goes. You continue to draw events and play the story of your investigators and build up their inventory to prepare for a possible end of the world event. Or be lucky enough to seal up gates to the other world that the ancient one cannot awaken for another millennium or so.
The game is very random, there is a very HIGH level of luck that plays into the core game play. Some people absolutely hate that aspect of playing board games and would prefer that they know what the outcomes are and be able to solve mind blowing puzzles, or have some sort of strategy. If you're into choose your own adventure or in a video game sense, point-and-click adventure game, this is most definitely your cup of tea. The players never know how the turn of events will play out. Beware, the game play is pretty long on average. I would say be prepared to devote roughly 2-3 hours into this game (assuming that at least one player is very knowledgeable about the game).
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Judgment!
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Recommendations:
- Get this game if you LOVE choose your own adventure type of games
- Be prepared to spend 2-3 hours
- Don't get this if it's your first game
- Don't get this if you don't like a lot of random elements in your game
- When playing, make sure at least ONE person knows how to play or the first time run-through of this game will most likely be a horrible experience.
Hope you guys enjoyed this review, if you have any suggestions on which game to review or how I could improve my reviews, please let me know in the comments below or by sending me a private message. Thank you for reading, see you on the next review
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