Weekend gaming: Arkham Horror + expansions

This past weekend, we met for our monthly game of Arkham Horror. My friend has done an amazing job of tricking out his game.

He replaced all the small cardboard tidbits such as hearts, brains and track tokens with color-coded glass beads. Each set of the glass beads also sit in awesome small decorative bowls that match the horror/occult theme of the game.

For this particular game, we included the Innsmouth Horror expansion board, and the Miskatonic University institution from the Miskatonic Horror expansion.

So back to our last game, man … we got tore up. The game was brutal, lasting 4 ½ hours, and we ended up getting devoured by Hastur. This concept of losing is new to us. Since we started playing monthly in July, we’ve won each game, though the first game’s win comes with an asterisk because we didn’t set up the final battle correctly.

Nonetheless, we’ve gotten pretty good at maximizing our investigators’ strengths while adapting the game to make it more challenging to us Arkham Horror veterans.

Two house rules we use are: no strategizing with fellow investigators unless you’re in the same neighborhood (no cell phones existed in the 1920s), and when reading encounter cards, their effects aren’t read out loud. The investigator needs to decide if he or she wants to continue with the skill check, and then learn of the consequence after the fact (we didn’t want an encounter’s effects to influence whether or not the investigator moves forward).

And then the big things that really hurt us this go around were:

• Hastur requiring 8 clue tokens to seal a gate.

• God-awful monsters getting in the way. For example, monsters that would devour you upon a failed evade check, or monsters that affect surrounding areas upon failed checks. These baddies trapped a few investigators in their current location and were unable to move for a couple rounds. Thus, enough unopened gates = the Ancient One awakens!

• Two separate mythos cards forced extra monster surges, one occurring while the environment mythos in play pushed the Terror Track up an extra space for monster surges. Being high on the Terror Track proved disastrous later in this game as Hastur’s attack  strength equaled where we sat on the Terror Track. We had hit 10. Ouch.

This time around Finn Edwards was my investigator. He’s a bootlegger, and his special abilities are that he gets to move as a normal moon monster, and he never has to discard an item or lose money, even when he is knocked unconscious or driven insane.

I got around the board pretty well with his special ability and spend a good chunk of my time on the Innsmouth board. There, I got stuck — going back and forth between Devil Reef and Y’Ha-Nthlei aquatic locations. An investigator cannot leave this area until another investigator summons him or her at Falcon Point. And nobody came …

I was able to seal two gates during my time up there and grab a few clues in the process, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. The Ancient One awakened, Hastur’s attack modifier was a 10, and one by one, we were painfully devoured.

Strangely enough, this gaming group, which is 6 of us, was pretty pleased in the end. We enjoyed going to battle with Hastur, failing miserably and feeling satisfied with this set of expansions. It was a great Saturday night — dinner with gaming friends and an Arkham Horror devouring.

What did you guys do this past weekend?