Arkham Horror: The Card Game – 4 Player Review – The Midnight Masks

Ok, so I mentioned in my last post that I would continue with the campaign with my friend Stuart, however my friends Josh and Shaun expressed an interest in jumping in to give the game a try. So Josh took the helm of my Roland deck and my mate Shaun opted to use Wendy. There was the temptation to go back and replay the 1^st scenario with them so they could get a feel for the game play, but we opted to just add them in as per the rules with a basic deck each.

So we set the scenario up as instructed in the campaign guide and made all needed changes to the board such as discarding the house as due to the result of the 1^st scenario, my house was sadly burned to the ground. I had played through the second scenario on my own before we sat down to play as a team, so I could at least be in an informed position. To recap, at this stage I am playing as Skids and Stuart is playing as Daisy.

Act 1 – Uncovering the Conspiracy

Straight away we are at the disadvantage here as we require 8 clues between us to get the top card of the cultist deck revealed, you may think this would be an easy feat with 4 of us being able to move around and investigate, however you would be mistaken for almost as soon as the encounter deck started to hinder our investigations, lock us down with enemies and generally make our lives difficult, our entire game plan fell to pieces. We soon found the first Agenda “Predator or Prey?” activating as the DOOM threshold was met and the second Agenda “Time is Running Short” activated. We found the DOOM tokens quickly piled up and we were unable to fulfil the objective on the Act card in time before the Agenda deck reached its goal.

Josh at one stage was trying to fight 3 bad guys on his own; I was attempting to kill off the cultists who were driving the DOOM counters, while Shaun and Stuart were trying to obtain as many clues as they could. The game gave a sense of separation here and a continued sense of impending doom, with so many obstacles being thrown at us.

The midnight hour arrived and we had finished the second scenario. Sadly 5 of the 6 cultists got away meaning our position moving into the next scenario is already looking bleak. I sadly drew Skids weakness, Hospital Debts, which I was unable to get rid of and this cost me two experience points at the end of the scenario, meaning I gained no experience from this run through. The others all gained two experience points to take into the next scenario “The Devourer Below”. The experience points came from the one defeated cultist and one location where all the clues had been discovered.

Points to note:

The 2 player run through certainly upped the difficulty of the game due to the encounter deck throwing out more cards per player, this really showed in the 4 player run through and we felt like there was no way we could complete the objective set out by the Act card.

I do feel there could be a balance here, with the optimum number of players being 2, this allows both players to pick up the slack of the other while fewer cards are being played from the encounter deck pushing the agenda forward.

With the second scenario being considerably shorter act wise than the first scenario, this report is considerably smaller than my previous reports and I must apologise for that.

We won’t be playing the third scenario in the campaign until after Christmas now, due to work commitments and time commitments over the holiday period. But as soon as we have managed to play the third scenario I will be able to post a full review of the scenario and the campaign on the whole. I will also get the views of the other chaps playing with me and see how they feel about the experience of Arkham Horror: The Card Game.

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Thank you for reading, I’m Big Boss.... I’m out..... Peace.