Arkham Horror – The Forgotten Age – 4 Man Team Role Call

Very similar to what I wrote before my team started our Path to Carcosa campaign, I wanted to go into a little bit of depth about the next load of investigators we will be piloting when we boldly enter The Forgotten Age campaign.

My logic when I start a new campaign is how to fill all the real roles of the team, such as who will be our main fighter and who will be our main investigator primarily. I’ve always resigned two of us to be the inbetweener, those who may need to service both roles as we progress in the campaign and help the primary should things get touch and go.

This time however, I wanted to try and move away from our standard format, to make things a bit more interesting.  After taking our original choices for our next investigators for a test run using the Carnevale of Horrors scenario, a couple of us were not too happy with our choices of investigator. So with our Mystic and Guardian options now up in the air, it was back to the drawing board and time to review these options.

So originally I opted to go with Father Mateo, a couple of reasons really, him starting with 5xp in the bank before the first scenario would give Shaun (the player) a good lead going into the campaign and some excellent options off the bat for upgrades. However Shaun’s experience didn’t give him much faith (pun intended) on the good Father’s ability to really hit hard during the campaign. After a bit of a discussion about who we had left to chose from our stock of “unused” investigators there was only 1 mystic we had to use which was Akachi Onyele.

Now, I’m not a big fan of hers to be honest, with being limited to only 2 Arcane slots until you get some XP behind you limits her “adding charges” ability use early campaign. However, once she does get some XP behind her and gets some useful tools, her combat usefulness is up there with the Guardian class. There are some excellent spells and support tools, such as the Spirit Athame or Book of Shadows are easily useable in the deck. Upgrading to higher level versions of Shrivelling and Blinding Light can also boost the fight power of the deck, these will be searchable too with Arcane Initiate in the deck. This got me thinking that if we went ahead and made this switch, we could ditch the Guardian class altogether for this campaign and use her as our big heavy hitter instead, making a very drastic change to our group dynamic.

I had originally gone for Leo Anderson to fill the role of our Guardian class; my original though was to embrace the Guardian / Rogue crossover and try to focus on using my experience to build him into more of a Rogue than a Guardian by the end of the campaign. Utilising some of the sneaky tactics of the Rogue class while maintaining a heavy Guardian Ally front to serve as shields against any real danger I may encounter.  Sadly, during our test run of the Carnevale of Horrors, I did not really click with this character during any point of the game and I also opted to not continue with this investigator.

During the last campaign I got a taste for the Rogue class while playing as Wendy Adams, I liked it, a lot. When we played the Labyrinth of Lunacy scenario, Josh used Finn Edwards (Rogue character), to great effect in the combat role, utilising Finn’s signature card to attack bad guys attacking other people while using the Rogue weapons to make sure he could defend himself also. The ability to search for illicit cards using Finn’s other signature card really opens some doors too, especially if you have the Chicago Typewriter in the deck, the combat output can be massively boosted.

So onto Finn Edwards, his deck can only play up to level 3 Rogue cards, unless they have the Illicit trait, plus up to 15 Seeker &/or Survivor level 0 cards, also he gets to do a free “Evade” action each turn, which at first isn’t so good, but with the Rogue card pool at hand, it has loads of potential. His unique deck building inspired me to switch to a more full time Rogue character instead of a part time one. Although Finn loses a fair few of the Rogue Class cards with his deck requirements, the ones he does get are sufficient to build a solid deck. So I opted to ditch Leo Anderson for Finn Edwards as my character for the upcoming campaign, plus to try filling some of the combat functions of the group.

Our last remaining two investigators were fairly straightforward to select. Josh opted to take on the role of the Seeker this campaign, with only really 3 options left in my library to fill this role it came down to who would provide the most value to the team overall.  Out of Ursula, Norman and Minh, Ursula was the one which jumped out to me value wise. Her ability to have a free investigate action once per turn when she moves is awesome, also her ability to pack relics, gives her access to some massively useful cards once she picks up some XP. On top of the already massive array of Seeker cards, she has a lot of potential in the campaign. 

The last option was left in the hands of Stuart himself. He expressed an interest in playing as Calvin Wright, as a pretty out there character with no stat line to start with, this was a risky choice, but I feel this whole campaign will be a little risky in comparison to our safer plays previously. I like the potential for Calvin, when we played the Carnevale of Horrors, Stuart was hammering bad guys with Calvin and generally doing well at investigating too, the closer Calvin comes to being defeated, the more powerful he becomes. So I have faith that Stuart will be filling in nicely for the loss of the Guardian class as the campaign goes on. 

So the role call is Calvin Wright (Stuart), Ursula Downs (Josh), Akachi Onyele (Shaun) and Finn Edwards (Me – Tom). This rag tag collection of randoms will embark on a journey into the “Forgotten Age” come January 2019. I for one am really looking forward to seeing how these guys tackle this stage of the Mythos and what crazy crap this campaign will throw at us in comparison to the Path to Carcosa campaign.

I’m Big Boss.... I’m Out..... Peace

Building Agnes Baker - An Arkham Horror: The Card Game Story

So I wanted to give Agnes a go for my groups latest campaign (Path to Carcosa) and I came at the deck from a different angle than I usually do. Rather than thinking of how the deck plays straight off the bat, I focused on how it would play once we had accumulated some experience points. With the upgraded spell cards taking up a bulk of experience I wanted to focus on getting upgrades which would decrease the change of the level 0 spells missing their mark. I’ll go into each point of the deck and then look at upgrades after.

Arcane

So, Shrivelling and Rite of Seeking are the two basic spells in the deck, obviously one for combat and one for investigating. Unless we get an abundance of experience points, these will more than likely stay at level 0, simply because there are so many cards which up your willpower value and provide other little abilities too, however these cost experience, so best to spend it on expanding your action base in my opinion.

Accessories

Only one here and that’s the Holy Rosary, I quite like Agnes’s signature asset, however with not going to spell heavy overall in the deck, it’s not going to get the use it deserves. So, the Holy Rosary will get the slot, its extra willpower bonus and sanity buff is going to fit perfectly into the build. I was tempted by the Key, however the minus 2 sanity really put me, maybe see how these play and we can always amend where needed.

Body

Leather Coat was the only real option here, Agnes has a low enough health value to make this a priority and as it’s o cost card, I don’t have to worry about resources to get this into play. If we have enough left-over resources this could possibly become a Body Armour, but will have to see. 

Ally

Peter Sylvestre was the sure choice here, not because of his level 0 version, but his level 2 version. The extra sanity buff he provides and his willpower bonus makes him the perfect addition to this deck which is trying to increase its willpower. I also threw in a couple of Arcane Initiates too, as the deck doesn’t have a huge number of spells it made sense to play cards which could go looking for them. It’s great having so many willpower buffs but if we can’t get the spell cards out, they are useless.

Other

Ok, so Forbidden Knowledge and Painkillers take these positions. As noted earlier her lower health means Painkillers was a great include, healing health is always nice, also because it can be combined with Agnes’s ability or even the ability of Peter Sylvestre to mitigate the horror you take from using them. Forbidden knowledge can be used in the exact same way to not only trigger your ability but to simply use Peter Sylvestre to negate the horror being taken to gain a resource.

Skills

So not my usual payload of skills here, I only went with Guts and Fearless. Guts is another great way of pumping your willpower stat and then drawing a card if your test is successful. Fearless at level 0 is ok, the higher-level version is better as its gives you two willpower icons, but the ability to heal horror is great. In most of my builds I go skill heavy but I felt this deck could manage without it.

Events

Some pretty standard choices here, Ward of Protection and Lucky, were my first choices. Evading encounter cards is great when you don’t necessarily have the ability to beat them and being able to add 2 to a skill check when you would lose it is nothing to snub either. So these cards were certainly staples for this deck. I threw in an Emergency Cache too so we could make sure Agnes always had some moolah to hand. I added Drawn to the Flame to give her some clue gathering power should Rite of Seeking not make it to the board within a reasonable time, I can imagine this being one of the first cards to be cut when upgrading. Delve Too Deep also got a sneaky include, I noted that we should be trying to get as much XP as possible to use between scenarios, and two copies of this in the deck could net us 2 XP a game which again, is nothing to be snubbed. As William Yorick is on the Team he can potentially add 1 XP each game too, so the potential for gaining XP is greater with all these includes. 

Ok, so that’s the build as it stands at 0 experience and there is certainly some wriggle room for upgrades of cards already in the deck and some new additions which can be added into the deck. Cards like Ward of Protection have a couple of upgrade options now, Peter Sylvestre as previously discussed, Fearless and Lucky all have upgrade options which give their own little boost to the build.

Spirit Athame provide nice little additions when upgrading, increasing your skill value by 2 when testing a spell card is a phenomenal include and again is a cheaper alternative to upgrading the spells in the deck.  Book of Shadows is also a welcome addition later on, to restock the charges on your spell cards or a Grotesque Statue if you would rather increase your chances of pulling the right token when you do utilise your spell cards.

From the Neutral card pool, I like the idea of the Key of Ys and even the Relic Hunter card, some real potential there especially considering the deck could have a few different accessory cards.

On the Survivor class front, there is nothing really jumping out at me on the upgrade front outside of Peter Sylvestre and Lucky. A Test of Wills is one card that does intrigue me when combined with Ward of Protection you get a good range of cards that allow you to evade the encounter deck. Sadly I feel a lot of the experience points will be spent on Mystic cards.

With our new campaign starting on 11^th April 2018, I cant wait to see where this deck goes as the campaign progresses. I didn’t manage to get much noted down from our Dunwich Legacy campaign, so I am hoping to get some more noted and reported this time around. 

Im Big Boss, I’m out.... peace.

Arkham Horror The Card Game - The Rogue Class

Arkham Horror the card game burst onto the card game scene following Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop parting ways as partners in the gaming world. When it was announced I knew very little about the IP other than it was loosely based on the novels of HP Lovecraft, so I decided to look a bit more into it to see what the deal was and I was rather surprised. First it was a co-operative card game, so I would be playing solo or in a group to defeat the game itself rather than the other players and I quite liked this angle. I kept abreast of all the updates being released and the sneak peaks to try and get a feel for how the game would play.

From all the classes which were revealed, I felt a certain kinship to the Rogue class, which from first glance appeared to be a class focused on avoiding trouble and picking their spots to fight or clue gather. This really attracted me as generally in card games I’m a very basic player, I like simple plans and you would think this would draw me to the Guardian class of investigator or the Seeker class, but no. I liked the almost “criminal” aspect of the Rogue cards, the artwork also caught my eye more so than the other cards too, the images were in an almost noir style which was cool. Cards like Pickpocket, Sneak Attack and Burglary have great artwork which reminds me of the styles featured in Dick Tracy.

Some of the themes on the cards did deter me slightly, cards like the Switchblade and 41 Derringer were only good if you were successful by two or more in the relevant skill check and with the ever-looming randomness of the Chaos Bag, I was not a fan of either of these cards. Despite this I do feel like both fit into the overall Rogue theme of picking your spots, so you wouldn’t bother using them until you had a clear knowledge that you would win. However, the Rogue class brings us a few little gems such as Sneak Attack, Elusive and Lone Wolf. Sneak Attack allows you to deal two damage to an exhausted enemy which is just phenomenal in a class which really likes evading enemies, which in turn exhausts them and you don’t have to worry about making a skill test to do the damage either, another bonus. Elusive allows you to evade those tricky enemies and make a swift escape to another location, great when used in a combo with Dynamite Blast….. Ha. Lone Wolf allows for some extra resource generation when you are off on your own doing your thing, great with Skids ability or Jenny’s unquenchable lust for resources.

From the level 0 cards to the Rogue upgrades, there are some nifty options currently available. One of my personal favourites is adaptable, the ability to change two level 0 cards in your deck for free between each game is awesome and really does allow you to adapt to each scenario, yes, on first play through this card may not be as effective but on replaying a campaign I think this is a must. Big bonus cards such as Hot Streak are also critical to the overall Rogue game, paying 3 resources to obtain 10 resources (netting 7) allows you to build a huge stock pile of resources, which is never a bad thing.



In my solo campaign, I have just added the Exceptional card Lucky Dice to my deck, although I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, I am really looking forward to being able to mess with the token draws from the Chaos Bag. The upgraded version of Switchblade is also a great addition to the upgraded card pool, combining the fight stat boost of the 41 Derringer with the unlimited use and fast play of the level 0 switchblade makes for a staple upgrade in my opinion. I am also quite partial to the Lock Pick, adding your evasion value to your investigation stat is great and that the resources on the card won’t always be spent is great, this fits into the theme of picking your spots to make sure you don’t lose those resources. 

I know I have missed a few bits off, however you can appreciate to discuss all the cards available to Rogues would take a bit of time. I would like to mention the characters available to Rogues. First is the Core starter, Skids ‘O’ Toole, who despite is awful willpower value has the facility to be the most action efficient character in the game, his ability to spend two resources to have an additional action once per turn is phenomenal. When combined with cards like Ace in the Hole, Leo De Luca and the Guardian class card Police Badge, you could end up with an insane number of actions in one turn. Skids can splash Guardian cards up to level 2 and with his 3 fight value he can be a contender when handling the bad guys of the encounter deck. As discussed before a critically played Elusive and Dynamite Blast can be a wondrous thing to behold…. HA. Sorry. His willpower is concerning at a 2 value, but in the right team this low stat can be mitigated. What I love most about Skids, is that he is an ex-con, out of the “joint” and looking to do some good. This really is what attracted me to the Rogue class, this character’s “story” and how the Rogue cards fit into this tale of a guy who is using his criminal background to do some good was really enticing to me. 

The second Rogue character is Jenny Barnes, the dilettante. A character released for the Dunwich Legacy campaign who I was not sold on at first due to all her stats being 3 and her ability to simply gain 1 extra resource per turn not really filling me with any ideas on how to play her or which direction to take her. I was writing a piece about her which went into a bit of detail about how very wrong I was about my original take on Jenny Barnes, however I will resign myself to this piece to go into it.  I have also picked up the Hour of the Huntress book which contained an alternative art card for her and two cards you can use to replace her standard signature cards. To summarise her ability and stat line allow her a vast array of potential builds, making her flexible in solo or group games. Her back story is quite cool too, the Hour of the Huntress novella briefly revealing a bit more of her adventurous nature and just how tough she is. Again, she fits smoothly into the rogue character build with her being very tactical, picking her spots to achieve maximum impact and I am greatly looking forward to seeing how my solo campaign with her ends.

The third and most recent character is the artist Sefina Rousseau, this character really intrigues me because she is very event heavy due to her ability to house up to 8 events under her character card which can be accessed using an action once per turn. My concern here is that she has poor investigation and combat stats, despite being able to work around these with the cards available to her from the Rogue and Mystic classes, I am not sold on this investigator yet. But saying that I was not sold on Jenny Barnes at first, but now I am her biggest fan. I do like how the Rogue class and Mystic class are put together for her character’s story, the idea that she forges paintings but this has sent her into the mystic world is rather unique. Since her Willpower and Evasion are her highest stats, her ability to use the Mystic spells should mitigate her other poor stats while maintaining those cool Rogue events which deal damage or allow you evade enemies. I am sure I will give her a run out at some point, sadly with not being to play much, it is a challenge to get through the characters, I have been playing the game since release day and I have only used Roland, Skids, Jenny, Pete and Daisy so far. Leaving so many characters to try out and play.

To summarise once more, the Rogue class offers some of the coolest characters to play as, with their back stories and play styles all being so very different. This class has some of the coolest artwork and card effects available in the Arkham Horror card game. All of which fall into a cool theme of careful planning, cunning and tactical strikes to make the most of the situation you are in.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

I’m Big Boss, I’m out…. Peace. 

Arkham Horror The Card Game: The Dunwich Legacy Part 1

So I have now started my solo flight of the Dunwich Legacy campaign from the Arkham Horror card game, opting to use Jenny Barnes as my investigator once again, however I have chosen not to carry over my previous experience from the Night of the Zealot campaign where I also opted to play as Jenny. When setting myself up for this campaign I wanted to make different choices than my team made in our 4 player run through of the Dunwich Legacy campaign and to make a start I opted to tackle The House Always Wins scenario first and the Extracurricular Activity second. I won’t go into too much detail as I have already written play through reviews for all these scenarios an I want to keep spoilers to a minimum.

The House Always Wins
I really wanted to stay away from using the reaction ability of the Act 1a card to switch a chaos token for another chaos token, then having to note that I cheated. However the chaos bag was not being very nice to me and I ended up resigning myself to using the ability to get my final clue to advance the act deck. I did take advantage of multiple victory points being available in this scenario and managed to rack up 4 experience points and managed to wake Francis Morgan out of his trance and get him out of the Clover Club alive.

Extracurricular Activity
This time I really wanted to end the scenario with a different resolution than my previous attempts at this scenario, sadly I wound up doing the same, rescuing the students from The Experiment instead of just trying to kill the swine. Sadly this scenario only netted me 2 experience points and I did not manage to rescue Warren Rice. I did not feel as in danger with this scenario as I did with The House Always Wins, The Experiment was quickly approaching but I was very confident I could get out of the scenario alive and intact.

Armitage’s Fate
Luckily I managed to get back to Henry Armitage before anyone could get to him and I was able to note that I had rescued him. As this was not an actual scenario, it didn’t give me any experience points and moving forward I opted against putting any of the extra story assets into my deck moving forward, simply because I would never have played any of them over Dr. Milan Christopher, who is my go to ally asset.

The Miskatonic Museum

This scenario did not seem as easy as my previous attempts and I only managed to score a measly 2 experience points as I opted to get out before the Hunting Horror became a major concern to me. Sadly this game also didn’t go the way  I hoped it would as I again opted to get clues to find a way in to the museum instead of breaking down the door. However I did make the correct choice to destroy the recovered Necronomicon unlike the previous campaign, where we took it and my Daisy build used it to great effect.

So from there I am a little under half way through this solo play through of the Dunwich Legacy campaign in Akrham Horror the card game. At this point I have yet to use the Experience points I obtained from the Miskatonic Museum pack but I have opted to take the Hot Streak and lockpick cards to bolster my deck for the next chapter in the campaign, The Essex County Express.

You can follow me on twitter @bigboss010 and Instagram @bigbosstp010. Thank you for reading, I’m Big Boss, I’m out.... Peace.

Arkham Horror The Card Game - The Path To Carcosa Roll Call

After a gruelling journey, my team finally managed to finish the Dunwich Legacy campaign with a big win where we all survived the wrath of the Mythos intact. However we have little time to enjoy our victory as the game continues on with the Path to Carcosa campaign. With this new campaign we have decided to not continue with our Dunwich Legacy characters and we have opted to construct 4 new decks.

I really wanted to try and get four characters who would complement each other but be able to cover all the main facets of the game, the driving forces as you would, investigating and combat. I am always set on having a Seeker and a Guardian in any team, both are specialists in their respective roles and with that team you are pretty much set for whatever the game decides to throw at you. With that said, we all wanted to see characters previously not played before make their debut in this campaign and with that in mind I am constructing Mark Harrigan (Guardian) and Rex Murphy (Seeker) as our first two members. Rex is replacing Daisy Walker, who has been our Seeker for the last two campaigns. Both these characters will bring new elements to our games as Mark has all the makings of a tank in combat and Rex Murphy will be an investigating machine once he gets a few experience points under his belt. Stuart has opted to pilot Mark and Shaun decided to go with Rex, which will make this the first time Shaun hasn’t played as a Survivor character.

So, with two slots left open the field is narrowing, Josh had a look at the remaining characters and made the choice to go with the Mystic class, with two options available, we opted to go with Agnes in this instance. Mainly because her ability allows us to throw out some sneaky damage to bad guys while giving us access to level 0 to 2 Survivor cards and the Mystic class cards were extremely useful in the Dunwich Legacy campaign, especially in the later scenarios. Although we were using Jim Culver to fill the Mystic role, which gave us certain advantages when the skull token was being pulled, I do think Agnes will also bring some fun aspects. With her signature card she has the potential to cycle through her deck to get the cards she needs. Giving our team a fair amount of drawing power potentially, between Marks ability, Rexs card pool and Agnes’s signature card, we should never be short of cards.

The last slot is where my brain starts to hurt, I recently played a Jenny Barnes deck in solo playthrough of the Night of the Zealot campaign, which I really enjoyed and was really tempted to roll it back out for this campaign, my only real issue with the deck was that it was built to pilot in a solo game or to not really be hanging around any other investigators. So it was with much sadness that I decided to leave Jenny for my solo games. As I have already used Skids ‘O’ Toole in our first campaign, I did not wish to replay him so soon and in all honesty I am starting to sour on the idea of having a Rogue character in our team. The last option in this class was Sefina Rousseau and im not too told on her, her abiltity to essentially start the game with 13 cards instead of 8 is amazing, but her pretty awful stat line has really put me off as I feel I would have to go Mystic heavy in her build to really make her a viable.  

Lola Hayes is a new investigator from the Dunwich Legacy campaign; she can play level 0 to 3 cards from all five classes, which blows the potential deck lists wide open and as much as that is awesome, that also makes it incredibly tough to settle on what goes in and what doesn’t. I drafted a couple of different deck ideas and I just couldn’t get anything I was really happy with. I am quite keen to give Lola Hayes a try, the uniqueness of the deck restrictions would make for a phenomenal play experience, but for now my search for our fourth team member continues.

We finally get to the Survivor class; in our last two campaigns we have seen Wendy Adams and ‘Ashcan’ Pete all make an appearance, which leaves us with the gravedigger William Yorick. This character sees the Survivor class team up with the Guardian class for what can only be a phenomenal combination. The cards released in the Path to Carcosa campaign fit really nicely into his theme, cards like Gravedigger Shovel and Lantern as examples of this. His stat line emphasizes the fact he can be a fighter and with access to the guardians fighting tricks, such as Vicious Blow and Guard Dog, I’m confident he can bring some fight to the Survivor class’s ability to make the most out of success and failure. His ability allows you to play assets cards from your discard pile when you defeat enemies, which really inspires me as you can easily get cards into your discard pile which you can then play and also his elder sign ability allows you to pick up a card from your discard pile, should you be lucky to pull the elder symbol of course.

At this point I have opted to go with William Yorick as my character, unless of course I can come up with a Lola Hayes deck which I can settle with, which at this stage isn’t looking too promising in all fairness. What we have opted to do prior to starting the campaign is play the Curse of the Rougarou as a standalone game, upgrading all our new starting decks with 9 experience points in order for us to get a feel for how they play and interact with each other before making the commitment to use them for the next few months. The roll call is as follows:

Tom – William Yorick (Survivor)

Shaun – Rex Murphy (Seeker)

Stuart – Mark Harrigan (Guardian)

Josh – Agnes Baker (Mystic)

I know I did not manage to do a write up of the bulk of the Dunwich Legacy campaign when playing with the guys; however I do plan on writing up a piece for our stand alone game and will be aiming to do a write up of my solo Dunwich Legacy campaign.

Thank you for taking the time to check this out, I really appreciate it, I’m Big Boss, I’m out.... peace!

Arkham Horror - 3 player Review, Chapters 3 and 4 of the Dunwich Legacy Campaign.

So, I know I said this would be a 4 man game but sadly our 4^th man again couldn’t make it, we are hoping to have a 4 man game when we continue with the campaign in a few weeks and that should hopefully bring a new element to the play experience.

We continued the Dunwich Legacy campaign with The Miskatonic University. I again took the reins of Daisy, the trusty librarian. Josh continued with the Zoey, the monster hunter, and Shaun once again played as the nomad “Aschan” Pete. Josh and Shaun both used all but one of their experience points obtained through the previous scenarios of the campaign.

The Miskatonic University

Ok, so we are on the hunt for a translation of the Necronomicon, which some hidden forces are attempting to steal from the University and it’s our job to stop them.

Act 1

So the first order of business is to gain entry to the museum, this could be done in two ways, we could either get the attention of the security guard to let us in and aid us. Or, we could break down the door ourselves. We opted to gain the attention of the security guard to advance the act. The security guard was then assigned to Shaun, for what we believed would be the best. Oh boy would we be shocked.

Act 2

Now the next step was to find the necronomicon hidden within one of the halls of the museum. Unfortunately we ended up being stalked by what would be a recurring villain for this story and sadly Shaun ended up losing the security guard and Duke in an horrific chaos bag fail. The loss of the security guard meant we had to add another token to the chaos bag for the remainder of the campaign. Luckily Josh managed to tackle the recurring villain easily while I located the necronomicon in the restricted hall of the University Museum, which advanced the act.

Act 3

Now the bag guy materialised with me in the hall, so I quickly evaded and ran to the main hall where he of course followed and ran straight back into a waiting Zoey (Josh) who again chopped him to bits with a machete. This allowed me to sneak back into the hall and discover all the clues we needed to obtain the necronomicon. Yes I will be using this word ALOT during this review.

So we finished this scenario pretty quickly, we did not want to hang around and get swamped by the encounter deck. Following the conclusion of this scenario, we had a tough choice to make, keep the necronomicon or destroy it. Now I am playing a Daisy, who already has a necronomicon, and I wanted to have another one. So we opted (by we, I mean me) to keep the book intact and add it to my deck for the foreseeable future. This also resulted in another chaos token being added to our chaos bag. Sorry guys, totally my fault.

The Essex County Express

So with the necronomicon in our possession we opted to get out of dodge and head to Dunwich Village. Sadly this train journey would not be without peril as the train came to a screeching stop and a vortex opened in the fabric of reality with aims on taking the necronomicon from me!! I was not about to let that happen.

Act 1

So we wanted to get set up and have a good tool set to aid us moving through the train towards the engine car. Sadly the encounter deck advanced the agenda deck and the train car we were in was sucked into the vortex, defeating us..... Now we opted to be crafty here and decided to reset the story.

Act 1 – Take 2

Ok, so now we actually opted to not “tool up” but instead opted to run as fast as the game would allow us towards the engine car. We did encounter some resistance from the encounter deck however we did just about manage to stay away from the advancing agenda deck which with every advancement took more of the train away, along with anything which was remaining inside it. While Josh and Shaun took to tackling the monsters and cultists which were spawned by the encounter deck, I managed to enter the engine car and begin clearing the clues required to clear the scenario.

Act 2

So now the agenda deck had managed to clear the entire train aside from the engine car and with only a threshold of 3 doom to clear the engine, we quickly went to work. 2 doom later and we managed to finish clearing the engine car of clues, thus clearing the scenario. This resolution was with merit as the necronomicon was retained and we gained a further 3 experience points each. However it was a very close call, with one card remaining in the encounter deck which would have added a further doom to the agenda, which would have resulted in our team being defeated.

This chapter was a bit of a shocker, as the timer on the agendas were considerably smaller than previous scenarios, however I am happy to say we will learn from this and won’t be making the same mistake again. We are hoping to play the next scenario on a week night so we can have a full four player turnout. With Stuart opting to play as Jim Culver, the musician, we should be in for an interesting game when our full team is on hand.

So there it is, we have survived once again with our souls intact and will now make out next move in the battle against the mythos.

I would again highly recommend this game to anyone who has any interest in card games or role playing games, or even an interest in the H.P Lovecraft stories.

I’m Big Boss.... I’m Out.... Peace.

Arkham Horror: Living Card Game Campaign 2 - Chapters 1 & 2

So we finally managed to start our new campaign, unfortunately one of my team was unable to make the first outing in this campaign, so they will be joining us for the next parts of the campaign. This outing saw me taking the reins of Daisy, as the investigator of choice to discovering clues it made sense to keep her in the line up for this campaign. Josh took the role of fighter again, this time piloting Zoey from the Dunwich Legacy expansion. Finally Shaun playing my Aschan Pete deck, which I had used in my solo outings, to provide a level of diversity of play style.

We opted to go into the Clover Club first for our campaign, where as you may recall from my previous posts I went to the University first for the Extra Curricular Activity. So the scene was set in the seedy underground club located in the heart of Dunwich.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game: 3 Player Review – The House Always Wins

Act 1 – Beginners Luck

In the same way I ignored the Pit Boss I n my solo play through, we aimed at discovering as many clues as we could and exploring as much of the club as we could. We swiftly obtained the clues we required to move forward in the scenario.

Act 2 – Skin Game

Luckily Josh had managed to obtain some weapons and managed to tackled the bad guys which were starting to be thrown out by the agenda deck. Shaun also took advantage of his faithful Duke to tackle to bad guys, while I sticking to my role discovered more clues and revealed more locations for the team to explore. I must note we really flew through this scenario and advanced through the acts pretty quickly, the Pit Boss and the random monster (name avoids me) were taken down rather swiftly.

Act 3 – All In

Once again, Professor Rice was found, the VIP Room of the Clover Club was obviously the place to be, however at the same time the new uber bad guy had materialised in the club to hunt us down. Again, we opted to gather up the entranced professor, sneak out the back door, carrying cab fare and leaving a fake phone number to complete the scenario.

The main thing we noted from this scenario was that Josh really did end up tooled up to the eyeballs but never really got to utilise everything he had equipped. Where Shaun and I did most of the lifting, discovering clues and rescuing Professor Rice to advance through the chapter. We quickly reset the board and opted to move straight into the next scenario.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game – 3 Player Review – Extracurricular Activity

Act 1a - After Hours

In a similar way to my original solo play through, we rushed to get enough clues to gain entry to the museum. One thing we did note early was that Josh wasn’t finding those weapons like he did in the previous scenario so I held little hope we would be able to tackle the big bad guy I knew would be spawning later on.

Act 2a – Rice’s Whereabouts

This was an interesting act, the objective was to take control of “Jazz” Mulligan, an asset who was shuffled into the encounter deck. For the cost of 1 clue, we could discard the top 10 cards of the encounter deck and luckily for us “Jazz” came out without us needing to spend any clues. We convinced him to join are merry band on our adventures to advance.

Act 3a – Campus Safety

So once again we came to face with “The Experiment” and as Josh had not managed to really get tooled up this time, we opted to get the hell out of there and go through the path of resolution 2 as I did with my solo play.

Not a too detailed a report I know, however this play through really flew by. We managed to obtain 7 experience points to take with us into the next scenario. Next time we will be tackling the Miskatonic University  scenario and fingers crossed it will be a four man play through moving forward, sadly Stuart will be entering with a 0 level deck but I am not worried about this as the rest of us can pull some of the slack.

I am also hoping to drop in the stand alone scenarios while we play this campaign as I managed to pick up both of them in the New Year. I am a huge fan of this game and I would highly recommend anyone to pick it up from their friendly local gaming store.

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