If you play board games for any length of time, you will know about Arkham Horror.  You’ll see it’s box adorning the shelves of your local gaming shop and you will be aware of its existence.  Eventually you will hear rumours of it’s arcane game mechanics; a clunky and intricate aggressive underbelly geared towards devouring fleshy unsuspecting players.  I’ve seen reviews that discourage and recommend the game at the same time for its poor yet simultaneously amazing mechanics.  In short, Arkham Horror is difficult to explain and to define.  With most games you can say “well it’s like Risk, but with terrorists and oil” or “well it’s like Monopoly but my friends still talk to me once we’re finished” but with Arkham Horror, all I can really say is that there are counters, dice and a board.

Arkham Asylum Horror is a board game for 1-8 players set to the theme of the H.P Lovecraft mythos.  It is a co-operative game, and as a group you win by preventing an elder god from awakening from its slumber by sealing enough inter-dimensional portals or by defeating said elder god once it awakens.  The game puts you in the shoes of a selection of investigators and sets you out on the streets of Arkham to search for clues and fight of mind-destroying monsters and abominations.

Having heard how aggressive and scary and cruel the game can be, I was actually surprised by how user friendly it appeared to be.  Setup was incredibly easy because someone else did it.  The game also got increasingly easier as more wine was consumed throughout the evening.  I suspect this was due to our automatic game-balancing abilities brought on by occasionally accidentally cheating (apparently you can’t just shoot a Shuggoth, but we were disinclined to apologise to it and release it back into the wild when we found out).  We are also in hindsight fairly sure that portals to other worlds are meant to stay in one place and not move around the board, although we haven’t decided whether this made the game easier or harder. 

My friend who had very kindly set up the board warned us at the beginning of the game that the thing has no pace.  You can find yourself pootling around the town for hours before snapping out of your dice-rolling trance and realizing that there was something you were supposed to be doing.  Maybe this just shows a lack of focus in our particular gaming circle, but this was spot on.  It was only with approximate three turns to go before an elder abomination was likely to show up that we decided maybe making a concerted effort against everything would be a good idea.  Despite the game being heavily based on random chance and a series of non-pre-determined events, the game did actually allow us to pull a plan together and execute it fairly well.  With minimal spanner-in-works-action we did manage to pool our resources and seal of the last portal to inside-out worlds and win the game.  What I really enjoyed about the whole thing is that it almost played out in a three act structure.  If you had filmed the game (the abstract events of the game represented on the board as opposed to the three of us grubbing around on the floor rolling dice) it would have made a half decent film.

The most important factor in any board game that uses them however is that rolling the dice feels satisfying.  Arkham Horror allows for some excellent dice rolling action that’s enough to make you bite your nails a little but not too much that you dread rolling certain numbers.  In actual fact, once our three investigators had saved the day by sealing the portals, they decided as they were sat around with full ammo clips, spell books and a police car that it might be an idea to see if they couldn’t take down the elder god anyway, so summoned him forth to do battle despite having won already.  In real world terms, this means that the three of us chose to spend a good five minutes rolling a bunch of dice to “do combat” with the eldritch abomination and getting way too excited over rolling dice.  Who knows, maybe this was the game and maybe it was that a little more wine had been consumed than was strictly sensible. 

The bottom line on this (not that I’ve really been giving this a review…more of an informed ramble) is that it’s an amazing game if you’re expecting it to be horrible.  It might actually be a great game if you have high hopes too, but I didn’t so I couldn’t comment.  Whereas I expected it to very quickly come to a grinding and perplexing halt, I was overjoyed that the cogs of the dice and cardboard machine kept turning in a very satisfying manner.  This has some beautiful elegant mechanics, some highly satisfying dice rolling action to say nothing of the high production values that accompany anything published by Fantasy Flight Games.  Like all good things in life, this probably needs to be done with the right group of people and a bottle of wine or two definitely helps but this could be optional.

If this has sat on your “to-try” list for a while, I’d definitely recommend it. 

 Additional Notes:

The biggest challenge we seem to have is calling it Arkham Horror and not Arkham Asylum.   The Batman marketing machine should be proud of itself.

The review that I mentioned at the beginning that both recommended and discouraged the game is over at Rock Paper Shotgun and the particular column is always worth a read if you are in to or interested in board games in general.