Arkham Horror.

Fantasy Flight Games just released the third edition of its popular Arkham Horror cooperative game this fall to positive reviews, the first new version of the game since the 2005 edition, with somewhat streamlined rules and four scenarios to play in the base game. I had no experience with the previous versions – the original is from 1987, but Fantasy Flight’s 2005 version is considered a major improvement – but played this version a few times and found it easy to get into once you get past the daunting setup. It’s a co-operative game you can also play in solo mode, and follows the typical format of Lovecraft-themed games where you can die or go insane, but that’s not the losing condition in this edition. The balance here is solid and the format allows you to throw up a lot of defenses to try to give yourselves time to solve the mystery, but if you don’t do so in time, allowing too many horror tokens to pile up, you can still lose the entire game.

Arkham Horror is a Cthulhu game, so you’re going to play investigators trying to find and eliminate Lovecraftian monsters before they kill you or drive you insane, but in this game you can just replace a dead or insane investigator with a new one, losing any extra cards or bonuses you’d accumulated. The board has a different setup for each scenario, with five neighborhood tiles, each comprising three districts, and streets connecting them. Scenario cards tell you where to generate new monsters, place clue tokens, or potentially roll for benefits as you move your investigators around the board. Each scenario has you trying to rack up enough clue tokens to trigger the next phase, eventually winning the game by completing some final task – often beating a more difficult monster spawned after you’ve hit the final clue threshold.

The clues themselves are just tokens, not actual clues; you’re not solving a puzzle or mystery here, but accumulating those tokens while you also try to add cards to boost your investigators. Each investigator has a unique profile of health and sanity points, and gets a specific number of dice for each of the game’s five types of tests, which are measured by dice rolls; you roll that number of dice, and if you get at least one 5 or 6 among all your rolls, it’s considered a success. Investigators can add cards that give them items, spells, and even allies who add more benefits and can absorb some types of damage to spare your main character.

Game turns are simple, although you’ll take so many turns that an entire game will probably run two hours or more. You get two actions, including moving your investigator, attacking an enemy, warding off horror tokens (if too many accumulate, bad shit happens), starting an Encounter in your space to draw a neighborhood card, fleeing from a monster, and so on. You’ll spend most of the game moving to new spaces to either defeat a monster or try to draw a clue, since each game phase is triggered by gathering some set number of clues that lets you flip a scenario card to see the next step, or occasionally to go clear out some horror tokens from a space before they cause negative effects specific to that scenario.

Setup takes a while, primarily because each of the base-game scenarios has a unique board, tokens, and monsters, the last of which must be separated out from the complete set and shuffled into a game-specific monster deck. Once you’re rolling (pun intended), though, the game can move along as quickly as the players want to play it; game length is then a function of the storyline and the number of things you have to achieve or collect to get to the next stage. Turns themselves don’t take that long, and combat can be resolved with a couple of dice rolls. (One of the best benefits you can get in the game, from items or allies or spells, is the ability to reroll one or more dice.) If there’s a downside to Arkham Horror beyond its length, it’s that the clues aren’t anything more than green discs – you’re not actually putting together a story or solving any sort of mystery, just collecting good things and avoiding bad things. There is narrative text throughout each scenario, both on neighborhood cards and on the scenario cards that dictate the flow and rules of that specific session, but it’s all window dressing – you don’t need to know or follow any of that story to play the game.

I haven’t played the previous editions of Arkham Horror or the related game Eldritch Horror, but from what I’ve read, this third edition of AH borrows much of the mechanics of Eldritch Horror, and has streamlined this game’s design to reduce some of the randomness – investigator characters start with specific items/spells, the ‘mythos’ tokens at the end of each player turn are a bit easier to predict and plan around – while also giving players four scenarios out of the box instead of one. Those all sound like upgrades to me, at least.