The cooperative living card game Arkham Horror: The Card Game, by Nate French and Matthew Newman, is published by Fantasy Flight Games. In this macabre universe of the writer H.P. Lovecraft, players are far more likely to lose, go insane, or get temporarily or permanently transformed (in a bad way) than they are to defeat the creatures of the Insane Mythos for which Lovecraft is famous. The game is set in and around Arkham, a fictional 1920s town (bustling with secret societies, laudanum, jazz, and all sorts of other horror business) in Massachusetts.
The first time I lifted open the box, I was hooked on satisfying narratives and themes. This board game, with its many outgrowths, has the structure of an intricate and chaos-weaving story. Twilight sessions of gaming really do feel like they have the equivalent of the heft of a well-told tale—spanning, as they do, over many “chapters” of gameplay; and with each turn of the card, marked by a momentary hush and intake of breath as we wait to see how the game’s storytellers (and its algorithm) will grow the drama next.
The Arkham Horror Card Game stands out for one very good reason—its deck-building, which is an act of personalizing investigator decks, a form of curation. You build a deck for each investigator, using a card-mix of varying power levels, a card-mix of abilities, and a card-mix of those key strategic moments—from which you’re about to be flung into events for which you have no foresight. Then, you build your story from there, and what a story it is. Building a deck in The Arkham Horror Card Game is a narrative act that throws the game into the story of the characters and the choices they make—a lot like what happens in the first The Arkham Files game, Mansions of Madness.
Another high point of the game is its cooperative aspect. The game demands that the players join forces. It’s not a rule, of course. You can play the game solo if you choose, but there are some parts of the mansion that you just can’t investigate adequately without a buddy. Besides, if you want to play a character who goes off on his or her own all the time, you’re bound to run into game balance problems. The teamwork and feelings of camaraderie are real as long as the players buy into them.
In my opinion, Arkham Horror: The Card Game shines as both an intricate piece of a storytelling device and a fun, cooperative card game. Unlike most for-the-table card games, which one usually plays with a group of friends, Arkham Horror is a game, a card game of that lot, where you can lose yourself in excellently crafted scenarios that place you and one or more friends in the world of H.P. Lovecraft. You can take up the mantle of being an eldritch gumshoe in a deeply satisfying gameplay loop—if you don’t mind, mind you, that that loop is also spun from a wheel of otherworldly resources that judge the success or failure of your character’s actions.
To start, each player selects a character to play. You can choose one of five unique investigators that come with the core set. Each is Syrinx Hyctal (you heard that right!), with their own mix of talents and foibles that you can read about on the character card. And this is hard-bitten detective stuff. You’ve got the eponymous Arkham Files that sleeves the cards. In ‘To Be Continued…’ scenarios, even your failures can become legends of the sort that the files are filled with. This is what the off-the-cuffI ‘To Be Continued…’ scenarios, even your failures can become legends of the sort that the files are filled with. This is what the off-the-cuff content of Arkham ought to be, really. And I mean that in the best way possible!
After that, the stage is set with a sequence of acts and agendas that make up the core of the game’s narrative. The time in the game moves forward by these; resolving them takes the players one step closer to act 1 of William Shakespeare’s famous play, Macbeth. The act cards tell players what has to be done (usually with objectives sot), and the agenda cards advance the story just a little bit more, usually upping the ante in some way. The acts and agendas are laid out next to each other in a line, with the act console right in front of the first runner and the agenda cards a bit off to the right.
Setting up the game involves creating a kind of rudimentary map. The setup guide creates a “map,” of sorts, with clearly labeled location cards. Once you have placed all of the cards in the designated positions, you are ready to play. You are also making a map of undiscovered terrain. Naturally, mapmaking carries with it an inherent sense of risk. “What is this territory that we’re not supposed to go into but are going to anyway?” it seems to ask. “What is in this obviously haunted, under-terrorized space that we may be extremely unlucky to come across?”
Once the locations are determined, mix the encounter deck well. This deck is full of the various nasty (and occasionally not-so-nasty) things that get in the investigators’ way.
Each scenario in Arkham Horror: The Card Game uses its very own encounter set (or the combination of a couple of sets). That deck forms the set of cards from which you’ll draw your obstacles. These prescriptive scenarios generate a limited and yet wildly variable set of circumstances, which makes every playthrough take on a different mix of excitement and super-tension. You never know what’ll come up, but you know you won’t like it.
The game starts when each player draws their opening hand from their investigator deck. This hand is what you and your fellow players will use to begin telling the story of your intrepid investigators. Some cards in your hand are like objects you literally keep in your investigator’s pocket; others are one-time events, the kind you might say “I remember when…” about. And the third type of card in the investigator deck is a card that represents pure skill. Like real life, more often than not, what you have in your hand is a mix of all three, leading you to take very different actions as you stand at a crossroads with an initial choice that will determine the start of an act.
In the end, hand out the initial resources. These are the health and sanity tokens, also the clue and resource tokens, which must again be tracked throughout the play. A manual is meant to be read, and I can assure you that the not-so-brief brief we received was enough to get us totally submerged in both the story and the strategy endemic to the play’s foundation. The winds were whipping. The windows were rattling, and we were off.
Gameplay is best defined as an expression of a game’s rules. It essentially comes down to what the player does, or what the player can make his avatar or units do in a video game. In other words, gameplay is what you do in a game, in the context of how the game is designed. For example, when you play a first-person shooter, there’s a certain kind of interaction that’s expected and that’s defined by the game’s genre. Up to now, the gameplay of a good game was to be ingenious, varied, and capable of surprising the player.
Where Arkham Horror: The Card Game really comes into its own and sparkles is in offering copious narrative, strategic decisions, and the appearance of teamwork. A round is broken into several distinct phases. Moving from phase to phase feels more like an act of pushing the game story forward than a drudgery of awaiting one’s turn.
The game opens in the Mythos phase, where the agenda of the ‘bad guys’ moves forward, and a doom token is placed on the card that is the current agenda. This phase represents the appearance and escalation of the threat that the investigators are trying to deal with. It is also the phase where each of the players at the table (if you aren’t playing true solo) reveals the top card of the encounter deck, leading to the appearance of new enemies or other threats, or even the drawing of treachery cards that can push the momentum of the game toward disaster. These are the things that get at the hearts of the cards that we draw during the Mythos phase. They can feel very tense indeed.
Then comes the phase of the game that we like to call “Being an Investigator.” In it, you and your friends take turns making up to three actions. You can do a variety of awesome things, like travel to new places to discover what is really going on there, search for the hidden signs and secret symbols that the villain has left behind, or find that pow! that you need to whack a monster in a really cool way or in a way that just might save your life. And you can play cards that are held in your hand and have abilities attached to them. But monsters are lurking. And they attack you. And you have to either engage the monsters or try to go past them somehow.
The phase where foes have become locked in combat with our intrepid investigators is what we call the enemy phase. They are close enough now that the clothes reek of their fetid breath. One cannot reason with a foe in combat; the bestiality of their actions is horrific enough to shatter the nerves. Foes, in their phase, attack, eviscerate, maim, and further deal the damage that may spell the end of our friends. And sometimes standing one’s ground and taking the punishment can conversely confer upon our heroes that essential quality needed to achieve their aim: survival.
When the adversaries finish their phase, the game shifts to what I like to think of as the upkeep phase—the text might as well call it that. Investigators reset everything (in a way, you could almost see this as the next turn’s “setup” phase, if you wanted to divide the game of Arkham Horror into something resembling the classic phases of a traditional board game). You draw a card for your hand, you gain a resource, and, now, if you’re playing against the god known as “Cthulhu,” you also keep your fingers crossed that you don’t put something into play that the Big C eventually uses to drive you insane.
The gameplay is exceptional in the way it handles skill tests. When an investigator takes an action that requires a skill, the player draws a token out of the “Chaos Bag.” Some of the tokens will have symbols on them, and some will have numbers. The symbol tokens usually mean something awful is going to happen to your investigator—the more “Elder Sign” symbols you draw, for instance, the worse your fate. The newst campaign introduces new symbols that your investigator would much rather never see.
As the game goes on, investigators try to push forward the act deck by achieving objectives. At the same time, the agenda deck is driving toward a conclusion, bringing with it additional problems of a Lovecraftian Leeds sort. And if there is one thing at which this game is ridiculously good, it is the almost obscene amount of awful narrative waiting to be generated between these two key drivers of play.
In sum, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a nearly unparalleled mix of strategy, collaboration, and narrative. “Each phase is almost a separate game in itself,” Daviau says. And each of those separate games ensures that players get a steady stream of content, making this living card game one that’s hard to pin down as a typical, solitary “gamer” experience. It is an evolution for both the Arkham Horror franchise and the LCG format, and it may be the closest thing tabletop gaming has to an MMORPG … but that’s a topic for another article.
