Arkham Horror the Card Game Gameplay Runthrough

hey everybody before we get started I just want to let you know I'm probably gonna make a few goofs in this run-through and if you want to know what they are be sure to set your subtitles on to the Klingon Channel that's right the Klingon channel where all of my mistakes will be dutifully recorded qapla and now today righto runs through Arkham Horror the card game which is a hugely successful very very popular new cooperative adventure card game set in the Cthulhu Mythos and I'm gonna be doing a two-player run throughout today so you can see what it's all about now I've already got the game set up here and now before I go any farther I'm sure Lafayette was saying hey this is a very strongly story-driven game I don't want to have the this adventure story spoiled by doing this run-through don't worry I got you covered the base game comes with a single adventure campaign called the night of the zealot which takes place over three completely I mean you could finish it in three sessions but chances are you'll lose and I mean a game is a lot of replay you could you could play the night of the zealot over and over and over again and use different characters use different deck building options and stuff like that but I'm not going to show you any of the adventures in that I'm instead going to show you an adventure I downloaded online called the collector because this is such a popular game people have started making their own standalone adventures and in fact as you can see this looks really quite high-quality on the fact that I printed it out you know so it's not a real proper or card but it looks really great and so I read online it found a lot of people thought this collector one was a very very good one so that's what I'll be spoiling for you today the free print and play adventure called the collector so don't worry no actual spoilers from the real game in this run-through so what's the situation well whenever you set the game up each adventure comes with its own little setup card and this one told me to gather together the following card sets and shuffle them together to make the encounter deck so I've already done that every time you play in a given adventure the encounters you'll come across are kind of thematically tied with what's going on and so there's one two three four five six different sets of cards this is the ghoulish card this is the locked door card deck and stuff like that so there are the designer of this adventure chose these specific things so that there would be a automatically consistent adventure with what's going on let's see also as far as setup I'm supposed to set aside a Victoria Devereaux Peter Warren and a single copy of amnesia I've got them right there at the ready because they're presumably there will be events that make them come into play and place all six locations into play the investigators begin the lobby so we've got the museum lobby the hall of prehistory antiquity the hall of the exotic the storeroom and the curators office and here we are starting a museum lobby as it says and so now the rest of this is just a reminder of special events that can happen in this adventure in the collector various things might happen every time you play a game you're gonna have a different version of this card that means different unique events can happen so there's so much variety in this game anyway here's the actual storyline we start out there's two decks the agenda deck and the act deck the agenda deck is what the bad guys are trying to accomplish their progress is marked on this deck and chances are if they make it all the way through all three of these cards before we win chances are we'll lose although I haven't looked ahead I don't know exactly what's going to happen in this agenda deck the axe deck is our deck where we are trying to make progress and get through these two cards a bomb and finish and win before the bad guys get through there in this game three cards right and also you'll notice the two decks next to each other make a little book that tells a story that evolves over the course of the adventure so na'toth museum what is our story here well something dear to my family has been taken from me mrs. Devereaux's penetrating eyes held your own held yours I know it's not your usual line of work her eyebrow arches but surely it's not stealing if it was stolen in the first place recover this item from the McClellan private Institute for esoteric history and you shall be rewarded most handsomely and then we got our little card here cat burglary the lobby of the McClellan Institute is cold and smells ancient and musty the collection here is notorious in certain circles but the security seems oddly lacks Victoria Devereaux has hired you to recover an item she claims has been stolen from her an easy job or an obvious trap only one way to find out so there we go here's the story now in this game I am going to be rolling banks the federal agent jen is gonna be Daisy Walker the librarian the game actually comes with five different characters there's also a plucky street urchin and the local waitress who turns out to be a reincarnated witch and unless the other one oh the oh the the criminal the you know the mafioso who's gotten in too deep into the dark arts and so a steel pit and this came like I said I'm gonna be the federal agent which means you know this must be a sting operation of course I'm on the straight and narrow I wouldn't be engaging in a cat burglary unless there was something else going on and Daisy Walker the librarian will no doubt she was hired for this because she's a librarian she probably knows a lot of information about the thing so you know I mean obviously you can come up with a storyline wahi these two characters are here working on this cat burglary for this mysterious woman but it's up to you to accomplish the more important thing is before the game starts you have to build your deck and um so there is a big debt construction element to this game the game comes with a whole bunch of cards and you can mix and match although this is interesting thing about Arkham Horror the card game first of all if you buy only one copy of Arkham Horror horror it's a 1 or 2 player game you can play it solo or cooperative linear player if you want to play it with three or four players you have to buy two copies of the game the other reason you might want to buy two copies of the base game is because with only one copy well you can only have a two-player game which is fine but you're very very limited in your deck building options for instance um if you only have one copy of Arkham Horror the base card game Roland and Daisy can never work together because as you can see the deck building everybody's deck size has to be 30 cards I've already done that and the Roland takes his cards from The Guardian set and the seeker set Daisy takes her cards from the seeker set and the mystic set so both of these two characters need to use cards from the seeker set and if you only have one copy of the game in there for one set of seeker cards that's not enough for both of them to make a full deck so if you just buy the original game these two would never be able to work together because you can only IML she could work with the the mafioso because the mafioso I think has survivor cards and street-smart cards or something like that so they can mix and match so right off the bat that's one reason to buy two copies of the base game so you have more flexibility about how you can mix and match characters but there's another reason to have two you have a lot more flexibility with the deck building if I only have one copy of the game I'm pretty much gonna have to put in all the seeker and Guardian cards into Roland's deck to get the base game which means there's gonna be one copy of every type of card but if I want to customize his deck so that it focuses on you know a particular type of fighting or a particular type of investigation or a particular card um if I had two copies of the game I would have multiple instances of the card so I could really focus and do a lot more targeted deck building and um so those are the reasons you might want to buy two copies of the game RAF the bat it gives you a lot more flexibility it gives the game a lot more replayability because you're gonna have more mixes and matches of characters you can have more interesting deck construction and you can play it as a three or four player game so I just want to get that out of the way really quick anyway so I've already gone ahead and put their decks together um yo Roland has a combination of Guardian and seeker cards um he can have neutral cards he's got a few and there's a few tech building requirements he's God is 38 special cuz he's a federal agent and he has a weakness card called cover-up there is a cover-up going on in the bureau that Roland is trying to deal with somewhere in this deck the cover-up might impede his offer his ability to investigate this adventure also he has one random weakness that was put in here if I recall correctly I think it was paranoia so he's paranoid he's having to deal with a government cover-up and otherwise he's got his deck that will hopefully help him out also every player starts with five resources which is a general purpose thing it represents knowledge it presents contacts it represents items it represents a bunch of stuff that you can call on to help you out while you're investigating stuff Daisy I've already made her deck um you know as a librarian she unfortunately stumbled across the Necronomicon and read it that was a mistake so the Necronomicon and now she can't get rid of it it's in here it's a weakness for her and then she has one other basic weakness which I recall correctly was a weird cultists who follows her around and might you know Haunter no doubt because she opened the Necronomicon and has forbidden knowledge at the ready she's really obsessed with the arcane lore that she's discovered in her researching so no doubt that's why she's come along anyway her deck has been built Oh also she has some special stuff she has Daisy's tote bag oh and the Necronomicon which is a weakness and one other biggest weakness and she's got her starting and each player is also supposed to start with a hand of five cards so Roland has in his hand he's got conduced some deduction you can overpower an enemy he's hyper aware mind over matter and evidence okay so that's his starting hand Daisy starting hand unexpected courage blinding light which is a mystical spell she learned from a book oh the Twilight silver acolyte this is her basic weakness this acolyte keeps following her around but it's beginning the game she doesn't have weaknesses in her aunt's we'll put that aside some deduction as well because you know because again both characters wouldn't be able to have deduction because I wouldn't be able to max it mix-and-match these two because they both be having cards from the seeker deck but since I have two copies of the game I was able to put them together magnifying glass and the Holy Rosary okay so that's her starting hand and now this acolyte has to get shuffled back into the deck someplace because you could still show up at any second I put the camera down for a second shuffle Daisy's deck back up and now her two weaknesses and my two weaknesses are waiting for us somewhere inside our decks but we are ready to go ready to enter the mcclellan Institute and try to recover the stolen item for miss Deveraux okay setups done let's get going here we are in the museum lobby whenever you come into an area but you'll notice all these areas are locked right now which means they're facedown let's say and this says the museum at night is eerily quiet time to get to work as soon as anybody interests of space you flip it to the face upside and okay well often in the main game a lot of these rooms have special effects you can go to the room and interact with it to do certain things this museum Lobby doesn't have any special ability it's just the museum is still eerily quiet time to get to work but by coming in here we have discovered that in the museum lobby there are two times the number of players that's what that little symbol means clues to be found so two-player game there are four clues that we could investigate and find here in the lobby and there the Shroud level of the lobbyist - that means this is a pretty easy room to find clues in now in a nutshell no matter what the adventure that's what the investigators are always trying to do oops I just put I didn't put Clues here I just put a a leak on resources let's put the clues down there are four clues here in the lobby okay so what we were always trying to do is search through the environment and find clues because to complete act one of this cat burglary between the two of us we need three times - so six clues if between the two of us we have six clues we can go on ahead and flip this card and reveal the next part of our adventure during this cat burglary but over time as we're running around investigating searching for clues - to complete our side during the mythos phase Oh what are they called mythos tokens doom tokens we'll be building up on the other as soon as three Doom tokens appear on this card this step 2 of the agenda will get revealed so there is a timer every round more and more doom is building up and we need to find our clues before the our doom is upon us so that's the basic structure of every game okay no matter what the adventure is no matter what kind of special rules there might be those are the basics right so we are set up we're in the starting room there's some clues here it's eerily quiet the other thing this card tells us is how this room connects to others you'll notice down here at the bottom a blue triangle brown cross and green diamond blue triangle is the Hall of history a brown cross is the Hall of antiquity green diamond is the hall of the exotic this is saying that from the museum Lobby we can go to any of these rooms and if you notice here in the hall of the exotic it says hey I can go to orange square which means I can go to the museum to the holidays otic and back also from the hall the exotic I can go to brown squiggle which lets me comes up here to the storage room so this is actually kind of a maze of rooms that we can travel from one to the other looking for clues fighting bad guys and trying to get to the bottom of the mystery alright so and I noticed some people they actually like use little sticks or toothpicks or something like that so that you can add a glance see how all the rooms line up I don't have any of those I suppose I should put those out baby Mike so we're in the lobby and from the lobby we can move to the any of the three halls from the hall the exotic we can go to the storeroom for their storeroom we can go to the curators office and otherwise that's it we need to start exploring and find this mysterious stolen item for Madame Devereaux so I am Roland banks alright before we started we declared I'm gonna be the lead investigator that means I'm always first every round and sometimes there are events that will affect the lead investigator that is me so here's a little summary everybody gets a copy of the round sequence first thing that happens every round is the Mythos face we're bad doom builds up but skip it in the first round so we're gonna skip placing a doom token advancing agenda and drawing encounter cards we'll do that as starting with the second round now we move on to the investigation phase each investigator takes a turn performing three actions and all the actions we can do are here on the other side we can draw more cards or resources we can play events or asset cards from our hand we can activate arrow abilities that are in on a card in the location are on our own played cards we can move to the connecting locations we can investigate where we are and try and find these clues we can fight or engage in enemies who are where we are or we can attempt to evade enemies and then on top of that we can do lightning bolts or these type of abilities but they don't cost an action to those types and if you are if there's an enemy here and we were engaged with them we would have to we would either have to fight them or aid or parlay or resign if we have access to that otherwise if we try to do anything else when an enemy is attacking us other than fighter evade then they will get to do a free attack on us as we get away from them or investigate or whatever it might be see what that's a list of stuff we can do and um right Here I am I've got three actions we're here to try to investigate as fast as possible so I could just spend all three actions investigating although here's your same thing MA even though I'm a federal investigator a detective my investigate ability is three dayz is much smarter than me no doubt because of all her years spent researching all this stuff she has an investigative v she is much more likely to be able to investigate to me so really I'm wondering if I should just leave this room to her and I could go starting exploring and she can stay behind and investigate this room much more better because she's almost twice as good as me so I think that might make sense so of my three actions my first action is I'll go on ahead and I will travel from the museum lobby to the Hall of antiquity which means this gets flipped let's see here lurid inscriptions on papyrus and colossal painted vases weave images of a time when the edges of the world were yet to be described well that sounds Pleasant and okay alright well I'm starting to think maybe there's no special effects we can do in any of these rooms because it's the same description but there are two clues to be found in here and the hall of antiquity is harder here the base is two over here it's three so alright that's not great um heck I was going to explore I should export here where it's easier to find stuff so let's just keep exploring I'll move again now from here I can come back to the Red Room or I can go to the Hall of the exotic let's go to the hall the exotic and let's see more recent but no less McCobb exhibitions brought back from the uncanny islands of the South Seas alright so here I am and there are four clues in here so I mean we're fine there's a lot of clues in this adventure and they're easier to find they only require a two so now I've got one more action um you know what I haven't been doing I spent two extras moving around finding stuff I've got a whole bunch of cards in my hand maybe I should get some of the into play so that they'll help me in the future like for instance I could put into play this asset of hyper-awareness now this is gonna record me - of my starting five resources but it means in the future I can spend one resource and get +1 whenever I'm doing an investigation so if I'm hyper aware I'm better often investigating or anytime I want I can spend a resource and get +1 for dexterity tests because again I'm hyper aware so I think very third action I'm gonna put this into play it cost me two of my starting resources and I am now hyper aware so I'll have an easier time exploring it here in the future if I'm willing to burn through my remaining resources ok so that was my start I explore it a little bit I'm now hyper aware I'm ready next round to start doing some exploration alright it is now Daisy's turn and you'll I did the exploring just to find if there's anything interesting didn't really find anything interesting but Daisy was the one who's going to start investigating cuz she's really good by the way if we need if you need to after you're done with a turn you can flip this over so the black and white side to remind everybody that your turn is over alright Daisy is up she is going to investigate the heck out of this Lobby in heck in fact she'll probably just do all three actions investigate investigate investigate because we need to start working on finding these clues now remember her investigation skill is 5 so she will the fir first action she's gonna investigate now she has to hit a - she's already well on her way she's probably gonna succeed but every time you do a test whether it's an evasion test to get away from a bad guy or an investigation or a knowledge test or a lower test any number you know there's four different types of tests you can do any time you have to do one you have to draw from the I forget what this is called it's uh it's interesting the game doesn't come with a cloth bag they say just provide your own cloth bag or a cup I'm using the old chicken cup of doom here as part of setup this deck will see this this cup was seeded with a bunch of specific positive or negative chips this effectively is a customizable die it's I think sixteen chips are in here so you can imagine it's a sixteen sided die and as part of set up you're supposed to put the see I set the game up to have standard difficulty I want a challenge that means in the cup there's a plus one which is great it helps me in my test a zero zero three negative one's a negative to a negative three or two negative two negative three negative four two sculls a cultist a good event a bad event and the other event up here that's called and these events tie to what they say right here so whenever you do a test you've got a draw from the cup and here's the thing Daisy most likely she's gonna draw a negative 1 or 0 I mean heck half the deck is zeros and negative ones and then some negative twos even if she draws a negative two she has a 5-2 still beats this it's only if she draws that negative four or one of the really bad events so let's see what she's doing on her first attempt she is going to investigate she's got a base value of 500 dear and she draws the skull so what's the skull we got to look over here minus X X is the number of clue tokens at the current location there are four clue tokens so this is a minus 4 5 minus 4 is 1 she just failed oh my gosh well that was her first auction she could try again I mean heck maybe I should look at her stuff she's got a magnifying glass if she and this is an asset I think her 4 second action since that was such a terrible fail she's gonna spend one resource to get her magnifying glass out um Missy although I'm sorry this is a fast action it does not take one of her actions she just did this for free um right so this is a an item it's a tool and this increases her investigation ability by one so she actually has a six now cuz she's got that magnifying glass alrighty so she clearly she should have put this out first if I paid attention to what was in her hand I would have particular cuz I didn't even take an action to do it but here's the thing even if she would have had a six - ooh if she had she would have had a base of 6 - that 4 would have been a 2 and she would have succeeded so let's just say I wasn't a complete idiot I looked at her hand of cards the first thing because it was fast add in taking action she got out her magnifying glass then she did the investigation and thanks to the magnifying she actually succeeded and she found a clue so that was her first action let's have her or second of three actions use the magnifying glass and let's investigate some more okay and we get ooh we get the guaranteed success so this is just always a guaranteed success plus I mean oh and this is awesome there's like a 1 in 16 chance of getting this whenever you draw this you get a special bonus which is unique for every character so she's gonna succeed she found her second clue and honesty a special effect for her is plus 0 didn't add anything to her test but if you succeed draw one card for each tone you control now unfortunately right now she controls a tool she has no a lot of a lot of her deck is a bunch of ancient tomes of wisdom if she had had a tome in her hand which she doesn't she's got a spell and a charm and you know a special skill and another two skills if she had any tomes out in play she would have gotten to draw a card for free to make her hand bigger because she got the really big of active soap all right say love you but it doesn't mean heck she got so her last thing all she's doing this turn is investigating with her magnifying glass she's gonna try again and she gets a minus 2 6 minus 2 is still 4 not a problem for Daisy she has almost completely cleared out this Lobby once she's done with that there is no reason for us to spend any more time in there so congratulations Daisy you were at a much more successful round than me huh you're actually getting stuff done while I'm off exploring all right so that we two or three actions now we do the enemy face if there were any enemies on the board they would activate hunters would actually move around and try and chase us if they were engaged with us they would attack us and now finally at the end of the round we do upkeep if we had any cards I well first of all we're ready to go again and if we had any cards that said you have to exhaust it you know tap it they would get untapped so they can be used but neither of our cards are one-time uses so you can use them as much as we want each of us carrier draws one card so we each get another card into our hand I get to draw some unexpected courage which will be good because we're about to go into the myth face and Jen or Daisy draws hey it's a tome if she gets us into play she had this in play she would have gotten a free card for cuz she drew really well so anyway so the old book of lore this is a thing where she can exhaust this so she can only use it once per round takes an action to do it and then you choose an investigator at your location that investigator searches the top three cards of their deck for an a card draws it and shuffles the remaining card back in the deck so if you're if you you know so Jen if she gets this into play she can use this if she's with me to let me draw three and keep one card so I'm not at the the whim of luck of the draw so but she has to spend three of her remaining four resources to get this into play speaking of resources the end of every round we always draw one card and we get one more resource our resources refill slowly over time and each investigator checks their hand size if we had more than eight cards we'd have to discard but neither of us have that many cards in our hand so that was it we have done one round but now the new round begins and hey doom starts to appear in two more rounds this is gonna fire and we'll find out what agenda step two has in store for us all right so we added one doom token we would advance the agenda if we hit the threshold but we haven't and in each investigator draws one card from the top of the encounter deck now we had we oh you always start you get one free be round where everything is easy-peasy but now we're gonna start having encounters oh I'm the lead investigator I draw first and I've got a crypt chill this is a hazard revelation means I do this as soon as this card gets drawn first of all I have to test my my willpower and I need to get a four if I fail I have to choose and discard one asset I'll have to discard my hyper-awareness and if I can't do that I take two damage so there's a cutting chill that has gone through the air darn it and I need to screw my courage to the sticking point my willpower is three and I need to hit a four so I've got to do a test I've got a draw and I need to get that plus one and there's only a single +1 in here oh dear oh dear that is not good let's see now remember I do have hyper-awareness anytime I want I can spend a resource to increase my investigation or my agility but this will not help me with my willpower so oh my gosh well there's unless I just get crazy lucky and draw this plus one oh I am gonna here we go show me the plus one nope that's a negative four I was not prepared for this I'm off by myself I'm scared uh he gets very cold and boom so this happened yeah it gets discarded and I just had to discard my hyper-awareness before I even got to use it gosh darn it alright so that was my encounter Jen or Daisy has an encounter she hears dissonant voices also a revelation this happens immediately put this into play in her threat area so this is gonna stay in her area um you know the same way she's got her magnifying glass this is available to her this is gonna stay and continue to haunt her um as long as dissonance she's hearing voices in her head as long as this happens she cannot play assets or events so she can't that tome she just got that she wants to one two place she can't do it because she's hearing voices in her head at the end of the round discard this so this is only gonna stick around for one round so this round Daisy Jen cannot get any cards into play because she's hearing voices strictly speaking that was not too bad yeah I lost my thing but what I was really worried about is that we might have revealed bad guys who would start hunting us down although honestly I kind of want that to happen because role in banks his special effect is whenever you defeat an enemy immediately discover one clue at your location so he's better at beating bad guys to get clues so I kind of want a bad guy but anyway it just means bad guys are gonna be coming there's a lot of bad guys in this deck and then we're gonna have combat um so it just gives us more time to prepare for that and if you'd like to watch a little bit more you can hit that I in the top-right corner screen go the extended playthrough I'll keep playing some bad guys will come out will have some combat will either will advance our agenda or the bad guy will advance it there are their agenda and you'll get see some more if you wanna go the extend playthrough orange so you can go straight to final thoughts your choice in five four three two one

Channel: Rahdo

Views: 60,271

Rating: 4.8297873 out of 5

Keywords: rahdo, radho, boardgames, board game, baord games, review, board games, baordgame, baord game, baordgames, game, boardgame, rhado

Id: 4-9mYqDGT9g

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/bleuchz]

This game honestly feels like Matt Newman and Nate French went out for a cup of coffee and Matt said to Nate

"Hey you know that Bleuchz guy? The one who likes Eldritch Horror but stopped buying the expansions for it to be more fiscally responsible?"

"Yeah what about him?"

"How can we make him spend more money on useless cardboard again?"

"I know. We'll just put everything he likes in a game and drip feed it to him every month for 20 bucks a pack"

"Brilliant"

[u/Geekken]

FFG likely had not expected this to be the hit it's become. Totally understand that it's exceedingly difficult to get the production-distribution chain going, but man the lack of availability is killing this game.

You can't really just pick up any old expansion and play it. Yes, it can be done, but the current packs are meant to be played as an overall campaign and in order. So you can't guarantee getting expansions and the demand is so high compared to the supply, you are getting some high pricetags (I'm seeing x2 MSRP). Sketchy availability + expansions needing to be a complete set + high prices over MSRP = folks giving this game a pass.

I really think folks will be getting frustrated in the next few months if stock isn't upped a fair clip. So much so that people will dump the game and move onto something else.

[u/golfer76]

Brilliant game. Don't get sucked into the trap.

[u/[deleted]]

If it wasn't for L5R coming to eat my wallet this summer I'd be pretty tempted to dip into this a bit. We still play Netrunner and LotR, so there's only so many LCG's I can dabble in simultaneously. Hopefully I'll run into it at the local cafe or store and can at least try it at some point.

[u/nznova]

This game is rapidly shooting up my list of favourite games. I just got into it and the LOTR LCG at pretty much the same time and man, they are both so good.

[u/whats-this]

I don't know, maybe it was just me, but I found this game a little too complicated the first time we played. However I only had a short time to read the rules and tried to teach it on the fly, that might have been a mistake.

[u/wookiewin]

This has pretty quickly become my favorite game (edging out Pandemic). I absolutely love the design, character classes and deck building. I'm happy to see Rahdo enjoyed it, even if he does not plan on keeping the game.

The custom scenario he was playing looks interesting to me, I will have to check it out.

[u/nstrieter]

Still have to play this and Rahdo definitely makes it more tempting. Hopefully this weekend we can pull it out.

[u/millertime8306]

I hate the chaos bag!