Arkham Horror: The Card Game (Solitaire) Review - with Zee Garcia

it's time for another diced our review with si hey hey everybody Zhi Garcia here today I'm taking a look at our horror or the card game this one is a living card game said of course in the Lovecraft mythos and in it you and possibly another player it's one or two players out of the box are going to be cooperating investigating some strange happenings in the city of Arkham the game is of course a car driven game but it's also a story driven game and the story is a big part of what's going on here let me give you a quick overview of how the game operates I'm going to be focusing on the solitaire version of the game and then we'll come on back and I'll tell you what I thought of it so here's everything that comes in the game except for a few more tokens and some books here you have a learn to play guide you have a rules reference as well as a campaign guide and so yes the game is campaign driven you have one campaign in the box and you are going to be going through three scenarios basically three parts to complete this campaign and depending on how well you do on each of those it dictates how you start the next leg what you start with etc okay and as I said all of this and I push the tokens aside for now and we will not be needing all of these cards for our demo here the game is largely story driven and you are trying to investigate and do the best you can to find out what's going on in Arkham there's been some mysterious happenings and goings-on in town and you are trying to decipher what is happening so to sell the game you have your character you have some resources on your character there this is your own deck and you draw a hand of cards you place a location as indicated in the guide you begin in your study this card here indicates where you are so I place it there next to my study the study has some clue tokens on it and up here we have the cards that tell you the story and further the game as well they tell you in much nicer writing that you are sitting in your study you are investigating what is happening and suddenly you hear scraping coming from underneath your feet underneath the house and you get up to investigate and suddenly the door to your study vanishes from view and you're off so that's what these tell you and these as they become filled with tokens will be flipped over you read the back and then the next card is revealed and will tell you what is happening okay this deck up here by the way is the baddies deck some bad stuff that's going to happen to you and some cards that have been set aside so how does the game operate each game is broken down into rounds and each round has four phases the first phase is the mythos phase and I'll come back to this one because you skip it during the first round second is investigation during the investigation phase each player is going to take three actions and those actions are as follows you can draw a card you can give yourself a resource you can activate an ability on a card you can move from one location to another location if they are connected and the symbol on the card would tell you if they are connected you can investigate your location which means you are going to try to pass a test to gather one of these Clues you are going to fight or engage in enemy if there are enemies where you are or at another location or you can attempt to evade an enemy and run away you don't want to fight that I mean there's also other abilities you can activate that would not cost you one of those three action points okay so that's basically what you are doing and so this turn for example I could I could play a card um which I think I forgot to mention actually in the overview is very important you definitely can play a card as one of your actions so for example let's I'm going to play this guard dog I play the guard dog it tells me up here with my cost is so I pay three of these resources that is one action for my second action I am going to draw a car let's say and for my third action I am going to investigate so here's how investigate works you have some tokens that I have put in this bag here the bag does not come with the game it just tells you put them in a cop for something opaque but you have a handful of tokens here and those are all in some container you are going to in order to investigate I'm going to use my lure my knowledge which is a value of three on this character I can then add any of those tokens from any abilities I have or I can even discard cards from my hand four symbols down the side here which I can add on to that so for example I could discard this card which happens to have one of those symbols to add one so my total right now is three and that one is for the the Shroud symbol here lets me know how difficult it is to find something at this location and so my total is four I'm trying to match a two and so I would go in here and I would draw a token and I see what I get this is a special symbol that I would check this card for ah let's say I draw instead a number let's see if it's a number it is it's a zero so great my 4 is not modified I beat it I would get one of these sometimes however you are going to get all sorts of bad stuff like a let's see we have a minus one here we have another fun symbol here which is not going to be good there's a minus three right there and there is of course this wonderful token which means you lose it's an automatic fail no matter what your value is haha so that is what you are doing and a lot of the tests in the game are going to go that way Fighting's going to go that way any sort of challenge you have to overcome is to we gonna go that way just the value that you're using your speed or your intelligence or how strong you are that was going to be different and the cards you can use to-- it's that of course so I did that and that was my three actions next phase is the enemy phase in which every enemy that has that is engaged with you is going to attack you and some of them are going to look for you so obviously right now that would not apply and then lastly you just have the upkeep phase where you reset your card after you take your actions you would flip it to mark that you are done obviously in a one-player game that doesn't really matter so I just never flip it over I just leave it alone you would ready all your exhaustive cards and then you would draw a card and one more resource and you would then check your hand size that's it and then we loop back around to the mythos face the first phase we skipped during this one you are going to add one doom token to the card up here you would check if the number is matched so once this has three doom tokens boom it triggers we read it flip it over read it and we go to the next card okay and then finally we take a card from here and we see what we have to deal with in this case it is uh I found some rotting remains ooh and it is a test that's forcing me to pass a text and for each point I fail I would take one horror one horror would be one point of damage to the mental damage of my character and so it's basically I would again test these by using my value any card I want to add to that and the tokens from the bag here if once I'm that's done I set it aside and I take my actions again we go to the enemy phase again of keep and that keeps happening as we work our way through these cards with these doom tokens and through these cards with typically these clue tokens okay that's how it works you want to go through these before you go through a bunch of these is the basic idea here continue doing that trying to discover everything reading your story as it's happening once we move out of here then we are going to set out some new locations so sometimes you'll have a bunch of locations like this and as you discover them for the first time they are going to be flipped over and they tell you what happened the shroud how many clue tokens are there etc the story will be further along some new characters are going to come into play all of that stuff is happening but that's pretty much the overall idea investigate chip away at the tokens trying to you know put the whole thing together and come out on top that I think should give you a pretty good idea of how the game operates so let's go back up top and I'll give you some final thoughts about Arkham Horror the card game the game that this most reminds me of of course is the lore the Rings the living card game which was also cooperative and could also be played by a single player this one however I think is a superior game to that I like this theme more for one thing but besides that I think the game's mechanisms are a little bit tighter they've been cleaned up and I think the story driven elements do go a long way towards making this a more engaging product that's more fun I think to to solo this game you are going to enjoy the story you are going to get into what's happening now a lot of that is going to go away after the first time you play and you can keep on playing that scenario that comes in the box but of course you'll have a lot fewer surprises later on once you see this stuff for the first time you can still enjoy it and I do still enjoy it but of course that that original you know flip of the card surprise is going to be gone I guess my main complaint about the product here is that it needs expansions almost immediately and that's sort of par for the course with these living card games but it's it's very apparent in this one you can do some deck building and if you get into that you are going to extend the life of the prod right away for sure but if you go with the recommended deck you play through that scenario you can finish that in one evening if you want want to and the game takes about you know one game of which there are let's say three okay we'll take you 45 minutes to an hour to maybe a little more if you you know if you happen to take your time or where the story draws out but that's a good life I like the length there but you can go through all the content or really most of it in one evening you can then pull again with a different character you can play with different cards I'm just saying the expansions uh you're gonna need them you know if you get into the game or even if if you just want to play it a few more times you're gonna need some content now it's that content that's coming so it's fine but that's my one thing I wanted to mention that would be a ding on the game other than that I think it's really solid it's well done good story radar work well implemented mechanisms and again fairly streamlined for this style of game I did not have too much of a problem understanding anything really and if I had a question about something I was typically able to go and look that up you know in the end the rulebook the the the thorough one so thumbs up for that I dig it I think it's a good product and if you are someone who enjoys solitaire games you like co-op games you like story-driven games and you like Arkham any any of those really I think you're going to be said I enjoy this a lot it reminds me a little bit of besides the Lord of the Rings game it reminded me a little bit of London Dredd a recent game which also has this feeling of being story driven but those elements are fairly minor in this one it feels more integral to the experience so thumbs up from me Arkham Horror the card game check this one out thanks so much for watching the diced our videos find more great videos and reviews as well as our top rated audio podcast at dice tower calm you can also find other great shows at diced our network comm I'm Eric summary and you've been watching the dice tower the dice tower is sponsored by cool stuff Inc or you can find great games for great prices cool stuff in stock check them out at cool stuff Inc com

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 170,003

Rating: 4.8931012 out of 5

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: zunyer

Id: 2RIQw3jvF_0

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Mik0ri]

Thank Nyarlathotep for Zee's solitaire reviews. So few popular reviewers bother.

[u/jonboyjon1990]

I'm not sure where all of these complaints about replayability are coming from.

You've got 5 classes of investigators, 5 unique investigators with their own deckbuilding options, 10 two-player combinations, random weaknesses, the agency of deckbuilding for each investigator, 3 scenarios (which are semi-random themselves), 4 difficulty settings, 4 different player counts.

And then you've got the new campaigns coming down the pipe and a new pack and investigators coming every month.

And yes, it's a core set, so it's bound to be a bit limited. But if you want a Lovecraft game with low replayability then look no further than MoM 2.0 - and that's a $100 game.

[u/ah-grih-cuh-la]

I was wondering when Dice Tower was going to review this one. Outside a few reviewers, this hasn't seen much coverage (based on the content I view). It looks good but I'm not sure if I'd like this more than the LotR LCG.

[u/Coffeedemon]

Good review. My concern is exactly what he mentions though... not only the normal LCG need for expansions but what seems like an almost immediate need for them. I mean, 8 hours (arbitrary figure) of play for 50 dollars isn't terrible but does anyone know if they're going to incorporate anything in later expansion to make it really worthwhile to go back to early ones? Assuming you beat them with each character. Would an expansion 3 character bring much of a new experience to a core campaign I wonder?

[u/aapetyo]

So if you don't like "outside the game" deck builders but just want a story based card game do you think this will this satisfy those type of players?