Arkham Horror The Card Game Tutorial

welcome investigators to the Arkham Horror the card game tutorial Arkham Horror is a cooperative game for one to four players where players will take on the role of investigators and go through scenario based campaigns you can play this game in one of two ways you can play it as a campaign where investigators start at level zero and accumulate experience over the course of scenarios in a specific order or you can play it as standalone scenarios you simply pick one set up a deck for that scenario and begin play I'm going to show you how to play the game using campaign rules and with two players so the first thing you're going to want to do is select an investigator the core box here comes with five but as the game grows and gets more expansions and packs there will be more investigators so more options to choose from I'll pick these two right here you can also want to nominate one to be the lead investigator it's more of a symbolic role the lead investigator would only be needed when specific cards say so or to break ties and to make decisions when there are multiple options available so when you pick an investigator you're going to want to look at the back of their car and you're going to construct their deck now here in the back it says what class cards are available to this investigator there are five classes of cards Guardians seekers robes mystics and survivors and there's also a common pile everyone else can draw from and construct our deck width now when you're starting a campaign you are limited to level 0 cards what does that mean a card is level 0 if it has no pips in the upper left corner here if a card has a pip it is a level card based on the number of pips it has so this card is level 1 this is level 2 etc etc so in constructing a brand new deck you can only bring in level zero cards so it says what classes I can pick from secret cards level zero through five mystic cards level zero to two and news record level zero through five once I've gathered 30 of those cards it also says that I need to add specific cards that will not go towards the deck size so the standard 30 cards that I just grabbed all together here and then adding these three new cards would make my deck of thirty three so let me talk a little bit about madness cards it wouldn't be Arkham Horror unless everything was against you even your own deck your deck at the very beginning will start off with at least two madness cards one unique to your character and one your draw at random from the common pile whenever you draw these cards during your gameplay you must immediately resolve them whether it is on your turn or during enemy turn or whatever these cards are usually bad and can really change the turn of events that you have planned in the head and it's even possible during your campaign to get more madness cards into your deck it only goes to show you that you can't trust everything even yourself once both players have created or decks they're ready to start but before we do that we're going to need to determine the difficulty of the game we're going to play to do that we're going to need to grab all the chaos tokens these tokens will determine the difficulty of the game in the book there are guidelines for which tokens to grab if you want to do it easy standard hard or insane difficulty game I'll be setting this up for standard difficulty by simply grabbing the specific number that I need I'll put them into a bag or whatever equivalent you would like to use so that you can't see what they are because these tokens are double-sided and that's how you set your difficulty so let's take a look at the scenarios if we're doing a campaign each campaign will come with its own booklet here talking about the lower and all the story reasons while you're here but also giving you all the setup rules as you can see here talks about setting the difficulty based on the tokens and on the next page you'll find all the information you need for setting up the actual scenario now this here has a lot of spoilers in it in terms of story so I won't be reading any of that to you you can experience the story for yourself with the first time when you get a copy of your own game so each scenario comes with a specific set of cards here we have the gathering this icon with the torch will show that any cards matching this symbol will belong to the gathering scenario so set this off to the side we're going to need it during the set up the next thing we're going to need to do is to make the encounter deck this will be the deck of monsters and obstacles that we'll be facing during the game the encounter deck is made up of sets of different encounter cards each with their own theme and challenges in the campaign guide it will tell you which sets to grab from matching these symbols once you gather up all the cards the rest of the encounter sets will not be needed and can be put back into the box in the setup for the gathering it says to put the study into play whenever you put a location into play it'll begin on it's locked side here at the top you see that this location is locked and it doesn't have a lot of information other than flavor text this setup specifically says to also set aside two cards that they call out in particular so we'll simply set these off to the side it then says the shuffle the remainder of the encounter cards which I will simply do here and then we're able to set up the rest of the cards here now I didn't say to put any of the location in the play so I'll put those aside as well there are two sets of cards that are very important in a scenario which is the act and the agenda deck the act deck is what the investigators will need to accomplish in order to gain a more favorable result in the scenario the agenda deck is the monsters plans to foil the investigators and to make things hard when playing the game both of these decks are going to advance but it's up to the investigators to make sure they advance the agenda deck as fast as they can the number numerically starting with one make sure that's at the top and the rest follows the crunchy under it you'll place that in a central position near the top of the board with the agenda deck next to it set the encounters off to the side and then lastly you have this reference card this reference card is double-sided and will allow you to select an easy or hard mode for this scenario we're going to set it to easy slash standard and just put it there now this scenario says each investigator begins play at the study you will take the mini cards representing your investigators and place them at the location specified whenever you begin play or whenever you move into a new location you will then flip it to reveal the information on it so here we have the location this number here is what we need to pay attention to when the location is revealed this shows how many clues will be spawned per investigator to shows how many clues and that symbol means per investigator so since we have two players here we'll be needing to grab four clue tokens in total two per investigator the clue tokens are double-sided on the other side is the doom tokens which the enemies will be using to advance their deck each investigator will repair their decks by shuffling them up and drawing five cards and they will also gather five resources which are represented by these box tokens these are the tokens that will allow the players to call upon their cards and to actually use them once both players have drawn their hands and gather their resources you're ready to play the scenario there's a double-sided reference card here that will show you the brown sequence and the actions of investigator can perform on their turn so at the very beginning of a round you'll perform the mythos phase however if this is the very first round of the scenario you'll skip the metal phase taking you to the investigators phase when it's the investigators phase you will choose as a team who wants to go first that's why I said it didn't really matter who was the lead investigator because you'll end up picking who wants to go first anyways there is no specific turn order so you're going to have to work together to determine who's best to go when it's your turn as an investigator you will perform three actions that are on this card and I'll explain each of them in order first you may draw a card so if explanatory simply take a card from the top of your deck and draw it put it into your hand secondly you may gain a resource simply take a resource from the pool and add it to your personal supply you may play a card from your hand now there are three types of cards in this game you have event cards you will simply pay their cost use the card and then discard it assets cards you will pay the cost at the top from your resource pool and when you play an asset this will be sort of equipped to your character now there are limitations on how many cards you can have equipped usually one for every slot and two Cingular hands but in this example here talents you can have an unlimited supply of they don't take up any sort of a slot and lastly the kind of card you have here is a skill card these can't be played these can only use in conjunction with a skill check which I'll be describing later so that's how you play a card the next thing you can do is to activate a card action card actions can be found on cards these arrows represent actions that the player can take so they will simply declare which action they would like to perform spend their action point to then perform that specific action the next thing you can do is move to a different location now right now we can't do that because there are no locations that we can move to but let's fast forward here and let me show you how that works so for example here will later find ourselves in the hallway and there will be other locations for us to explore now this hallway is connected to these rooms as indicated by these colored dots it's connected to the blue triangle the brown cross and the green rhombus so as a move action we can go from one location to any of the connected locations on the bottom of the card so I can choose which location I want to go to and when you go to a new location for the first time you will flip it and then add clue tokens based on the number of investigators now again I won't spoil any of this for you so you can experience it for yourself the next thing you can do is investigate a location and this is where we're going to be talking about skill checks so to investigate you perform a skill check and if you succeed you'll be able to take one of the Klu tokens at your location and place it onto your card so how do you perform a skill check specifically the investigation skill check we based off of a player's Noir there are four stats here on the top of your card will power lower strength and agility daisies lower here is five and a difficulty of this check we based off the shroud value of your location which is the left number here on the location card so the difficulty of this location is two we're trying to beat two and right now we currently do that with five but that check will be augmented with our little bag here of Kaos tokens which could reduce our scale in that check so the way we counterbalance that for example here my lower here is five and I want to boost it so I'm going to discard this card as part of my skill check and it has one lower icon on it so that would make my skill now six now you the one that's going to perform the skill can spend as many cards as you would like to try and boost your skill value but your teammates can also help you out they can also discard a card in the same manner that you do to boost your check however in order to do this they must be at your location and they can only discard one card each after everyone is finished discarding their cards for the skill check you will then take your bag or whatever equivalent you have jumbled up all the chaos tokens and pick one at random so here I got a minus three so my five we've been subtracted by three you will succeed at a check if you are equal to or greater than the difficulty of the check so my five getting reduced by 3 becomes 2 which is equal to 2 so I succeed I will simply take the token put it on my card congrats if you fail you simply will not take the clue token and use effectively wasted your turn and any cards you attempted to boost your value with so that's how you perform a skill check now in this bag talked about chaos tokens you got all sorts of different chaos values here from negative numbers to zero to a few special symbols here there are three special symbols here that are on the reference card whenever you draw those symbols simply refer to this to show what those values are actually equal to but these two symbols are not on that reference card if you draw the blue outer sign this actually refers to an ability on your player character you refer to your character and look at the elder sign effect and perform it like that but if you happen to draw this red tentacle your check automatically fails because this means you've bailed but there are some cars that make reference to if you failed by X amount then act as if you got a zero anytime you draw a token you'll simply put it back in the bag so that this bag is always filled during the game you'll be drawing from this deck and encountering monsters and challenges now monsters can be engaged with you engage with the teammate at the location you're at or at a different location but you can fight with a monster in any of those locations so is engagement do with teammate with location you simply can't fight a monster at a different location however how do you fight monsters monsters here have a few values on their card the top left is the combat value when you fight a monster you're trying to beat this value if you succeed you deal one damage the middle number here is their health top right value here is the evade value if you can beat that value you can evade a monster but I'll explain that later so what are some specific rules in regards to fighting monsters so if a monster is engaged with my teammate here and I want to fight it that's great I will simply do the check and if I succeed I do damage but if I fail at attacking a monster engage with the teammate I will not damage the monster instead I will damage my own teammate so to prevent that you can engage with a monster you spend an action take a monster from anywhere at your location or engage with the teammate at your location and instead put it in your what's called a threat area and now you are engaged with the monster and can attack it freely by spending an action so those are the rules for fighting and engaging now there is one more thing I need to explain if you are engaged with an enemy here and you perform any action other than to fight it to evade it or to activate specific parlez or resign abilities that might show themselves on the card or on other cards in the game that monster will perform an attack of opportunity you've effectively tried to ignore the monster but it's going to take a cheap shot at you for trying to ignore it to do that it will simply get a free attack on you monsters here we'll have health and horror values showing how much damage it does and you will simply take that much for free so you don't want to ignore the enemies these attack of opportunities happen before you even perform the action you're trying to ignore them with so let's say for example whatever the situation was this player felt that if we could just get that last investigation token we're going to win the game so I don't care that I'm engaged with this monster I want to investigate well first the monster would attack you and after if you survive then you can perform your investigation action so it's very important to keep into consideration dealing with monsters in your threat area again this attack of opportunity only happens if the monster is in your threat area if you've already evaded it and it's in the location nobody's engage with it then you can do whatever you want but if it's engaged with you but if you try to move to a different location it's going to still follow you because it's in your threat area now I mentioned you can also evade an enemy you simply perform a skill check trying to beat the monster agility value and if you succeed you've successfully evaded the enemy you would then exhaust the enemy by turning it onto its side and placing it at location out of your threat area this can be very good because exhausted monsters will not act during the monster phase so you've effectively stunned them for a single turn so there are a few other actions you can perform that aren't really considered actions there are free and reactionary actions you can perform a free action is something signified with this lightning bolt these don't cost an action to perform and you can simply do what it tells you you need to do and perform it's quote-unquote action and then there are reactionary actions the reactionary action has this roundabout arrow these actions are performed in reaction to something in a reaction to specific requirements and once they are fulfilled you may perform the action so here says after you've ate an enemy exhaust discard so that you can then draw a card another thing you can do during your turn which doesn't require an action is to take clue tokens and to place them onto the act deck this can be done on any investigators turn as a group you will collectively spend your clue tokens and place them on to place them onto the act card once the act card has a number of vestigation tokens equal to it says here it needs to per investigators so that means we need all four once it's acquirements have been fulfilled you're simply discard all the tokens and then flip over the card and resolve any of its effects once you finish resolving its effects you will discard it and look at the next act card this is effectively how you win the game that's the investigators phase once every investigator has had their turn to perform the three actions it moves on to the enemies phase the first thing that happens is that enemies with the hunter keyword will move toward the nearest investigator so let's go back to our example here with multiple locations and let's say we've already run away from the swarm of rats last turn and so now we have a swimmer rat here that is ready it's not exhausted it is ready and it has the hunter ability so during the enemy phase it'll move towards the nearest investigator because it's at the Attic its location is connected to is the hallway and it will go whoop in order just run right in there and now we'll talk about how to do enemies acts when they need to engage an investigator so if an enemy at any point is ready and at a location with an investigator it will immediately try to engage an investigator and during the enemy phase each engaged enemy will attack by again looking at the card seeing what damage it does and adding that on to the investigator now investigators can acquire cards that have health and horror values on them for example here I could have this ally played on my side of the field and they have a health and sanity value so when I take that damage instead of putting it onto myself I could put it onto my ally it's like to be mitigating some damage off me if I really needed it but if one of your allies or whatever cards that have these tokens on them if they ever of course reach their maximum threshold then they will be discarded and are effectively destroyed once each enemy has moved if they're a hunter engaged and attacked then we'll go to the upkeep phase during the investigative phase after each player has finished their turn it will flip over the cards or show that they're done so by the end of the turn every the gate will be this greyed out portrait during the upkeep phase we will refresh any cards that were exhausted and reef lip over our mini tokens - until that we're ready for a deer round this also counts towards enemies so if Daisy here had evaded the swarm of rats and it was exhausted that means they couldn't do anything during the enemy phase because it was exhausted it's effectively stunned but during this upkeep phase it would ready up and what did I say whenever a monster is ready at a location with investigators it will immediately engage one investigator so the investigators will have to pick who does it engage if enemies have the prey keyword it'll tell you when you have this conflict who it will specifically go after but again if there's also multiple options that have that requirement then you as a team would pick who does it effect after all cards have been unexhausted each player will then draw a card and take a resource token from the pool and put it into their stash and then each investigator will check how many cards do they have in their hand if they have more than eight cards they will discard down to eight and that's a round and we'd go right back to the beginning but this time because it would be the second round we would perform the mythos phase so at the beginning of the mythos phase we'll take a doom token and place it onto the agenda and then we'll check how many doom tokens exist on the board at all there are some card effects that might place doom tokens on other cards in the game and then if during this step when you're checking for doom tokens it is equal to or greater than the number here on the agenda deck you will discard all doomed tokens and then flip this card performing any specific details that are on the back of that card and then once an agenda has fulfilled you'll maybe put it aside to reveal the agenda below it after doing all that with the agenda Dec then each player starting with the lead investigator will draw a card from the encounter deck so skids here will take the first card and perform whatever needs to be performed on the card there are two types of encounters you have treacheries and enemies treachery is a sort of challenges that the investigators will have to defeat and enemies are enemies monsters that'll stick around and be a real pain after drawing the card do whatever it says that you to do place it in front of you perform any checks if necessary or to keep it in your play area whatever it says but once the treachery or enemy has been defeated you will then discard it into its encounter discard pile and then the next investigator would then draw their card perform any actions etc etc after all players have done this then it's back to the investigators phase something else to point out it's possible to draw enemy cards that say spawn so normally when you draw the encounter you would place it in front of you because you're dealing with it this is it would fit the monster it'd be placing your threat area but if it says spawn on it you instead not placing with that area and place it in the location to tell you to spawn it and then if there is an investigator at the location it would engage them instead and that's how you play arkham horror the card game the goal of the game is to reach some sort of resolution usually towards the bottom of the ACT deck there be an R with a number next to it which will tell you which resolution to read from the campaign book now it's also possible to resign in order to do that there will usually be a card somewhere on the board that says as an action resign quit just leave and be effectively removed from the game if at anytime you are defeated you will discard all your cards discard all your tokens and place them at your location but let me tell you resigning is better than being killed or driven insane if you take a number of wounds equal to your health you of course be killed and also suffer the same effects as resigning except now you'll gain even more penalties towards future games which I'll explain in a bit same thing happens if you take a number of sanity tokens equal to your threshold etc etc so why is quitting better than being killed if you were killed or driven insane you will suffer a penalty and that penalty is you will suffer a physical or mental trauma it's not so bad as it kind of makes it sound but what it means is you will suffer a sort of permanent health damage or sanity damage in each subsequent scenario in the campaign so after resolving all of this and let's say Daisy here was killed in the previous game but skids managed to just resign and escape he didn't suffer trauma but I did and that means at the start of every game I'll begin with one less wound because I have a physical trauma or a mental trauma we dealt a single point of mental damage at the very beginning of the game that's pretty bad especially if you start racking up so many traumas that by the start of the game you are immediately defeated that means your investigator is effectively killed they may no longer participate in the campaign if something so bad were to happen to you and yet you still had a certain number of missions left in the campaign you'd have to remake a new character to continue through the campaign but such is the nature of arkham horror games once the scenario is finished once you've reached a resolution by finding it on a card that tell you to look at a specific resolution or if every player has been defeated or resigned you will look at the campaign log here again I'm not going to spoil it for you but it effectively has an entry for each of the resolutions the first one usually being if no resolution was reached because every player resigned or was defeated it'll tell you to read off something lower wise and then will tell you what to do in the campaign log by marking players house etc or whatever and experience points players can earn bonus experience points throughout the game any number of ways they can defeat specific monsters that have victory in the description if this monster was defeated you would put it into what's known as a victory display you know kind of off to the side so that once the game is over you'll grab all the cards that had that victory display and count them up and you would gain all those victory points as experience points which is great you can also find them on locations again I don't want to spoil it too much for you but that's especially what it would look like if you managed to investigate a location completely so that there are no more clue tokens on it at the end of the game you can claim that location as a victory card and also be able to gain its victory points as experience so how do you spend experience points you can spend them by purchasing card upgrades again will refer back to your card here and show what limitations you have so Daisy can get level 0 through 5 secret cards and level 0 through 2 mystic cards so we'll look at the curves and show which card you can purchase so Daisy could purchase these but you couldn't purchase these we'll look at all over options from your collection and you can spend experience points to purchase them one experience points per level so if I wanted to buy this magnifying glass it's level one card it cost one experience point so buy it great now your deck must maintain the number of cards set here by the deck size the cards that don't go towards the deck limit don't count it may never be removed from your deck so if I were to purchase this magnifying glass I'd have to find a card in here to replace it you can only have two copies of a single named card in your deck so keep that in mind but it's also possible to upgrade cards so if in my deck here I had let's see a look magnifying glass these cards are the same but ones level one and one level zero the level one card might have better bonuses and a lower cost meaning it's a better card might even have more tokens here so instead of purchasing it and simply replacing a different card in my deck I can upgrade my magnifying glass here and replace it like that it's effectively the same thing you're still buying a card and replacing your card but when doing something like this you instead pay the difference between the two so for example if my magnifying glass here was this a level 2 and this magnifying glass was level 4 instead of paying for entire experience points to get this card I want to play to the difference between you two in instead upgrade my old card that's how you spend experience points to customize your deck any points that you do not spend will be tracked in the campaign log and then you'll move on to the next scenario even if both players were to die in a scenario it's not over until you get to that final scenario in your campaign you just wouldn't be in a good position but it's not about winning or losing it's about the story your story the story of you your deck of cards and the friends that you play with even if you want to lose our scenario it's totally ok because your experience is unique to you and your team so experiment with new investigators try out new decks and delve into the Arkham Horror I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial if you have any questions always feel free to leave a comment below or email me at cynically Austin Games at gmail.com and that's all for now let's keep on rolling

Channel: CynicallyAwesome

Views: 103,248

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: arkham horror the card game, arkham horror, card game, lovecraft, fantasy flight games, ffg, lcg, how to play, tutorial

Id: 3pFe13ZrnJA

Length: 34min 52sec (2092 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/alucardu]

Not sure if it was posted yet, and I haven't finished watching it but it loooks like a pretty good source of info to show to new players.