How to Start Playing Arkham Horror the Card Game in 2020 ► New Player Guide and What To Buy

hey everyone I'm Kel and today we're gonna talk about arkham the card game to be more specific we're gonna talk about the best ways for you to start playing Arkham Horror the card game in 2020 think of this as kind of like a new player guide as well as an overview of products that you might want to pick up if you are a new returning or current player I'm going to talk about a good number of products ranging from expansions mythos packs novellas and accessories to spice up your arkham the card game experience you may be asking yourself what is Arkham Horror the card game well Arkham or the card game is a living card game or an LCG down here what that means is when you buy a box of cards you get all of the cards inside there are no random cards there are no booster packs you buy the product you get all the cards I should also note they should be careful not to confuse this with Arkham Horror the board game both made by Fantasy Flight Games today we're talking just about Arkham the card game one of the fantastic reasons why this game is so great to pick up in 2020 because it is both a single-player and a cooperative card game in an era of social distancing this is a really really cool and fun thing to play honestly I've been having a lot of fun playing this by myself and with my girlfriend and it's one of the few card games have actually convinced her to play with me you essentially take the role of an investigator investigating horrific dark dealings Eldrick and Lovecraftian mythos you build your deck and play through a scenario and it's all story based with that said I will not be including any spoilers in this video so if you are afraid of spoiling anything I'm gonna be really careful with that so this is the corset the Arkham Horror of the card game corset when you buy any other expansion or mythos packs and we'll talk about those a little bit later when you buy those you just get a full playset of all the cards for the corset that is not the case so I wanted to let you know that right off the bat to get a full playset of all the cards you would need two corsets however you don't really need to do that you can still have a lot of fun playing with just the corset here you know it does say for one to two players and that's what my girlfriend and I have been doing the corset itself has three scenarios to play through it is a complete story it is kind of like a base story I've only really played the corset and my girlfriend and I are working on another expansion called the Dunwich legacy which is this the Dauntless legacy is the very first expansion for Arkham Horror of the card game and so far it's been a lot of fun a full box expansion like this adds new investigators new player cards as well as the baseline schematics for the scenario to get the complete story of an expansion you do need to purchase mythos packs as they come out each expansion has six mythos packs released in several months after the main expansion comes out so it's kind of like a monthly installment kind of thing so for the Dunwich legacy the first mythos pack is the Miskatonic museum so you'd play through Dunwich legacy and then you would bring your deck and characters from this into the Miskatonic museum and you can kind of tell which number it is here so it is it is pack one for the Dunwich legacy and after you complete this you would move on to the Essex County Express and so on moving on to blood of the altar or blood on the altar unda mentioned and unseen as you can see things get a little bit crazier from here and then where doom awaits I do not have the final mythos pack for this one quite yet we're still really early in our playthrough honestly we've only completed the first two of the Dunwich legacy we are eager to start our journey into the Miskatonic Museum if we're talking price here the expansions cost about $30 and each mythos pack costs about $15 and that's actually not too bad when you compare it to trading card games or something like that you can buy many many boxes of booster packs and not really even get anything that you want the core set itself cost about $40 MSRP and there exists a bunch of expansions right now in addition to Dunwich legacy there's stuff like the path to Carcosa which is a very very cool one this is one we're gonna do right after done which legacy as well as something like this circle undone here which I haven't even opened yet I have the circle undone and then I went ahead and bought one of each of all the mythos packs so you can kind of see here this is what a full cycle would look like the expansion and all six of the mythos packs this would make a full complete story that has a lot of replayability depending on the things that happen in your story there's a lot of role-playing options here which i think is a lot of fun but full cycles like this aren't your only option because there are standalone scenario packs like the murder at the Excelsior Hotel a standalone scenario does not have any player cards to juice up your deck it is just the scenario but this one in particular is a lot of fun my girlfriend and I played through this and I can tell you there's a lot of replayability here something like this takes about an hour and a half two maybe three hours to play through just so you know and I would say an average scenario from any one of these takes about an hour to play so I've shown you a lot of boxes already let's take a look at some of the cards these are the two decks that my girlfriend and I are currently using to play through the Dunwich legacy I am playing as men and my girlfriend is playing as Zoe Zoe is this crazy holy sh f monster slayer kind of rides maybe like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with fantastic art by Magali Villeneuve and I am playing men the secretary she's very smart and good at finding clues also she is plagued by the king in yellow which is a you know horrible horrible book I'm not gonna go really deep into the rules but I kinda want to just show you some stuff so you can kind of get an idea of what you're looking at here so this is my investigator card you start with this in play man this is your investigator this is who you are you have your stats up here these kind of show you how good you are at various things so like the fist is how good you are at fighting the little foot is how good you are at escaping or evading danger the book is how good you are at investigating and the mind here is how good you are at you know critical thinking and stuff that involves you know the mind each investigator has some special abilities the numbers down here are your health and sanity if they get to zero you basically die or go insane which in this game mean the same thing on the back of the card you have some deck building restrictions deck sizes are typically 30 cards though there are some variations here so for men you can include secret cards level 0 to 5 at neutral zero to five survivor cards zero to two and then there are some other deck building restrictions each investigator has a signature weakness and a signature positive card I guess you could say and you also always include a random basic weakness so your deck isn't all great you do have some weaknesses here which i think is actually really cool and a lot of fun this is just kind of like a rounded sequence here is minh's signature weakness the King in yellow like I said I'm not gonna really go over this but it's going to show you how some of the cards look like and what you can expect this is the random weakness I pulled basically you shuffle up all the weaknesses together and I just picked one at random I got haunted which basically makes all of my skills worse these get shuffled into your deck and when you draw them they have an immediate effect or maybe not depending what the card says so this one says revelation add haunted into your threat area so when you draw you have to immediately play it which is kind of bad you know it takes up your draw and it does bad things to you and you have cards like skills skills can help you perform various actions this one's really good at finding clues for example perception we also have guts I have stuff like inquiring mind men is really really good at skill checks so I have a good number of skills in here then we have event cards these are cards that you play for their effects whereas some of these other cards are for either resources or for skill checks magnifying glass is an item you can have items up to the number of slots available so for example you have two hands so you can have two hands worth of items or one chest worth of items if that makes sense so you can't wear two coats for example you can only wear like one coat here we have a rabbit's foot this one is an amulet item or a necklace item here is a weapon gravedigger shovel that also doubles as a clue finder you probably don't know if that means at this point but just know the good crux of this game is finding clues and fighting enemies my deck is really good at getting clues and Robins deck my girlfriend is really good at fighting enemies Zoe is a beast she is absolutely fantastic at murdering monsters here have this Lantern helps me find clues but I can also pitch it smash it over someone's head to deal a little bit of Dan cards like field work which gives me a little bit of options when I move around and then we have your allies allies come into play you can only have one Ally at a time unless you have card that lets you have more than one ally at a time this one's pretty cool with a really good art by Magali Villeneuve lets you draw two cards when it comes into play and increases your maximum hand size and you can put damage or sanity loss on your ally and if you know it reaches one of the maximums here then they die so think kind of like soak up damage for you like the art student here probably might get cut from my deck but it's a pretty pretty good one when you play it you get a discover a clue at your location and it can soak up a little bit of damage analytical mind is mins signature card and then we have some stuff that give me more mobility options pathfinder I should note these little dots on the top of the card indicate the level of the card and when you start your deck you can only have at level 0 cards and as you progress through the stories and campaigns you will gain experience and you can spend that experience on cards that have levels so I used to experience to put these two cards into this deck I think this card is pretty good because during your turn if you're not engaged with an enemy you can exhaust the pathfinder and move to and connecting location which kind of gives you a free action because moving takes an action and so I kind of want to move around the field and snatch up clues and Pathfinder is actually really really good for that for me and then I also have a card from the story I'm not going to talk about him too much though you should note that some cards in the stories will make it into your deck so you can use for the duration of that campaign so I have professor Warren rice here I also got dr. Malan Christopher this is not a story card just a really really good card from the corset as well as cutting distraction yo the baboons they stole your turkey and just for comparison's sake this is my girlfriend's deck like I said playing zoe Samaras the chef who is really good at murdering monsters she's basically told by God to slay monsters and that she does and her deca is all about you know getting weapons soaking up damage and killing monsters there are some cards in here that help her do other things but stuff like dynamite blast / power here is Zoe's weakness might the wicked she's compelled to smite the wicked got some like stuff like the beat cops drawn to flame what's really interesting about Zoe and most of the investigators from the Dunwich Legacy expansion is that they have a special deck-building restriction are they gonna have cards from their class so Zoe is a guardian so you can have zero two level five Guardian cards zero to five neutral cards and then up to five other level zero cards from any other class which is pretty cool so Zoe has a little bit of flexibility here so she can have stuff like drawn to the flame which lets her discover clues which is really good because o is typically not good at discovering clues this is what Zoe is good at she's good at killing monster so she's got stuff like guns here's the weakness that she got chrono phobia which isn't actually it actually is pretty bad for Zoe it's not too bad for Zoe but she takes direct horror and Zoe does not have a ton of horror she's really good at fighting so she has a stronger health pool here's some the other cards that kind of like sure up Zoe's disadvantages cards that let her search for cards or draw extra stuff really like the guard dogs they're got some weapons and all of that cool stuff really like stuff like this - let me handle this which kind of lets Zoe take a hit for something that might affect me which is really really cool because you know min isn't really good at fighting here's Zoe's cross this is her signature card really really good with her ability probability is that she gains extra resources when she engages enemies and there are dozens of other investigators out there here just some of the ones that we have you know we got Jenny Barnes and her signatures in weakness Carolyn fern we have let's see a catchy we have stuff like Safina I think these were all ones we were considering running for our latest campaign mark Harrigan I've used him before he's really cool he's very very strong as a attack power of five they're rollin banks is my very first investigator that I played FBI agent he's very good both good at fighting and good at discovering clues as you would expect an FBI agent to be Jim Colver he's got a really really cool mechanics and deck Agnes Baker she is a sorcerer basically a witch this was Robyn's very first character that she played through with Daisy Walker some of these cards come in the corset so like Agnes Baker Daisy Walker and Roland banks are all cards where's Roland they're all cards that come in the corset here we go rolling banks and then other stuff like we got the field reporter Rex Murphy I was considering playing Rex Murphy but I think min is a little bit more my speed got ash can Pete he starts in play with his dog Duke I like ash can peed a lot I think I'm gonna play with him in the future William Yorick definitely reference to Shakespeare Wendy Adams is another one of the poor set ones all of the corset investigators are actually very very good so if you just bought the corset and then just kind of jumped off from there I think you would still be in a good place because that's kind of how we started playing Lola Hays is an insane investigator with a ton of options she's an actress so she can basically almost do everything and she has a lot of weaknesses because of that and then here we have some of the more violent things these are all of the weaknesses that you would shuffle up together and pick one for a random weakness before I talk about some of the cool options for your Arkham the card game experience I want to show you some basic rundown of how the game is played not gonna go into too in-depth and like I said I'm not going to cover any spoilers these are cards from the very very first scenario it's kind of like the introductory tutorial campaign this is the very first starting location it is the study it is currently flipped over on the other side when you can actually go to the location you can see kind of what all of the stuff is here when you're at a location you have your little investigator card and you move it to that location you can also investigate on that location if it had clues on it this location would have two clues per investigator that's what the little hat means it means per investigator so if we only had one investigator in this game if I was playing a solo game it would only have two clues if we had two investigators in the game it would have four clues not two in the location just two in the entire game this little - here is the Shroud value for the location that's the number I need to beat in order to get a clue from the location and then you can use those clues to advance the current agendas without going deep into the terminology the one on the right side is the good one this is the one that you want to do to advance the one on the left side is the bad one this is this is the bad stuff that's happening to you every single turn this increases by one you get one doom on the agenda and to advance this one we would need two clues per investigator so we would need four total which is all of the clues from the study monsters hazards traps and all sorts of evil and unpleasant things appear as you flip over cards from the encounter deck every single turn both players will flip over a card from the encounter deck other than the first turn and nasty things will happen like I said I'm not gonna spoil anything here just know things can get pretty hard this game is not an easy game but it is a ton of fun and there's a lot of replayability here I should also like to know that these are what the tokens that come with a game look like they're just you know cardboard punch outs we have your tokens for resources tokens for clues and doom tokens for mental damage or sanity damage and tokens for health damage I mention these because there are some really cool things you can get to kind of spice up your game improve the quality of life of the game and it does involve tokens it also comes with these little tokens these are your chaos tokens as I drop it these will be drawn from a chaos bag the game does not include a chaos bag so you'll need to use your own little baggie and that leads me to my first upgrade that I would get for Arkham Horror and that is a bag a simple gaming bag either leather or whatever material you prefer is the first thing that I would recommend that you pick up if you wanted to spice up your Arkham core experience you're not drawing your chaos tokens from a plastic bag I picked this guy up for maybe like a couple bucks on eBay it's just a very simple drawstring bag but it gets the job done you know you can put your hand in here you can ruffle around for the chaos tokens and you know it's a much better experience extrapolating from that you can actually get things to enhance your chaos tokens and for that I would highly recommend coin capsules specifically these coin capsules which I found to be incredibly sturdy of very very high quality make this is a German company the name means lighthouse the ultra intercept 26 millimeter coin capsules are what you want to look for this is a 10 pack that costs about $10 straight from the manufacturer and I'm gonna take some of this out here I bought three of these so about you know enough to have 30 you really only need 20 you only need about two boxes so if you wanted to spend a little bit of extra money you can spend 20 bucks on two of these maybe $25 get two of these and a chaos' bag and the end result here is if you can kind of look into the murky depths of the chaos bag are all of our Kaos tokens in the coin capsules which you know they look fantastic you know they're very sturdy it's actually kind of hard to get them apart which is really good so they don't you know come apart while you're rifling around and it's just a really good feeling you just stick your hand in there and pull out your token that's zero that's pretty good for a while we weren't using the coin capsules and we were just using these but they stick together and it gets kind of hard when a bunch of these little like cardboard things are just like like you can't even see here look well they're just like stuck together and this is just a much much nicer experience it actually really increased like you know quality of life while we're playing ah skull another thing that I would highly recommend if you want to juice up your experience and you have the money to spend are these custom tokens made by Team Covenant these are health sanity resource tokens as well as doom and clue tokens and you know you can use these for other things as well but that's kind of what they're meant for the tokens here are incredibly high quality though they are kind of expensive but I think there are definitely worth it this one is one of the doom tokens you know this side represents one doom this side can represent two doom whereas some of the tokens like the sanity tokens here are actually a little transparent you can kind of see through it like I said very very high quality and these are made to fit the specifications for their game ward's I also mentioned their game boards these are custom made for Arkham Horror they're very high quality have felt on the bottom so they don't you know slide around too much and they're made specifically for Arkham Horror and they're custom made tokens so for example we can set Zoe here doesn't slide around on the board you can mark her health or sanity damage I believe the health ones go down here and the sanity ones are made to fit up top and they are made specifically to fit in those locations you can put your you know clues or resource tokens down here let's say that as always discovered a clue and she's got three resources every one of these pieces fits perfectly in the spot that it's supposed to go it's very nice if you have to pick up the board and move it around you know none of the pieces fall out or anything like that I think it's very very nice very useful but you know it's not needed it's just something if you really wanted to spice up your Arkham Horror game here is another one other player boards this one is more of South American themed I think it's really really cool it's in theme with the Forgotten Age cycle whereas this one is in theme with the Dunwich legacy cycle I went ahead and bought one of each just because you know just to have a little bit of variance here all of the things here both of the boards and all of the pieces cost me I think directly from their website close to about a hundred and thirty dollars or something like that ship like I said it's a little expensive but if you wanted to spice up your game and support folks who create custom things for card games like this and I believe they also do content creation then I would highly recommend team covenant stuff they're really nice folks and they have a really really good service and I would like to reiterate like I said at the beginning of the video that you don't need any of that stuff to actually play and enjoy this game all you need is the Arkham horror of the card game corset here you don't need anything else you can have a ton of fun just playing this by yourself or with another person with just a single set you don't need your extra bag and your fancy you know coin capsules you don't need all of the extra peripheral things all you need is just the corset and you are good to go and if you love the game if you like the game you can buy expansions to expand upon that get new player cards and experience new experiences before we end the video though I do want to show a couple little extra things outside of the card game itself that I think are really really cool and if you really like Arkham Horror you like the theme of Arkham Horror they would be really interesting to you the first of those things that I want to talk about are the Arkham Horror novellas these are the two that I currently own I have to fight the black win by Jennifer Bros ech I just actually finished reading this book it's uh pretty good they're not too long I mean they are just novellas but the writing is really really good really interesting you know they delves into different aspects of Arkham Horror at the end you have like this color you know thing here that tells you a little bit more about the story not super long but they're also not super expensive each Arkham Horror novella cost about $15 but when you buy a novella this is not the only thing you get as I wanted to show off here with the deep gate by Chris a Jackson this is one that I just purchased myself and it says that it includes exclusive cards for Arkham the card game as you can see my camera in the reflection so let's actually open this up and show you what it kind of looks like minty fresh from the packaging alright so let's just open this on up get the shrink-wrap off it doesn't tighten as I pull there we go and then we have the deep gate by Chris a Jackson very very sweet I bought this directly from Fantasy Flight Games but and we can buy it through Amazon or whatever else I would highly recommend supporting your local game store or just buying it through Fantasy Flight here we go here is the card at the end so the cards are all Investigator cards of the main character in the story so the fight the black wind has Carolyn fern as the you know investigator card that you get pretty cool I think she as a character Carolyn fern is is a pretty interesting character I like that story a lot so hopefully I will like the deviate a lot so this one has I think it's Silas it's his name very very cool here is this little player icon you can move around on the field here is the deep gate not really gonna go into that too much Silas marsh he's a pretty strong and agile but not the smartest dude he's a drifter looks really cool I kind of dig the artwork here and he does have a different signature card and signature weakness that aren't in the regular version of Silas Marsh and this card kind of tells you all about that all of the like alternate cards that you can use other called replacement cards but yeah you can use these in your you know Arkham Horror the card game adventures so if you like the flavor you like the theme you can purchase the novellas and also get a little bit a little bit of extra stuff here kind of curious though what the colored bits at the end here are looks like a journal documents some charts and that kind of stuff yeah really cool Cod flounder halibut mmm delicious and the final thing I want to talk about is also a book but not a novella it is the investigators of Arkham Horror this is just a very very large book this book costs about $40 MSRP I believe directly from Fantasy Flight Games this one is just Arkham Horror like the novellas they are not specific to the card game though they do have stuff before the card game it's just Arkham Horror so there's a lot of characters in this that are maybe not from the card game yet and are from the board games and some of their other products but this product is incredibly cool it has a lot of beautiful artwork a lot of stories about all of the investigators I just think it's incredibly sweet Hey look there's Caroline fern yeah this this is definitely worth the money if you're into this kind of setting if you're into this whole thing I think this is the the newest in the novella character there's artwork here from the cards as well as stuff that you know we have not seen in the cards maybe artwork from the board game or anything like that Lily Chen who got this really cool Egyptian theme here I dig it dig it quite a bit oh this one is Silas Marsh one that I literally just showed you I believe these stories are completely different than the stories in the novellas so they kind of supplement each other yeah just incredibly cool I do not regret paying I think she's one of the newer characters from the upcoming expansion the the ins mouth one but yeah I did not regret buying this at all for like 40 bucks this is just a really really fun read and it has a lot of like cool and colorful pictures so I recommend investigators of Arkham Horror quite a bit if you like this kind of thing and to cap off the video and sum things up if you wanted to get into Arkham Horror of the card game in 2020 I would highly recommend picking up a corset if you really like the game after you play the corset maybe pick up and expansion if you like that expansion then maybe start picking up some of the mythos packs to that expansion to experience the complete story for new returning and current players you can always use up your experience with gaming bags and other supplemental products that kind of you know enhance your overall quality of life as well as stuff like these coin capsules I would really highly recommend getting the coin capsules it actually helps so much I remember a lot of the time some of the pieces we just stick together and I swear I swear the ten plus one's really good I swear the tentacle one was one of the ones that wasn't there we go wasn't sticking together and we always ended up with the tentacle one and just so you know just to see it's like really really solid in there and let's see if I can actually get this off probably you have to finally look at the lip and you have to like really peel it off there we go yeah it just fits right on in there actually fits right on this side you just take the token put it on in and then just snap it on and you're good to go off to the races too to get the autofill token and that was my first video on Arkham the card game please let me know in the comments down below if I missed anything if you would like to show me anything new this is something that I've just gotten into in the last couple months I love this game it is a ton of fun especially if you are in the situation where you need to self isolate or if you just don't have anyone else to play with or someone else's self isolating you can play this by yourself it's really fun by yourself you can play this with a friend or loved one it's a really really fun cooperative experience like I said at the start this is the only card game of convinced my girlfriend to actually play with me and that'll about do it I would really appreciate it if you liked the video too maybe leave a like or a comment tell me what you thought of the video or of Arkham for the card game let me know if you would like to see more stuff like this on the channel we'll probably be covering this as a mainline gaming channel because I love it so much I'll probably be covering the ins mouth expansion as well as the investigator starter decks launching later this year I've already pre-ordered all my stuff from Fantasy Flight Games so I can't wait for that stuff to come out it's gonna be a lot of fun and those investigator decks are gonna be really really good for new players anyways thank you all so much for watching and I will see you next time for some more card game content I'll see you later [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Red Zone Rogue

Views: 27,382

Rating: 4.8369565 out of 5

Keywords: red zone rogue, arkham horror, arkham horror lcg, arkham horror the card game, how to start playing arkham horror the card game, how to play arkham horror, how to play arkham horror lcg, how to start playing arkham horror lcg, arkham horror card game, arkham horror card game how to play, arkham horror coin capsules, arkham horror the card game review, arkham horror new player guide, arkham horror card game new player guide, arkham horror card game 2020, co op card game

Id: YoQpjDyFAbQ

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Apophany]

How to start playing:

Step 1: Get a degree in internet research

Step 2: Track down out of stock mythos packs

Step 3: Pay 10 times the original cost

Step 4: Cry yourself to sleep because you've remortgaged your home

I jest! I'm just annoyed right now because I can't find Miskatonic Museum anywhere :(

Nice video :)

[u/RedZoneRogue]

Howdy folks! I figured this video might be useful to some folks out there who are just picking up Arkham Horror or who are considering it - especially in an age of self-isolation where folks are looking to pick up more single player and co-op experiences (of which Arkham is one of the finest)

I also talk about and showcase some various ways to upgrade your quality of life while playing that could be useful to slightly more established players (coin capsules, custom tokens etc). I also also discuss the novellas and other books as well for those who may want to enrich their Arkham experience beyond the card game.

[u/SiriusMusta]

But why is there an Eldritch Horror cover picture?

[u/nrv96]

Wow, I didn't realize Magali Villeneuve had done so many art pieces for this game! (I love her work in mtg) I have an unopened core set and this has inspired me to open it and start playing this weekend