Yesterday I dragged my childhood friend into a game of "Arkham Horror: The Card Game" (AH LCG).
We picked the beginner scenario from the core set, thinking the two of us taking on a few ghouls would be a piece of cake—but this game just doesn't play by the rules!
In other co-op board games, you roll dice to fight monsters. This game, on the other hand, has you blindly draw tokens from a black cloth bag. My friend swore up and down at the time that he'd done the math—as long as he didn't pull that "auto-fail" tentacle token, this round was a guaranteed boss kill.
Then he reached in, and hey—not only did he pull the tentacle, but the boss bit him back on top of it, and he went down unconscious. I was laughing so hard I nearly fell over.
But two turns later I wasn't laughing anymore. The most brutal thing about this game is its dedicated "weakness card" mechanic. I was just about to strut my stuff and investigate for clues when I suddenly drew my character's signature weakness from the deck—Cover Up. Not only could I not advance the main objective, I had to waste several actions cleaning up my own mess first, or else I'd get hammered on sanity.
So guess how we "won" in the end?
The town was about to blow, we were both covered in wounds with our sanity at rock bottom, and we scrambled out of the scenario on our last legs. At resolution, the game told us: even though you didn't kill the final boss, you successfully escaped with your lives, so it still counts as clearing it.
Boy oh boy—heading into the next scenario with a pile of permanent trauma. This is literally paying money to get tortured!
But the immersion in this game is absolutely incredible. After one session it feels like you've watched a horror movie—we went nonstop until 3 a.m. and didn't even feel tired.
Any fellow patients out there also suffering in Arkham? When you reach into that chaos bag, do you have any superstitious hand gestures you use?
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