Arkham Horror LCG, 2 players

Finally, finally got to the Drowned City with my usual play partner for the blind run. I am running a comical tempo Rex deck, so we blasted through the initial sections before I got vastly overconfident, I went on tilt and fucked up some things, and then we got in an insane shootout at the end where Michael McGlen got frozen in fear and his final shot missed. The McGlen deck was a cycling pistol McGlen. The thing about Arkham LCG is that it's not only a great game and system, but it is almost unbelievably efficient---it packs the narrative beats and incredibly agonizing beats and decisions in like an hour and a half. It does what a lot of three to four hour games do in half the time which makes it very valuable indeed.

Drowned City early impressions were very, very good tbh. The initial bit was pretty empty and a little silly because of how strong Rex is at early tempo in clue gathering. But the person I play with and I were like... in shock at how uninvolved the setup and special rules were for the game. We just put things into play and played without constant rules references. By the end, the final surprise twist of the scenario does add some of the more difficult rules interaction stuff, but nowhere near what the last two or three campaigns have had. And I'm totally game for a set piece of special rules when it's not layered on top of a huge raft of overall special rules the campaign itself has. Huge breath of fresh air moment, even if the scenario was just solid.

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Arkham Horror LCG, solo 2 handed

My play tracker says that last scenario of this was my 250th play of Arkham LCG. Pretty remarkable for a game that I put down in disgust after playing it like 3-4 times with the truly shocking base game product and didn't play again for several years.

I guess it's appropriate that a milestone number is being played on the old Dunwich campaign, which when you play it these days really shows its age in several ways. First, some of the scenarios are just terrible. The one pictured I played today is a poorly designed scenario that serves to absolutely blank out certain investigators and approaches to deckbuilding. I hope you brought your static boost and resource spend boosts to try to hit sky high difficulty numbers like 6-8! Really a pretty bad experience all the way around. In general, going back to Dunwich (I'm doing Return To) shows off how the team didn't really know what they had on the their hands; it's quite clumsily designed, and not only because of one-off stinker scenarios like this one. They didn't really know that they would have like 10 years of expansions to grow into, or the directions they would go, so the encounter decks are often just quite unconditional fuck yous---I got a card I just don't think they would have made in the Return To train scenario (Essex), a notorious scenario in general, which makes all players unconditionally lose an action and then some other punishment for some arbitrary damage limit. That's just not the kind of encounter card they would make later in the game's life. It isn't fun to just get a card that says "fuck off" with not even a slight possibility of mitigation or preparation. It's weird because this unfun gotcha stuff is paired with an otherwise easy difficulty, since the modern card pool is so flexible after 10 full campaigns or whatever.

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Arkharm Horror LCG, solo 2 handed

I wrapped on a playthrough of Innsmouth last week, the last mission is quite strange (shot here is from the one that is second to last). Still didn't get all the flashbacks, getting the one from the Riot is the third mission is really tough for me as I am just not quite that efficient a player despite the hundreds of plays. I hadn't run a bless team before so this was fun, and Book of Solomon is really an MVP if you can pump enough bless into the bag. The book is really good with a weak to the mythos guardian or rogue, as you can just infinitely heal everything. I was using Carolyn, so that added extra value by giving out resources whenever she did it. This was a really fun team that wasn't overpowered and showed off what makes Arkham so special---it's a maleable card pool that lets you approach even the most bog standard investigators (Nathaniel Cho) from an odd direction. He generated all the bless with ancestral token and tried to use Blessing of Isis to recur his good spirit events. That part didn't quite work but was enough.

I like playing Arkham with my full physical cardset and/or 2p, but playing it solo on TTS is such a perfect weeknight high quality filler game. Besides making the deck, it doesn't require that much from me mentally and my mastery of the rules means its a super light load. Simultaneously, it offers 100x the game of an equivalent length game I would be playing as filler.

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