Arkham Horror: The Card Game Revised Edition Review
Disclaimer: Haven’t really experienced the story or expansions, stuck to introductory and higher level difficulty plays just in two-player and solo.
TLDR: If you love the aesthetic or need a co-op experience to spend an afternoon on, this should be a go-to. It’s great fun figuring out what’s next and seeing what’s thrown at you, just make sure you and the people you play with are actual team players and dig the aesthetic.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a 1-4 player living card game, a term penned by Fantasy Flight Games to mean that each product sold for the game which contains cards is equal in content instead of milking you via RNG (if only so much of it weren’t out of print). Set in the world of Chaosium’s much loved Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, it’s also the 28th highest ranked game on BGG at time of writing (technically the 2016 version is, I’m playing the 2021 revised edition). Each player controls an investigator, played on a map made up of connected location cards (where goals are met and encounters happen) with various equipment and skills both attached to your investigator and in your hand.
Each investigator has resources to manage, two pools of health (physical and mental, essentially), and they excel at different things, usually thematically, through their skills, which are used for skill tests (it’s a modified dice roll) and unique abilities. The good thing about this is that it doesn’t get stale with a higher player count, each investigator can find their niche and help their buddies in ways that matter. It also means that some characters have more “main character energy” than others. Luckily, you can buy expansions with extra characters, so there’s almost definitely something out there for everyone.
This set-up alone should speak volumes about how much replayability the game has, besides expansions introducing new equipment, characters, monsters, locations, and story, the game itself is wonderful for testing your mettle through various difficulty modes. It’s a game you can play with the younger members of your family as a fun way to spend the time and also one where you can present a tense challenge to your usual gaming group. I do have to say, the game can be a bit stale at times due to the “best” decision being pretty obvious closer to the endgame, but even so the ambiguity and subsequent consequences in resource management you have earlier on more than makes up for it, along with the multitude of play styles and interesting stories the game lets you experience, though the latter will most definitely appeal to some more than others.
My biggest gripes are two fold, the first being that the introduction to the game is quite easy. It’s great for a younger age range, but for older individuals or more experienced gamers, well, it’s not that it isn’t satisfying but more like you can tell that the game has a lot more depth than what you are currently experiencing. This has another downside, where mechanical intensity, even in optional ways, doesn’t scale with the difficulty. This is a non-issue for most people, me included, but I do think it would be cooler if we could do more interesting things at higher difficulties, like combo attacks for example (this is a bit tough to clarify because card combos certainly exist, I mean sometimes having 1-on-1 fights is a bit lame as is, though maybe there are things that have changed that).
My second issue is content availability. I was being hyperbolic when I lamented at how a lot of products were out of print. The truth is that only some of it is out of print, but there’s plenty to explore as is, more than enough for this sort of game unless you really love Lovecraft. There is one specific product that really sticks out to me, Return to the Night of the Zealot, which is the sequel to the introductory adventure the core box contains. It makes no sense to me that this is out of print, but what do I know? Still, I’d love to see it make a comeback someday and buy it myself.
Overall, it’s a really fun game. Try to make it a bit harder than the base difficulty and set aside a good chunk of time to get immersed in the story and atmosphere. I don’t think this game is for everyone, I know one person who won’t touch it due to the aesthetics, and honestly I wouldn’t say it’s a must-buy, but it’ll keep you and your group entertained for multiple hours. Just make sure the aesthetic intrigues you, I really do think that’s what a person’s opinion hinges on the most here.
Nikhil Saxena
Founder, Destrier Studios
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