A typical night in Arkham: Arkham Horror recap

Well my first full game of Arkham Horror is under my belt. Well the first full game since 2006.

We lost in the end, but it was a cool 4 hour ride to get to that point. We had two events happened that sealed the fate of the town of Arkham. One was I was assaulted by a particularly nasty creature that was immune to physical weapons. I had not bought enough items and even throwing holy water on the thing was a fail due to bad dice rolling. At that point all I had was a bullwhip and a pistol and it was game over after that.

Being knocked unconscious I was sent to the lost in time and space spot, lost half my items and that was the last that the town of Arkham heard of Monterey Jack. Meanwhile my partner Mandy Thompson leaped into a gate in a desperate attempt to close another one.

5 monsters were roaming Arkham including a ghoul and a vampire. Several gates were opened and we need to get one sealed fast. However her first Other World encounter was exhaustion and she failed all three checks, lost all her stamina and passed out.

With the DOOM track on 12 and Hastur about to appear, we were out of Clue Tokens, lost in Time and Space together and there was no way to stop anything from spawning since we were Delayed and knocked on our asses. The town of Arkham would succumb to the evil of Hastur and we called the game once we pulled another Mythos card and got a Gate Surge.

In the end the mistakes we made were that we did not buy enough items, were slow to upgrade our characters, and took too much time in between gate closings. We also had a run of bad luck there near the end with my holy water failing, bad die rolls and her exhaustion knocking her out of the game.

Another thing that sucked is we lost a lot of clues. Some locations had as many as THREE on them and a gate would spawn and take them all. Also Hastur makes all gate closings require 8 tokens and that really hurt.

Some highlights:

• The Strangler hit Arkham and killed 4 allies off the Ally Deck before we arrested him
• Curiosity shop was blocked by a gate and two tough yellow monsters in the street what would not move.
• I had to drink Whiskey to stop from losing my sanity at one point
• I amassed about 7 creature tokens 3 of which were zombies I shot in the head with my revolver

We learned lessons however and know what to do better once we play again which will be very soon. I have already ordered a slew of miniatures and some Iron Gate Tokens from Litko. Yeah I am hooked. On the upside I did use the iPad based Arkham Horror toolkit from Fantasy Flight Games. It tracks your investigators stats, lets you adjust sliders, modify clue tokens and money, and even has a sweet die roller included as well as the ability to draw from the encounter deck. Great app and really saves table space.