The Bones of Arkham Horror
At its very core, the game is simple, but, in its extremities, it becomes complex. Arkham Horror is Ghostbusters, only set in 1926 and the ghosts are Lovecraftian horrors. The board depicts the town of Arkham, Massachusetts, H.P.L.’s re-imagining of Salem, and its destinations include many of the attractions described in Lovecraft’s tales. Players may study at Miskatonic University’s Library, spend the night in the Witch-House, and recuperate in Arkham Asylum. Each of these sites and a dozen more bear a painted illustration, and streets connect them. Down the side of the board, stretches a strip of “Other Worlds”, which the players must visit to win the game: The Dreamlands, the stomping grounds of Randolph Carter; R’lyeh, city of Cthulhu; Yuggoth, fortress of the Mi-Go.
That’s the basic story: gates to Other Worlds have begun to open all over Arkham, releasing dread, alter-dimensional aliens into the joint and awakening an Ancient One, an entity of power from Beyond. Players move investigators around the board, fight horrible creatures, close gates, and, maybe, face the Ancient One in a Final Battle.
Should the players blow it, well, “all of mankind suffers for the investigators’ failure” as Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth or Shub-Niggurath or Whoever lays waste to the planet. Pretty straightforward.
Yet, once you’ve got the whole game set up and in action, it looks like a gorgeous mess”"and kind of plays that way. Paraphernalia abound. There are hundreds of cards: encounter cards, Mythos cards, weapon cards, spells, allies, missions, cards delineating injuries and madnesses that afflict the investigators. And tokens! Little cardboard tokens, some taking forms with an immediately comprehensible purpose and others not: cash, hearts, ‘clues’ with magnifying glasses on them, but also exposed brains and staring eyes with a pentagram on the other side.
Investigator markers are cardboard, too. You move a tombstone-shaped portrait of your investigator from place to place in Arkham”"a white-bearded professor, a two-gun gumshoe, a librarian, a nun. Monsters are square tokens, illustrations on the front, stats on the back. Elder Things, Deep Ones, Star Vampires, yes, the Mi-Go, too, man-sized, sapient, insectoid fungi that cheerily remove the brains of humans and install them in Mi-Go Brain Cases, the better to survive a trip to Yuggoth and beyond.
All laid out, the complexity of Arkham Horror becomes dazzlingly apparent, as does the fact that children would just destroy this game. Leave a kid alone with it for five minutes and half the set’d be up his nose, the other half irretrievably bespittled.
Arkham Horror‘s an adult game; it belongs to the new breed of board games that has appeared over the past decade: ‘Euro’ or ‘German-style’ games. Knights of Cataan established the genre in 1995 and Tannhauser‘s a recent hot title. These games are heavily puzzle-oriented, often cooperative rather than competitive, and frequently have intricate gameplay emerge from simple rules. First introduced in 1987, Arkham Horror anticipated some of these advances in game design, while its 2005 re-launch fully embraced them. You could describe the trajectory of the game’s development through its two principal designers: Richard Launius invented the game, and Kevin Wilson re-defined it.
Two Guys Cthulhu
Launius came up with the idea for a Lovecraftian board game after playing the Call of Cthulhu tabletop role-playing game. A prolific board game designer, Launius has written rules for hundreds of games and hopes to market two new ones this year. With Arkham Horror, he wanted to bring the collaborative aspect of role-playing to the board game format, but he also wanted the option of playing alone. Paradoxically, solo and cooperative play easily share game mechanics. “The bottom line is it’s all players against the board” says Launius. “I’m not sure that when I first created the game back in the ’80s that there had ever been a game like that.”
Published by Chaosium Press, which also produced the Cthulhu role-playing game, Arkham Horror became a cult hit and a big influence on other games.
A few years back, Launius presented his own re-design of the game at the Origins Game Fair, a huge gaming convention held annually in Ohio. Kevin Wilson stopped by to play. Wilson had been working for Fantasy Flight Games, where he’d moved from writing role-playing games to developing board games. He thought he could update Arkham Horror even further by incorporating more Euro sensibilities. He gave Launius his card and suggested he get in touch with Fantasy Flight.
Things worked out, and Wilson soon found himself re-designing Arkham Horror in consultation with Launius. The trick was to maintain the cooperative spirit of the game while changing the way it used luck. The original game relied on a roll-and-move mechanic to get players around the board, as Monopoly does, an archaic process today. Contemporary games favor strategy over luck; pieces tend to have a fixed movement rate, as in chess. “Most American-style games have a lot of luck involved”"dice and luck” says Launius. Eurogames are different. “They’re all decision-based games, for the most part. A lot of their games have no dice whatsoever.”
But games also need variety. “In a competitive game, the other players provide that” says Wilson. The contest between players changes up the game.
Arkham Horror had to satisfy the modern player’s hankering for strategic challenge while delivering a dynamic experience that encouraged team play. The game and its vagaries had to become the enemy. “You try to establish a feeling of camaraderie among the players against the game itself” says Wilson, “and in order to do that you have to abuse the players a little bit.”
Nice…review?
Kind of convinced me to give it a whirl. I would have liked to know a bit more on mechanics, (that you may have seen as pedestrian information, such as setup time, as the box pic looks huge, learning time (how well it fares with 2 players, (just me & the missus).