The variety of‚  Arkham Horror products reflects this. In addition to the principal board, depicting the town of Arkham, Fantasy Flight has released three major and three minor expansions. Each of the major ones consists of a secondary board and a bunch of cards and tokens. These secondary boards depict the towns of Dunwich, Kingsport, and Innsmouth, with each set favoring a particular collection of Lovecraft tales. Dunwich evokes “The Dunwich Horror” “The Colour out of Space” and “The Picture in the House””"excursions into the Gothic landscape of Western Massachusetts, where degenerate rural folk reside in picturesque squalor. Kingsport is the most benevolent and boring of the expansions, much like the stories from which it draws: “The Festival” “The Terrible Old Man” “The Strange High House in the Mist””"dreamy stories, filled with longing, but not much substance.

The minor expansions have no boards and tap‚  influences on or outgrowths of Lovecraft’s work, rather than the stories themselves. Curse of the Dark Pharaoh introduces themes of Egyptology; The King in Yellow follows the work of Robert W. Chambers, an author much-praised by H.P.L.; and The Black Goat of the Woods riffs on the cult of Shub-Niggurath, one of Lovecraft’s most famous creations, infusing it with a vibe of hippie Satanism. One of the monster tokens in the Black Goat depicts a ‘Child of the Goat’, a bikinied, long-tressed brunette dancing before a fire. Most monsters in Arkham Horror harm investigators who lose a fight against them, damaging them physically, tossing them into an Other World, or devouring them outright. When a Child of the Goat wins a battle, the losing investigator is “delayed” for a turn. Hm.

Tying both narrative and rules to the underlying theme is the great success of the game. Consider Innsmouth Horror. Lovecraft’s story is a racist, cautionary allegory of immigration. His protagonist, Robert Olmstead of Ohio, comes upon Innsmouth during a journey to uncover his family’s New England heritage. He discovers that the citizens of Innsmouth have interbred with the Deep Ones, fish-frog people who live beneath the waves, in exchange for good fishing grounds and some gold trinkets. Olmstead’s inquiries bring down the ire of Innsmouth, much of the population of which bears the “Innsmouth Look”, a froggy, gilled aspect. Lovecraft used the Deep Ones as a metaphor for the Portuguese and Italian immigrants who poured into Gloucester during his lifetime. Olmstead barely escapes the town, calls down the Feds, who put the Innsmouthians in concentration camps, and retreats to Ohio, where, naturally, he begins to develop the Look himself. In the end, he discovers he’s descended from the family that first made the pact with the Deep Ones. The final horror!

The game incorporates this turn of the tale by means of the Innsmouth Look deck, one card of which tells the investigator he has the Look, at which point the investigator is removed from the game and a Deep One monster token replaces his piece on the board.

If all of this sounds a bit like an in-joke, that’s because it is. And this, too, fits nicely with the Lovecraftian tradition. Lovecraft and his buddy writers took great delight in winking at each other through their texts. Lovecraft famously killed off Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, in “The Haunter in the Dark” and much of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos amounts to little more than a series of in-jokes which Lovecraft’s epigones and many of his more credulous fans took a bit too earnestly.

Innsmouth Horror continues this tradition. One investigator introduced in the set is Zoey Samaras, a cook and homicidal maniac. Her illustration shows her in the kitchen, cooking fish in a pot and chopping up an octopus on the cutting board. Even better, Zoe Robinson, Fantasy Flight’s Art Director, is the model for the illustration, painted by Henning Ludvigsen. Robinson takes great delight in the investigator bearing her features and hung a poster of Samaras’ portrait over her assistant’s desk.

This is the real point of playing Arkham Horror. It’s not the narrative of saving the world that matters, but all of the mini-narratives and fodder for in-jokes that occur in the journey to the end game. “One thing I wish more people would do instead of trying to beat the game at times is have more encounters at more locations” says Launius.

In other words, try playing for story rather than victory, as encounters form the links in a narrative chain. “Sometimes things will click together” says Wilson, “and you’ll see a logical story out of it.”

Take Sister Mary, the nun, for example. Say she picks up an ally, Herbert West, Reanimator, M.D., and heads to the Miskatonic University Science Building. “An experiment on dogs has gone horribly awry and now a student is willing to pay to get rid of the evidence” reads the encounter card. What a perfectly West-ian encounter. Disposing of the dogs, she collects her dough and heads over to Hibb’s Roadhouse (it is the time of Prohibition, after all), and has a drink. Or several drinks, says the card. She gets herself drunk and tossed out of the establishment, losing her dynamite on the way out. Next turn, she heads into Independence Square, where she and West try to pass out on a bench, but a cop rousts them back into the street, where, a turn later, they find themselves face-to-face with a monster. We’ll hope it’s a Child of the Goat.

“Sometimes it’s not totally logical” says Wilson.

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About The Author

Ray Huling is a freelance journalist living in Boston. He writes about games and quahogs.

One Response

  1. Donal

    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).

    Reply

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