Arkham Horror: The Card Game Review

If you have never scoured the unsettling locations of Arkham as you hunt demons and other abominations before, let me give you a bit of a crash course on what sort of game Arkham Horror: The Card Game is. In Arkham Horror, one to four players take on the roles of investigators as you work together to make decisions that impact the narrative, complete objectives by succeeding or failing checks, and fending off all manner of nasties, from gangsters and cultists to elder gods and demons that drive you insane.

Each player has their own tailored deck based around the character class of your chosen investigator (these include the Guardian, Seeker, Mystic, Rogue, and Survivor). You can use a preconstructed deck or build one yourself, which you will further improve over the course of each session, spending experience points to buy and swap in new cards. It’s not a deck-building game in the typical sense, with “deck management” perhaps being more appropriate.

Should your character get knocked out in a session, they can suffer physical or mental trauma, which will continue to impact them as the campaign progresses. Sometimes it’s best to give up and cut your losses rather than trying to succeed until the last man standing, and those sorts of tough decisions are part of what makes Arkham so special.

This new core set, sometimes called "Chapter Two," presents players with the brand new “Brethren of Ash” campaign, picking up a few months after the events of the previous expansion, The Drowned City (see on Amazon) – but don't worry, you don’t have to have played it to be able to enjoy this new campaign. In Brethren of Ash, you and your friends will dodge dangers and escape the encroaching flames as you race against time to uncover the identities of the campaign’s namesake, the members of the Brethren of Ash, and stop whatever their goal may be. Knowing Arkham Horror, it’s safe to assume it will be something nasty.

Being a core box, the three scenarios that comprise the campaign aren’t the most mechanically intricate or complex, but I still found they provided a good amount of enjoyable challenge. I especially enjoyed the new “Doomed” keyword, which threw me and my main Arkham Horror team for a loop. This new ability adds a doom token onto an agenda when it’s defeated, throwing years of muscle memory of “kill the thing” into chaos (doom tokens act as a sort of countdown timer for the scenario). How very Arkham of it.

For fans who have previously played the earlier core or revised box, this latest story may feel a bit familiar. As someone who has played through the introductory “Night of the Zealot” campaign a bunch, I enjoyed the little nods and homages this latest tale contains. At this point, a story starting with some place (possibly) burning down is as synonymous with Arkham Horror as a tavern brawl beginning an adventure in a role-playing game. If you're like me, and have unmasked your fair share of cultists in Arkham already, there are still plenty of new agendas and other new goodies that keep Ash from feeling like a fiery copy of what you’ve already played.

A new story requires new investigators, and this box comes with five options to pick from, each with their own preconstructed decks to use if you want to just dive in and start playing. This time around, the included investigators are Daniela Reyes, the Mechanic; Joe Diamond, the Private Investigator; Trish Scarborough, the Former Spy; Isabelle Barnes, the Returned; and my favorite, Dexter Drake, the Magician.

Drake has been my go-to character to play in Arkham Horror: The Board Game (the game that got me into this hobby). The characters’ decks are fine enough and, with the host of recommended upgrade cards, provide some avenues for customization between missions for new folks, but longtime investigators may find what’s on offer a bit bland. However, as Chapter 2 is compatible with the cards that came before (minus the ones that have been modified or banned – details can be found in the Arkham Grimoire online), feel free to spruce up the decks, or build your own, as you see fit!

Touching briefly on the production quality of the new core box, there are a number of smaller things I’ve found a bit irksome, which don’t ruin the release for me in any way, but I feel are worth bringing up. First off, this box is a slightly different size and shape than the previous revised core box or even the more recent Drowned City campaign box, with some stylistically different designs on the spine that I found a wee bit irksome, seeing it break the visual continuity on my shelf among the previous products.

Included in the box is a familiar set of cardboard tokens, all of fine quality. Among the punch boards are a few handy new additions, ones that have become popular among the community but now made official with the location connection arrows. I hadn’t used any previously and was surprised how such a simple thing – a glorified arrow made out of cardboard that more clearly showed what spots could be traveled between – could improve the experience.

The instruction book has seen a nice upgrade; it's clear Fantasy Flight has taken community criticism to heart over the previous instructions they’ve packed in core boxes. The result is a book with far more examples and accompanying imagery to help learn the game, and the glossary in the back assists with tracking down those clarifications you may need in the middle of a session. They have removed the smaller Rules Reference book, opting to add its details to the main book, but I do wish that the new box came with something similar. It was nice to be able to split the workload of tracking down rules when my group and I would have questions, letting one person have the main book and the other the supplement – but the improvements to the main rulebook outweigh the lack of the reference booklet. We do still have our phones after all.

This new campaign comes with additional agenda cards over the revised core box, which is fun, but unfortunately, this has come at the expense of how many cards you get for the investigator decks, which come in at about 25 fewer. Fewer options to tailor your characters to your liking. And touching on the cards themselves, they appear to be more reflective than previous releases, which can make them hard to see and read from certain angles. I haven’t yet sleeved the cards, but I can only imagine how this would compound with glossy sleeves, so if you are someone who wants to sleeve your collection, I recommend looking into non-glare options.

Despite it being the start of what Fantasy Flight is calling “Chapter 2,” this new core set isn’t a 2nd Edition or drastic departure from what fans have fallen in love with. Instead, it acts as the starting line for what Fantasy Flight has deemed as the modern environment of Arkham Horror going forward. It manages to deliver a great blend of fast-paced action, tough choices, and some great fights that will draw in interested new audiences and offer some fun new cards for existing players to add to their collection.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game has become one of my main “brewery games,” where I will meet up with my friends, grab a few drinks, and fight our way through the horrors of the universe, and every time, new people will come up curious about what we are playing. More often than not, they will stick around for a few turns, mesmerized by the beautiful artwork, the wild things happening, or inspired to share their own memorable board game moments with us. I love this game, and this latest core set does nothing to diminish that joy I feel whenever I get this to the table.

Considering it’s nigh impossible to get many of the previous Arkham Horror expansions thanks to Fantasy Flight’s pivot to set rotations, I look forward to further expanding my Lovecraftian collection going forward. For any gaming groups looking for a new game to dive deep into, I wholeheartedly recommend picking up this new box and checking out the Brethren of Ash campaign. We can always use more investigators to hold back the horrors of the universe.

Where to Buy

• Get it at Amazon
• Get it at Asmodee