Arkham Horror: the Card Game is an RPG-like game where the cards combine with player choices to create a story of eldritch horror and sanity-shattering madness. You’ll build a deck of cards to create a scenario, and other decks of cards will define your characters who will go through the adventure described by the scenario cards that are drawn.
The game comes with five Investigator decks. Roland Banks is an officer of the law who can acquire valuable clues by defeating enemies in combat. Daisy Walker is a researcher whose powers depend on what books she has in play. “Skids” O’Toole is an ex-con man with the ability to play a lot of actions at once, but is very fragile, especially against the more esoteric dangers of the game. Agnes Baker has access to arcane powers fueled by collecting Horror tokens, tokens that represent your character losing their cool in the face of eldritch wrongness. Where most characters treat Horror as a purely bad thing, Agnes can use it to dispatch enemies quickly. Wendy Adams is a slippery survivor with all sorts of useful deck-manipulation tricks that allow you redo certain actions or draw extra cards when you fail at something.
Each of these Investigators is defined by four stats: Willpower, Intellect, Combat, and Agility. If the Investigator’s stat is equal to or higher than what’s needed to succeed, the Investigator succeeds and reaps the rewards. However, tokens drawn from the Chaos Bag might modify (usually lower) an Investigator’s stats. Each Investigator also has at least one Weakness card in their deck which can also modify their abilities when it comes into play.
A Scenario is defined by a deck of cards that includes Encounters (usually enemies to defeat or evade), Locations, Agendas, and Acts. Agendas tell you what you need to advance through the Acts deck, and the Acts deck ratchets up the tension up until the end of the game.
Fantasy Flight describes Arkham Horror: The Card Game as a “Living Card Game.” By this, the mean that they’ll be releasing more card sets to define new characters you can play, as well as new scenarios to pit your characters against. There won’t be any randomizing of the contents, so you’ll know exactly what you’re getting, allowing you to create your own investigators or scenarios by mixing up the different sets.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a cooperative experience you can play alone, or with up to four people. It encourages a role-play experience, making it an excellent choice to fall back on when you don’t have enough players show up for your regularly scheduled RPG sessions. It’s also nice for scratching that RPG itch between sessions, and fans of eldritch horror will enjoy tackling the different scenarios in the boxed set with different combinations of Investigators and personalized decks to see how things turn out differently. You can play the scenarios as single-shot events or combine them to create a campaign. Talk to the helpful and totally-not-cultists-devoted-to-eldritch-horrors people at your local Dragon’s Lair Games & Fantasy® today about getting your hands on Arkham Horror: The Card Game and learning what expansions will be coming out for it soon.
