Category: Games

Games: London

Matthew

This review is cross-posted to Playtest. London is available via Amazon and Funagain Games.

Tucked away in the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony was a segment illustrating the evolution of Britain from pastoral island to thriving metropolis. Apparently many American found this transformation boring. I, on the other hand, was riveted — probably because, as the participants rolled up the grass and erected smokestacks, I could visualize myself playing the corresponding cards in Martin Wallace’s London.

Set after the Great Fire of 1666, and spanning the quarter millenia thereafter, London has players rebuilding the Capital through the play of cards, which depict buildings such as shops and train stations, infrastructure such as sewers and schools, populations such as refugees and paupers, and institutions such as the British Museum. Most of these cards confer a one-time benefit to the owner — money and victory points are the most common boons — when he chooses to “run” his city. 

Even as big a fan of Martin Wallace as I must admit that that his games can rarely be accused of elegance. They often seem as though they could have benefited from some additional development (and, indeed, several of his games have received this development and been reissued under a new name: Age of Steam/Steam, Brass/Age of Industry, etc.). One of his newest offerings, A Few Acres of Snow, asks the active player to select two actions from a menu of over a dozen, a panoply of options that can lead to paralysis. 

Players of London, on the other hand, use their turn to perform a single action from a possible four: draw cards, play cards, run their city, or buy one of the 20 London boroughs shown on the game board. This simplicity puts London within spitting distance of “gateway game” territory, something else rarely said of Martin Wallace’s offerings.

Even with such a streamlined design, though, Wallace manages to pack in a fair amount of theme. The cards, of course, have a host of different effects that reflect their type: markets produce money, paupers can be sent to school (or prison), and so forth. Cards are placed into stacks, which allows a player to “build over” those of an earlier era with modern buildings of increased efficiency. And, when a city is run, players receive deleterious “poverty points” equal to their stacks of cards, minus the number of boroughs they have acquired; thus, having a lot of buildings in a small area breeds poverty, while expansion reduces the pressures of urbanization. As I said: simple and thematic.

Wallace also attempts to mitigate the lack of player interaction that plagues many other games of this ilk. The game board features a display area, which holds, face-up, cards from which a player can draw. When someone plays a card to their area, they must also select from their hand a second card and place it into this display area. Thus, the face-up cards available for you to draw are those that your opponents have seen fit to make available. This clever twist on the traditional draw-cards/play-cards system allows you to stay in your own sandbox if you prefer, though it behooves a player to keep an eye on what would benefit his opponents — and withhold it.

Comparisons between London and San Juan are inevitable and illuminating, as both have players building a city by playing cards to the table before them. (London, it’s worth noting, is very much a card game, despite the attractive and largely superfluous gameboard). One could almost imagine London as the San Juan prototype — if, during development, someone hit upon the idea of using cards instead of money to pay for buildings, and of jettisoning the board entirely, you’d be three-quarters of the way from one to the other. 

Whether you prefer London to San Juan largely depends on how the amount of polish you demand of your games. Personally, I enjoy the opacity inherent in a rougher-hewn design. Whereas powerful building combinations are fairly obvious in San Juan (e.g., a building that gives you additional goods pairs well with a building that allows you to sell additional goods), London requires analysis, and repeat plays, to suss out these opportunities for synergy. 

Where London falters, in my opinion, is in the ratio of complexity to playing time — 90 to 120 minutes is a bit long for a game in which player options are so constrained. It also, perversely, contains a few cards that require to owner to single out another player for abuse. Some game groups (such as my own, alas) consider any and all “take that!” elements in a game design as grounds for summary rejection.

I, on the other hand, quite enjoy London, despite (or, let’s be honest, probably because of) its idiosyncrasies. Like Martin Wallace, I appreciate theme and I am willing to brook a few complications if they help in the setting the atmosphere. More to the point, I’m a fan of simple games that require tough decisions and provide ample opportunity for strategic play. By that criteria, London is capital indeed.

Games: Friday

Matthew 1 Comment

This review is cross-posted on Playtest. Friday is available via Amazon and Funagain Games.

You’ve invited friends over for games this evening, but their replies are rife with hedges and qualifiers. “I’ll try to make it” says one; “maybe I’ll swing by later” vows another. And so, having no clear idea of how many will actually attend, you mentally prepare for every contingency: maybe Bang! if seven or six others arrive, Arkham Horror for four or three, Agricola if you’re joined by only two or one.

But what if the unthinkable happens?

Don’t you worry. Friday’s got your back.

Created by Friedemann Friese (he of the sublime Power Grid and brain-damaging Fresh Fish) Friday is the latest of the designer’s forays into deck-building. Friese previously explored the genre with Fürstenfeld, but with limited success — as with so many deck-builders, Fürstenfeld often feels like “multiplayer solitaire”, with interaction so constrained that it’s as if everyone at the table is playing a separate game. Friese doesn’t address this problem in Friday so much as capitalize on it; in fact, he describes Friday as “a multiplayer solitaire game … without the other players”. 

Because, you see, Friday is that rarest of beasts: a one-player-only commercial card game.

The components of Friday

Friday casts you in the role of Robinson Crusoe, struggling to survive on a tropical island long enough for rescue. (According to the rules you are technically Crusoe’s assitant Friday, but this was clearly chosen so that Friese could call this the second game in his “Freitag Project”, following Black Friday.) To do so, you must weather a series of hardships, ranging from the relatively benign (swimming back to your wrecked ship to retrieve supplies) to the deadly (exploring the depths of the island). Each obstacle has a specific “Hazard Value”, and you overcome it if the total of the cards revealed from your Knowledge Deck equals or exceed this value. If you fall short of the target number, you may repeatedly draw and play an additional card at a cost of one life token (from your starting allotment of 20). Or, at any time, you can simply surrender, and pay life tokens equal to the margin of defeat. Work your way through the Hazard deck three times and you’re given the opportunity to fight pirates and win the game; if, on the other hand, you run out of life tokens, you become an entrée for wild animals or cannibals.

Cards in Friday serve a dual purpose: one half shows a Hazard (and a Hazard Value), and the other half shows Crusoe (and a Knowledge Value). When you overcome an hazard, the card goes into your discard pile, and become available to you as a Knowledge Card after the next shuffle. 

But failing to defeat a hazard brings its own reward, for it is only then that you are allowed to eliminate cards from your Knowledge Deck. Early in the game your Knowledge Cards are weak, but sufficient to combat the simpler challenges; as you encounter increasingly difficult travails, however, these cards become a liability, as they clutter your deck and crowd out the more powerful cards necessary for success. Furthermore, you will occasionally have to add an Aging Card to your deck, which bestows penalties, rather than benefits, when drawn. Thus, removing cards is often every bit as important as claiming them.

This “get good cards if you win and lose bad cards if you lose” system is not only clever, but surprisingly thematic. As in real life, you gain as much from your defeats as you do from your victories, as you learn from your mistakes and become a stronger person for it.

A Hazard Card, with the Hazard (cannibals) on the bottom half and the Knowledge Value (4) on the top

Friedemann Friese is a notorious dabbler, and loves to try out new mechanisms in his games. Friday definitely feels like such an experiment, complete with small but impressive innovations, as well as some rough edges. As an example of the latter, a player wins the game by fighting two pirates, each a Hazard Card of exceptional difficulty. It probably says more about me than of Friday when I tell you that this vexes me to no end. The game’s narrative works perfect with Crusoe surviving long enough for a (single) pirate ship to visit his isle, defeating the crew with his hard-won skills, and sailing off into the sunset for victory. Asking Crusoe to fight two pirate ships, one after another, makes no goddamned sense whatsoever. It feels as if Friese got the game to where it worked, realized that players were winning too often, impulsively threw in a second pirate to up the difficulty, and called it good. This impression of slapdashery is reinforced by a few other oddities, such as the poor translations of the card names.

Still, Friday is a fun way to while away an hour. (Each game only takes 20 minutes but, as with traditional solitaire, the compulsion to play several in a row is nearly irresistible.) It also has four levels of difficulty, even the lowest of which is a considerable challenge. And it gives you something to play when your flaky friends again stand you up.

I recommend Friday not only for its admirable qualities, of which there are plenty, but also because, as an engrossing one-player game, it will fill a niche in your collection that is almost certainly vacant.

Text Adventurer

Matthew 9 Comments

Here’s a thing I did: textadventurer.org.

I created the @textadventurer twitterbot to help myself learn the Twitter API. Originally it did nothing but tweet Zork commands, taken from a walkthrough. I was its sole follower.

Oddly, I really enjoyed seeing the text adventurer wander through my twitter feed every hour or so. And when he would tweet, say,”go north”, I would find myself curious as to where he was headed. So I eventually created the companion account @zork_i, rebooted @textadventurer, and introduced them to one another. Now they are playing out Zork I in its entirety.

Follow @textadventurer if you just want him to stagger into your Twitter timeline on occasion; follow @zork_i if you’d like to see the game reply to his commands. You can see the history of their interactions here, and check the current state of the game by visiting textadventurer.org.

Some details:

  • @textadventurer sends moves at random intervals; you may see six on one day, zero on another. On average he will issue three or four commands every 24 hours.

  • The adventurer will not make mistakes. He will not do something fatal, put the game into an unwinnable state, attempt to pick up items while his inventory is full, get lost in the maze, etc. That is not to say that the adventurer will complete the game in the minimum number of moves, though. He will sometimes stop to smell the roses (and read the leaflets), even when such actions are not necessary for completion.

  • Even though the adventurer is semi-optimized, you will still, if you follow him on Twitter, sometimes receive a passel of movement commands in a row, as he works his way through the coal mines, navigates the maze, and travels from one end of the Great Underground Empire to the other. I though about packing these into a single command for brevity (“go north, east, southeast, up”, etc.), but decided to leave each command atomic for the sake of authenticity.

  • The replies are taken verbatim from Infocom’s Zork I. Because memory was at a premium at the time of the game’s release, most replies are short enough to fit into single tweet. Some take two or three, which @zork_i will send at 60 seconds intervals. There are (relatively) few longer replies, requiring three or more tweets, most of which are found early in the game as new rooms are explored; a couple require five or six tweets; and there are two which are seven tweets long.

Want to play Zork I yourself? You can do so online, or find downloadable versions of the game at the Interactive Fiction Database. Happy adventuring!

Tweets of Horror

Matthew 7 Comments

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Rob Daviau ran an epic game of Tomb of Horrors.

Lest the names ring no bells: “Rob Daviau” was previously mentioned on this blog as designer of the excellent Risk: Legacy, while “Tomb of Horrors” is the legendary (and notoriously lethal) 1978 adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the playing of which was de rigueur for anyone who dabbled in the 1st edition of AD&D.

Throughout the month of May, Daviau sent a number of tweets about his preparations for the big game. Finally, over the Memorial Day weekend, he inflicted the dungeon on his friends, and kept his Twitter followers appraised of the carnage.

Here are his tweets, reprinted with permission:

Prologue

 
 
Day One

 
 
Day Two

 
 
Day Three

 
 
Epilogue

 
 
A Point of Clarification

Says Daviau:

The victory condition was “steal the demi-lich’s treasure and leave,” not “kill the demi-lich”. The first is possible; the second is not. Careful reading of the text shows that you can rob him blind in the final room as long as you don’t touch his skull. If you do that, you die. Once my players figured out “don’t touch the skull”, they won.

The things you need to do to kill the demi-lich are so obscure, non-intuitive, and bizarre that no one would think to do them. And the adventure doesn’t give any clues to it so you’d have to work it in to the campaign ahead of time.

 
 
Q&A

Matthew: Do you play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons?
Rob Daviau: I did as a middle school kid, then off and on since then. I play when I can, but finding a regular campaign has eluded me since about 1999. Either I don’t the time, or a group is too far away, or, as often is the case, the group just doesn’t feel right. Being in a D&D group is like being in a band. If the vibe is slightly off, it’s just not the same.

M: Why 1st edition Tomb of Horrors?
RD: I’m 42, so 1e is the way I’ve played 85%+ of my D&D experiences. As I got older, I didn’t have the time I did when I was 11-15. So there’s a certain fondness for it. I’ve also been playtesting the D&DNext rules for Wizards of the Coast since November and I wanted to go back and see how 1e rules felt as an adult–how much was nostalgia and how much still held together.

Playing Tomb of Horrors came after reading Ready Player One, where the 1e Tomb has a prominent role. After finishing the book I went back and read the module for the first time in 30 years. It seemed unfair, biased, and kind of crazy. My guess is that future editions make it more “fair”, so I wanted to go back to Gygax’s original vision.

I have to say that the experience, both the system and the module, were far better than I expected from the prep work. I scared the hell out of the players and they really did take their time to think things through, resulting in a far lower death rate than anticipated, and hoped for. Also 1e, for all its useless parts, really puts things in the hands of the DM. You only use about 5% of the rules since the rest don’t really make sense. What I discovered is that a lack of rules results a lack of rules lawyers. Its as simple as that.

M: I’ve never played Tomb of Horrors, but isn’t 20 PCs an insane number of players?
RD: It would be if that were a player count, but it was a character count. I was at a friend’s home convention, where there was going to be over 30 people, with perhaps 15 or so D&D players. But I didn’t want people to have to commit to the whole adventure (it took about 8-10 hours), nor be disappointed if they died in the first minute, so I recast the adventure as a sort of puzzle. Five players would play at once, using characters from the pre-gen pool; when a character died, a new one could be brought in. This way players could come and go, and also not feel bad if they character they were playing died suddenly.

M: At one point you mention Dwarven Forge. What is that?
RD: The company that makes the incredible 3D dungeon walls, floors, etc., that you see throughout my pictures. My friend has just enough money and just too little willpower, and ended up buying a tremendous amount of it about 10 years ago. We had a lot of fun building these rooms. Grown nerds just look for opportunities like this.

M: May I post your Jim Carroll “People Who Died” rewrite?
RD: Please do. I wrote it because there were people still at the convention who had spent the weekend actually jamming in the garage. I threw it at them as a challenge to learn and record it. The results are below.
 
 
All the PCs Who Died

Fodder the Fighter, he was 8 levels high
Gargoyle hit him, ripped out his spine
Aryk was next up on the gargoyle’s list
Threw him in a pit but Aryk can’t fly
Davin entered an arch of smoke and mist
Sprung out naked and started to cry
He was a friend of mine

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Karl was astonishing, a gnome of some reknown
Touched a lightning altar so they put him in the ground
Dravin got the shakes from a gas of fear and dread
Fled the tomb of horrors, with our gold but he’s not dead
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

The Mincer ran in fear and took a bad left turn
Slid down a polished slope and started to burn
No-name 12 was a wizard who the group agreed to kill
To find a secret door that was invisible
And No-name 12, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Howard Hughes the cleric had just found his groove
Ended up some jelly on the demi-lich roof
Cringar of West had been there longest
But someone knocked the skull and Acererak kills the strongest
But Cringar didn’t cry, Cringar died

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

The rest grabbed the loot from the last little room
Made their way out of this filthy little tomb
They got some bitchin potions, a rod, and some gems
So the others didn’t die in vain,
And No-Name 12, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are PC who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Matthew 7 Comments

This post is part of the H. P. Lovefest. Important: If you are thinking of playing this game on the PC (as opposed to on X-Box), please see my caveat at the end of the review.

In 2003 I began to hear rumors of a forthcoming video game based on Call of Cthulhu. My interest was piqued but my hopes were not high. I assumed that the game would be a routine first-person shooter, with the thinnest veneer of Lovecraft slapped on so as to justify the license. After all (thought I), how could a video game approximate the experience of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game?

That question soon became moot. In early 2004 I became a father, and my career as a gamer came to an end–at least for a spell.

I was, however, reminded of the game last month, as I continued research for the H. P. Lovefest. And I discovered, to my surprise, that Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was not only released, but released to mostly positive reviews. Even more encouraging to me, though, were some of the negative comments made by gamers on Amazon and Metacritic. They accused the game of being overly linear; they lamented the long and unskippable cut-scenes used to provide voluminous expository information; and they railed against the ridiculously high difficulty level.

A frustratingly lethal game with a focus on narrative and a proclivity toward railroading players? This sounds like a better adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game than I’d expected!

And so, for the sake of the H. P Lovefest, I downloaded a copy of the game from Steam and played it all the way through. Oh, the things I do for you.

My fears that the game would be heavy on first-person shooting and light on Lovecraft were allayed immediately. Dark Corners opens in 1909 with the protagonist, Private Detective Jack Walters, venturing into the homestead of a strange religion called the Fellowship of the Yith. As Walters explores the house, searching for clues as to the purpose of the cult, he discovers paintings of the Great Old Ones upon the walls, finds the Pnakotic Manuscripts on an altar, and stumbles across some horrible Yithian technology in the basement. And, significantly, he does all this unarmed. Even from the get-go, the focus of the game is on investigation, stealth, and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

The main story, set six years after the prologue, keeps you in the role of Jack Walters, and deprives you of weapons for at least the first quarter of the game. Which is not to say that you lack opposition–far from it. After you travel to Innsmouth (yes, that Innsmouth) you are beset by enemies on all sides, and must survive by skulking in the shadows when possible, running like hell when necessary, and patching up your wounds with first aid kits when you can find a moment’s reprieve. The flight-not-fight tenor of the game is so emphasized that, even after you acquire a gun, you’ll tend to use it as a last resort rather than as a first.

The story of Dark Corners is impressive, on par in detail and faithfulness to Lovecraft with the best of the Call of Cthulhu scenarios. And it even incorporates CoC’s most interesting mechanism, the sanity attribute. When Walters encounters horrors, key aspects of the game change to reflect his mental distress: the video becomes blurry, or wavers in and out of focus; the audio warps and wafts; and the controls become unreliable. Too much terror in too short a time frame and Walters may well go insane–with deadly consequences.

The devotion of the Dark Corners writers to the source material–both Lovecraft’s stories (The Shadow Over Innsmouth foremost among them) and the CoC RPG–is immensely gratifying, and shines in every chapter. I actually played the game through twice: once on the regular level of difficulty, and a second time on the easiest level, so as to enjoy the story without being murdered every forty seconds.

And you will be. Murdered, that is. Often. Even I, a fan of the notoriously fatal role-playing game, found myself exasperated at times by the lethality of the game. There is, for instance, an scene about a third of the way though, in which you must escape from the Innsmouthian locals, that is inexcusably unforgiving. I am also going to side with many of the game’s critics in declaring the save points in the game to be way too few and far between. I understand the philosophical unpinning of this decision on the part of the game designers–preventing players from saving at will makes the game all the more scary–but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel like defenestrating my laptop on more than one occasion.

All that said, I enjoyed Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth as much as any game I have played recently, a list that includes the both the Halflife and the Portal series. As a Lovecraft aficionado I am obviously biased, but even so it does not surprise me that the game was included in this compendium of Best Games of All Time.

Dark Corners is as close of a Call of Cthulhu campaign as you’re going to get without five other people and some ten-sided dice, and it’s a loving tribute to the master of dread.

Huge Caveat for PC Gamers: Dark Corners was originally developed for the XBox and, as I understand it, the PC port was performed hastily, in the last days before Headfirst Productions went belly-up. As a result, the PC version has some bugs. Some are small and ignorable; others are large and obnoxious. One however, near the end of the story, literally renders the game unfinishable.

The bug doesn’t occur on all systems, but it occurred on mine and, I suspect, on most modern systems. It takes place on the ship, when you are asked to fire a cannon at Devil’s Reef. The reef is supposed to show blue lights to indicate your targets, but the bug prevents them from appearing, making this mini-game all but impossible to complete.

Here is the solution:

  1. Get to the point where you are supposed to shell Devil’s Reef, which takes place in the “A Dangerous Journey” chapter. Look through the viewfinder and, if the blue lights aren’t obvious, exit the game.

  2. Download this zip file.

  3. Unzip the file and copy the “A Dangerous Voyage 5-28-2011 6.11.26 PM” folder into “C:\Users\[yourusername]\Documents\Bethesda\Call of Cthulhu”

  4. Relaunch Dark Corners, choose “Load Game”, and select the “A Dangerous Voyage – 05/28/2011” save slot.

A bug of this magnitude is clearly unacceptable, and I therefore cannot recommend the PC edition of this game (even though that’s what I played). But reviews of the XBox version make no mention of this glitch; that version is presumably unaffected by this and several other errors.

Yo, Gamer!

Matthew 1 Comment

A couple of announcements for the gamers in the crowd.

Tabletop: Wil Wheaton, best known for his role as “Wil Wheaton” (The Internet, 1992-present), is launching a new web show called “Tabletop”, in which he sits around and plays board games with Felicia Day.

Dude is living the dream. Specifically, he is living my dream. Thaaaaaat doesn’t seem right.

Geekway 2 the West: My buddy Chris is one of the organizers of an upcoming gaming convention, Geekway 2 the West, which runs May 17-20 in St. Louis, Missouri. Take it away, Chris:

Geekway started 8 years ago as 22 people in one man’s basement, and last year we had 350 people for four days of pure boardgame bliss. We’ve always had the tradition of pouring back in every red cent we get into prizes, facilities, etc. Last year, we had some of our local woodcrafters make a crokinole board and raffled it off. It was such a huge success, that we’re doing the same, and donating all proceeds to Child’s Play.

Chris is good people, and someone with whom I routinely consult when looking into new games (either by pestering him in email, or by reading his reviews on Boardgame Geek). Full details on the convention are available on the Geekway 2 the West website, and you can follow @geekway on Twitter.

PAX: A speaking of Wil Wheaton and conventions and Child’s Play, I’ll remind folks about my absurdly long essay about the Penny Arcade Expo. And be aware that PAX East takes place in Boston just a few weeks from now, April 6-8. Seattle’s PAX Prime, meanwhile, is slated for Labor Day weekend, and I will absolutely be attending again.

Lovecraftian Gaming: Even though my article on Lovecraft ran in The Morning News last Thursday, and was originally intended to be the culmination of the the H. P. Lovefest, I will continue to post about the author and his legacy through Walpurgis Night, April 30th. In addition to my post on Arkham Horror, I will also be reviewing the board games Mansions of Madness and Elder Sign, the video game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and the Lovecraftian role-playing game–the other Lovecraftian role-playing game–Trail of Cthulhu. Sweeeet.

Games: Arkham Horror

Matthew 5 Comments

This post is part of the H. P. Lovefest.

There are countless board games that simulate D&D and similar “dungeon crawl” RPGs. They accomplish this by providing the components and rules necessary for the hack and slash element of the game: the movement through the labyrinth, encountering of monsters, the throwing of dice to resolve combat. The narrative aspects of the roleplaying game, meanwhile, are surgically removed, or reduced to an “Introductory Paragraph” to be read to the players before the action begins.

But how does one recreate the experience of Call of Cthulhu, a roleplaying game in which story is paramount? Arkham Horror does so by focusing on the aspects of CoC that make it unique: the teamwork (AH is a cooperative game), the escalating sense of doom, the “sanity” attribute, and, above all else, the plot arcs of the characters involved.


Pete the Drifter investigates the Black Cave

The board depicts Arkham, the fictional setting of many of Lovecraft’s stories, in the most functional manner possible, with locations such as “The Witch House” as circles with artwork, streets as colored rectangles, and the routes connecting the two as thick white lines. The background shows tract housing in an attempt to make things look a little more City-ish, but it’s clear that the board was designed to be pragmatic rather than aesthetic. The first time you see it you are likely to wonder how the game hopes to capture the spirit of Lovecraft with such a drab playing surface.

The answer, as in the roleplaying game on which Arkham Horror is based, is via story–a staggering amount of story of story. Flavor text is everywhere and, unlike most games of this sort, demands to be read. For starters, each player begins with a Investigator–Joe Diamond the private eye, Jenny Barnes the dilettante, etc.–and the back of each character card tells “The Story So Far”, describing how this unfortunate soul came to uncover those Things That Man Was Not Meant to Know. For example:

Sister Mary has served the Church faithfully for many years, so when she was sent to Arkham to work with Father Michael, a man whose writings she had admired for many years, she felt that she was truly blessed. Now, after witnessing Father Michael’s strange mood swings and seeing some of the bizarre practices that go on in this town, she’s beginning to feel that she may have been a bit too hasty …

Now, gathering her things and quietly leaving South Church, Sister Mary has decided to investigate this town, and in so doing, reaffirm her faith.


Sister Mary is one of 16 Arkham Horror Investigators

These characters move around the city of Arkham, investigating locations, collecting items, and unearthing clues. There is a separate stack of cards for each neighborhoods on the board, and when an Investigator visits a building–the Library in the Miskatonic neighborhood, say–a card from the corresponding deck is drawn. The text describes an encounter experienced by the character, and usually asks the player to perform a Check by rolling a number of dice and comparing the result to the Investigator’s relevant Skill: Fight, Sneak, Lore, Luck, and so on. Here again the mechanics of the Call of Cthulhu RPG are emulated, albeit in a simplified form.

Meanwhile, gates to Other Worlds open around town and unleash terrible creatures into the streets, while the power of some terrible god grows ever stronger. Players can close these gates, but only after traversing the bizarre dimensions to which they lead, and returning to town before irrevocable madness sets in. If too many gates are open concurrently, or if monsters completely overrun the town, or if any of a number of Apocalypse-triggering conditions are met, the Great Old One shows up for a climatic final battle. And as anyone who has played Call of Cthulhu can tell you, shooting Yog-Sothoth with a .45 rarely ends well.


Yes you can battle–and be devoured by-the Big Guy himself. It’s an honor.

There is more to the game–lots lots lots more–but you get the gist: from humble beginnings the Investigators uncover a terrible threat of mankind, and save the world in the nick of time … or suffer a fate worse than death in their failure. No game I own comes closer to recreating the feel of a RPG than Arkham Horror.

Now the caveats, of which there are many.

First, this is a Byzantine game, with a dizzying amount of stuff of which to keep track. On more than one occasion while playing Arkham Horror I have thought that this, the board game version of Call of Cthulhu, is more complex than the roleplaying game on which it is based.

Second, it takes a loooong time to play: three hours at a minimum, unless you are spectacularly (un)lucky. A corollary to this is that the game’s player rating of “2-8” is universally acknowledged as BS: playing AH with more than four is ill-advised, unless you’ve set aside a week for the playing.

Third, AH is an very much an “experience” game; anyone who cares more about victory than enjoying the ride will wind up vexed and frustrated at the vagaries of fate. Don’t play with that person, they are a drag.

The Fantasy Flight version of Arkham Horror was released in 2005, but for some perverse reason I didn’t pick it up until last year. Once I did,though, it quickly became a favorite, and remains for me an ideal ways to while away an evening. If you are interested in playing, see if someone you know has the game and would be willing to teach it to you–there is no better way to learn. But even if you have to undertake the Herculean task of decoding the rulebook, your investment will pay you back with interest. For fans of Lovecraft, Arkham Horror is a game for the ages, and the strange aeons therein.

Grabbag O’ Updates

Matthew 5 Comments

Risk: Legacy (no spoilers): We have now played seven games of Risk: Legacy, and our interest in the game has yet to flag. As I mentioned in my initial review, our first session ended with new rules and cards coming into play, inspiring us to reconvene the following Sunday and continue our campaign. Yet more goodies were unveiled during the second session, but scheduling conflicts prevented us from gathering a third time until yesterday evening.

Last night we played two more games and, in the middle of the second, the most significant change yet was introduced, a literal “gamechanger” that goosed our enthusiasm for one more session at least. I was dubious that we would complete the full 15-game arc, but with the eighth and ninth installments approaching and yet more stuff in the box to discover, my skepticism on this point is waning.

It’s still Risk, for good or ill. But at the very least you you gotta acknowledge the skill with which they seeded the game with hooks to keep the players engrossed.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch: My atrophied pinky fell off as prophesied, but the good folks at OSI stepped in and replaced it with a bionic prosthetic.

I am still getting the hang of it, and have thus far broken the hands of three people while consummating pinky swears. Also I guess I have to fight Bigfoot? That sounds like bullshit but whatever.

Return of the Elder Gods: The H. P. Lovefest resumes tomorrow with a review of Arkham Horror.

Live to Fight

Matthew 3 Comments

Story I heard from Sheila Davis:

Last weekend I attended Ghengis Con in Denver. During a game one of the other participants told me of his experience at a previous convention.

He’d signed up as Gamemaster for a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, and drew the morning slot. Only one person showed up at the time of the game, but they decided to play anyway.

Talking to the player, the GM learned that the gentleman was unfamiliar with the game. In fact he’d never roleplayed before, and had no idea what the hobby was about. He and his wife lived in one of the small mountain towns of the Rockies, and every few months they’d drive into Denver to see what was happening. He’d discovered the game convention while his wife was at a doll show and, thinking it sounded fun, decided to drop in.

The GM handed the player a character sheet for a stalwart Ranger, gave him a brief overview of play, and they were off. When the player ran into his first monster, the Gamemaster helpfully pointed out the Ranger’s skill in archery and swordplay.

“So what do you want to do?” the GM asked.

The player studied his character sheet. “It says I can do bird calls,” he noted.

“That’s right,” the GM replied, somewhat puzzled.

“OK. I do a bird call to distract the monster, and then sneak past him.”

The fellow rolled the dice and successfully evaded the monster. In fact, over the course of the game, the player cleverly avoided every monster in the dungeon, with nary an arrow fired or sword unsheathed.