So my friend and I decided to try playing a game via MSN tonight. We both have our own copies of every expansion so we designated his as the "Master Board" and he would draw all Mythos cards and Encounters and tell me what happened and I'd echo it on my board.

With a random slection of Investigators, he ended up with Darrell and Trish and I had Zoey and Kate. The Ancient One was Chaugnar Fagn and the first gate opened on Devil's Reef. I won't bore you with the full details of the game, suffice to say it worked out fairly well. I rolled the dice and made the decisions for my Investigators but everything else was left for him to do. We reasoned that we couldn't both draw items for fear of duplicating one too many times, same for a Mythos card, etc. However, with hindsight, given how little I actually had to do, I think if we do it again then we'll have to come up with a way that I can draw cards after all. As it was, another of my friends was on MSN so I chatted with them while waiting for the "Master Board" to go through the motions. Possibly when he draw a Mythos card, I take it out of my deck and then on my turns just shuffle and draw. Same for items, etc. But with that one little niggle aside, it worked well. OK, we lost the game, too many gates opening on Investigators all the fecking time, but playing by MSN did kinda work. We hope to try again soon ...

I did one via telephone once, where the person on the other end didn't have a copy.

Never again.

A shame it's not possible for a version for Vassal or... erm, the other boardgame emulator thingy.

Tibs said:

Well, I surely can understand that you don't want to go through it again..

That's exactly what I'm planning to do with my friend, after he's got a camera.

What we could possibly try the next time is having master decks rather than one master board. So one player draws mythos and other world encounters for example and another draws encounters. Another possibility would be to shuffle the location encounter decks after each draw. I used to play this way years ago and for this kind of play might give a more rounded involved game for everyone involved.

I guess the best thing would be some kind of program which stores all the cards with card text, and allows you to "place" cards near investigators, or in a common area. However, I doubt distributing such a program to people who don't own the game would be legal, so it should be for personal use only. ^^

I find this thread very interesting, because a friend and I have been wanting to play Arkham Horror over a distance for quite some time now. The OP's plan sounded kinda workable; it's a shame Fantasy Flight Games won't GET ON THE BALL as far as online play goes. Sigh, oh well. We'll have to work out some laborious process or another.

Very intriguing...One of my friends who plays lives some 200 miles away. This could be interesting to try.

Couldn't work out worse than our Hecatomb card games or Dungeons and Dragons we were playing via a forum.