So I just bought into the game (core set and some of the expansions in progressive order).

As a long time super fan of Lord of the Rings the Living Card game I was quite hesitant to get into a second game, in particular since I'm not the hugest fan of Lovecraft (mostly like just like the Indian Jones sub-layer it has). In either case, while theme is always super important, gameplay to me can usually get me deeper into a theme so I took a crack at this one after watching some reviews and how to play videos.

In any case, there are a couple of questions (I feel like I'm asking a bit late) that I have that I'm sort of hoping and praying are answered with some objectivity from fans of the game.

First, how does the game do solo? One of the key draws for me to Lord of the Rings the card game which in its own right is quite an oddity for me since I typically wouldn't venture that deeply into a collectible card game was the extremely challenging solo play. LOTRLCG is **** near perfect when it comes to being playable solo, it's ridiculously challenging and to me that is a big draw but also really loyal to the source material thematically which is icing on the cake. I'm wondering how Arkham Horror fairs.

Second thing is regarding re-playability. Now with LOTRLCG replay-ability is really driven by challenge and deck building. In general, you will play most quests many times before you kind of "solve the puzzle", after which you kind of know how to beat it and you might not go back to it, at least not for a long time. With the sheer amount of quests, including campaign mode and various sort of player instituted formats the replayability is really quite near infinite. But I got the feeling from some of the videos that with Arkham horror there is a kind of "go through it once" adventure like thing going. How do you rate the replayability of Arkham Horror, once the story is played through once, do you have a sense of "lets do it again but this time I will ... xx yy... " or is it more like you have one good run and its done?

Finally regarding deck building, characters etc.. Do I understand it that there are 4 Heroes in the game and that's it or are new heroes introduced for each campaign? or do you simply add new heroes to the core gaining a growing number of heroes as you collect to run the adventures with a second, third .. etc time. Like in LOTRLCG basically every time you get a new hero it kind of feels like... ahah.. with this hero I can build this or that type of deck and you have this urge to go back to all of your old quests to try your hand at them again with the new setup. How does that work in Arkham Horror.

Thanks for any reply's its greatly appreciated!

To me AH LCG is more about the story than the difficulty challenge. It does have options to increase the difficulty though. It is playable solo but I think it would be more fun in a group.

Re-playability will most comes from playing with different investigators. While each scenario can be played as standalone adventures, it is best played in the campaign mode. Each scenario will also have different resolution depending on your actions and decisions and it could have an effect in the following scenarios. You will also be able move on (usually) to the next scenario even if you failed to do well in the current one, you will just incur some penalty. Your investigator will also get progressive better (in cards) as they gain experience instead of being all powerful from the start. But at the same time they might also get crazier or injured.

The core comes with 5 investigators, 1 for each class. Each campaign will add 5-6 new investigators. The thing about these investigators is that they all have different deck building restrictions and comes with their unique signature card and weakness which adds a lot of flavour to them.

2 hours ago, BigKahuna said:

First, how does the game do solo? One of the key draws for me to Lord of the Rings the card game which in its own right is quite an oddity for me since I typically wouldn't venture that deeply into a collectible card game was the extremely challenging solo play. LOTRLCG is **** near perfect when it comes to being playable solo, it's ridiculously challenging and to me that is a big draw but also really loyal to the source material thematically which is icing on the cake. I'm wondering how Arkham Horror fairs.

I haven't tried solo but I would imagine it plays well.

Just like LOTR you can play 1 or 2 investigators ( or 3 or 4..it's your game ! ) and the game difficulty scales with number of investigators....better than LOTR in my opinion.

The game has 4 difficulty levels and you adjust the level by adding or removing tokens from the chaos bag. Instructions are on the first page in the campaign guide.

For a first game with only one investigator, I would recommed using easy level. (..and use Roland. He's good at finding clues and fighting. )

2 hours ago, BigKahuna said:

Second thing is regarding re-playability. Now with LOTRLCG replay-ability is really driven by challenge and deck building. In general, you will play most quests many times before you kind of "solve the puzzle", after which you kind of know how to beat it and you might not go back to it, at least not for a long time. With the sheer amount of quests, including campaign mode and various sort of player instituted formats the replayability is really quite near infinite. But I got the feeling from some of the videos that with Arkham horror there is a kind of "go through it once" adventure like thing going. How do you rate the replayability of Arkham Horror, once the story is played through once, do you have a sense of "lets do it again but this time I will ... xx yy... " or is it more like you have one good run and its done?

Just like in LOTR, it's fun to do a scenario/campaign with a new set of characters.

Unlike LOTR, all scenarios have multiple endings depending on how the investigators are doing and the choises they make. Some scenarios have different versions of locations and several sets of enemies chosen at random during setup, so you never know exactly what will happen and during play the Chaos bag is a never ending source of fun/greif/Joy/disaster/frustration/rage/anger/relief/triumph that will ensure every game is different.

In campaign play the setup of a scenario often changes with the outcome of the previous scenario. A good example is the Ghoul priest from the first scenario. If you don't kill him, he will show up in later scenarios.

Each scenario also gives you XP you can use to change your deck between scenarios.

Add 4 difficulty levels I'd say replayability is really good, especially if you play campaign games ( as you should...this game is designed for campaigns ! )

2 hours ago, BigKahuna said:

Finally regarding deck building, characters etc.. Do I understand it that there are 4 Heroes in the game and that's it or are new heroes introduced for each campaign? or do you simply add new heroes to the core gaining a growing number of heroes as you collect to run the adventures with a second, third .. etc time. Like in LOTRLCG basically every time you get a new hero it kind of feels like... ahah.. with this hero I can build this or that type of deck and you have this urge to go back to all of your old quests to try your hand at them again with the new setup. How does that work in Arkham Horror.

Thanks for any reply's its greatly appreciated!

Well....so far new investigators has only appeared in The dunwich legacy and more will come in The path to Carcosa.

Each investigator has his/her own special abilities, rules,restictions and personal cards for deckbuilding, so you can easily see what kind of deck you can build for a character.

FFG has a sample deck list for all characters on the product page, under support.

Just like LOTR you can use any investigator in any campaign or scenario.

I hope this helps !

This is the only game I've ever gotten hooked on as a solo experience. It plays tremendously well as an absorbing addicting solo game.

The replay value is high in my opinion. The biggest draw of the game is experiencing the story for the first time but I've absolutely gone back through again and again with different characters and new builds and will 100% be doing additional Dunwich run throughs when the new characters and player cards come out in Carcosa

1. You can play this game solo, but it works best with at least 2 players. The reason being sometimes you will find yourself in a scenario where you will be wishing you had a second investigator(perhaps due to an investigators shortcomings or what the scenario throws at you). Though, I suppose you can always make two-handed decks like people do in LotR.

2. Replayability is high, especially in campaign mode. Different outcomes lead to different things occurring as you move along. I have had 4 different Dunwich Legacy campaigns going and they all went in different paths. The one thing lost, however, is the story shock, or rather the twists of the story. Otherwise the mechanics vary. Even then, instead of having a straight difficulty like in LotR, there are 4 varying difficulty levels if you think a scenario is too hard/easy.

3. It seems like they are releasing investigators at every Deluxe expansion rather than adventure pack(which is how heroes are released in LotR for those that don't know). Many of the Investigators are from the previous Arkham Files games, and with at least 50(?) characters out there you can expect more to be released. When Path to Carcosa becomes available(or if you got it at Gencon) there will be 16 investigators available to you if you have everything(I'm not counting promo Marie Lambeau, because 1. she is rare 2. she will be rereleased in a future deluxe expansion). If you get the Core, you will have 5 to start with.

It should also be known you only need to buy two cores to have a playset of everything, where as in LotR, you might opt for a third to get that 3rd Unexpected Courage, etc.

My thoughts:

Solo: I've played with 2, 3, and 4, but not solo. That said, the game scales very well through all those numbers, so I suspect it'll do well solo too. Honestly, it scales far better than LOTR did, IMHO - LOTR could be very uneven in how different scenarios handled different player counts.

Replayability: I look at AH in two stages - discovery, and optimization. The first time through a campaign you're playing for story discovery. After that, it's more LOTR-like, as you work to optimize. As best I can tell, this split is intentional on the part of the designers. Consider a card like Adaptable, which is basically useless if you don't know what's coming, but really, really good if you do. Also, as others have mentioned, the branching campaign makes each play different, and most scenarios have at least minor variations in setup (multiple copies of certain locations, randomized selection, etc). Finally, different investigators play very, very differently, so there's replay value there as well.

Investigators: You've got the right idea. There are 16 available now, spread across 5 classes, and each (at least so far) is very unique. More so than LOTR, but that may be a function of volume more than anything else, as LOTR has so many more. Each investigator plays more like a themed combo of good heroes - a Dunedain hero set, or a Noldor hero set, etc. I've played most of them at least once by this point, and they feel different enough that you're not just doing the same thing over again even if you're playing the same class.

Well I have had my first 4 games, effectively just learning the rules with the first scenario, getting a feel for the game.

I certainly can't say much about it at this point, other than that I appreciate all the answers and it seems at least at the moment everything said so far appears to be quite on the money.

There were two things that kind of stood out for me.

First was that deck building seems very limited and I don't mean in the sense of "options", I get that it will expand etc and more cards will be available but in the sense that it was an extremely tight player deck. With a 30 card limit (at least for the investigator I was playing), a Sphere limitation and a 2 card of the same type limitation and a single investigator per player its considerably less robust than Lord of the Rings. I mean, clearly deck building will be part of the game here, but it seems to me that the game really wasn't designed with deck building construction in mind, at least not comparatively to Lord of the Rings.

I also felt that the game had a more "board game" feel to it, rather then a card game. With position on the board being important, an action economy, juggling of multiple resources and health bars, I kind of felt like while there was a bit of luck involved with the Chaos bag, it was often more about management then card play, at least a lot less then I expected.

Its all very early to make any real assessment for me but quite happy with the game, I really enjoyed the game, certainly a nice addition to my collection. I'm certainly looking forward to trying it with a partner, I have to agree with the above statement that it felt like the game would be more action packed with 2 players.

Thanks again for all the feedback and answered questions, its appriciated.

Your first point is valid. But the limitations allow the game to let you have a more 'role-played' experience as your character will feel extremely unique among available character options. Once you have more investigators, you can choose where you want your limits to fall in regards to spheres, and, to some extent, deck size (see Lola Hayes, and Sefina Rosseu).

I think your second point is really only true if you compare it with other card games. There are more elements to AH than a lot of standard card games. It adds complications that allow the game to grow in unexpected directions, and also allows there to be cards to play that help you with the 'management' aspects of the game. There is very little 'hard' management as far as what you absolutely must concern yourself with (at least within a group and not solo), and so certain tasks can be split up as well as certain roles. A solo Daisy will look very different than a 3 player Daisy, or at least it should if you want to build toward success.

I don't usually solo games, and while I've been tempted to with AH, I think that the game does shine in a multiplayer setting. This is not a rebuttal of your criticisms at all, it's just another viewpoint to consider from someone who has played through the first cycle and made a handful of custom investigators as well. Having done the latter, I love the deck limitations. But I also love strong idiosyncrasy within the characters of my games.

I've played a lot of LotR, most of it solo, so I have some experience with what you're considering.

Solo play. Much like LotR, AHLCG plays well as a true solo game, but it it even better doing "two handed" solo. I think this is a bigger issue in LotR, but it's nice in AHLCG to have each investigator specialize in something and then compliment each other. True one handed solo works just fine, and can be a real challenge with an unbalanced Investigator. Overall, I give the edge in solo play to AHLCG.

Replay value. As you noted, most of the replay value in LotR is in attempting to beat the scenario. Once beaten, I rarely return that scenario. I've never played through an entire cycle a second time, but I have cherry picked some of the scenarios for one off play. AHLCG gives more replay value right out of the gate. The initial play is really about reveling in the story as it is takes you along. Once you know some of what is coming, you can plan and replay for a better result. Note that normally, this isn't in the same campaign. You play it, and then live with the results. This adds more tension to each play and makes you want to return again and again to explore other paths or get other results. The system also seems to be better set up for a fresh experience in multiple plays by having numerous scenarios with random locations. I think the replay value for AHLCG is much higher than LotR.

Deck building. The current state of the card pool is really limiting for AHLCG, but I don't think that's very different than LotR was when Khazad Dum was released. As stated before, each deluxe releases new Investigators that play vastly differently even in each of the classes. Survivor Wendy is way different than Ashcan, and both are way different than Yorrick. The recurring theme comes through, in this case discarding cards for effects and card recursion, but they have their own unique feel.

Overall, I think AHLCG is a much better game than LotR was at the same stage of releases. FFG seems to have learned a great deal about story telling and co-op card games. The future is very bright for such a dark universe.

I finished the core game campaign last night solo, tonight I'm going to give it a shot double fisted. I will also be expanding my card pool with some of the expansions I bought, fiddling a bit with deck building for this next run.

As a whole though I think the game has some really clever dynamics. In fact, while some here have stated really good replayability, many of the reviews of the game spoke of "limited replayability" as once the story is done, your kind of done with it. I actually found that to be very untrue. It seems to me the posters here are correct, the game is very replayable, knowing the story really does little to change my interest in the game, quite to the contrary, it makes me want to take another crack at it, see how I can improve my deck, my play through, etc.. I actually thought the replayability here was a key selling point.

I think one thing that hasn't been mentioned here, maybe its a given with FFG, but I was really surprised by how amazing the art work is in Arkham Horror. I found myself pausing quite a few times to examine it closely, they did a really fantastic job with illustrations, much like they did with Lord of the Rings. Really inspiring the theme.

In general so far so good, I really didn't have any expectations from Arkham Horror going into it one way or the other, but its actually inspired my curiosity about the Lovecraft theme, so as a whole I think I'm sold on it.

And all you've played is the core? Yeah you're hooked.

Agree with Tom. The core is very good, but Dunwich is outstanding.