I know the game officially doesn't support 5-6 players, but my group has 5 players, and potentially a 6th, that are interested in trying Arkham Horror LCG.

I have more than enough cards to assemble all the decks we need to play, so that's not an issue. The main thing is choosing which campaign to play that won't have issues with the player count.

From what I've heard, the scenarios will be easier due to the the higher player count, but I recall some scenarios do weird things when you're drawing 1-2 more encounter cards.

3 hours ago, Vertrucio said:

I know the game officially doesn't support 5-6 players, but my group has 5 players, and potentially a 6th, that are interested in trying Arkham Horror LCG.

I have more than enough cards to assemble all the decks we need to play, so that's not an issue. The main thing is choosing which campaign to play that won't have issues with the player count.

From what I've heard, the scenarios will be easier due to the the higher player count, but I recall some scenarios do weird things when you're drawing 1-2 more encounter cards.

My group of 5 started playing the Dunwich legacy campaign around 2 weeks ago. I must say that it is a bit easy with a larger player count (although we are playing on easy). But generally we have not met any trouble with the rules because of the higher player count.

I think the Dunwich legacy is a good campaign to start. The only problematic scenario that I see could be the Essex county express, but only if you reach a certain resolution (not enough cards, but you could easily mitigate that with a proxy).

In the core campaign you would have to do a bit of house rules or "grim" rules for higher player count (there are some set up instructions based on the number of players) but it could also work.

I had not played other scenarios, so I cannot advise on them.

Hope this was helpful, enjoy the game with your group

Dunwich is probably the best for 5-6, but be warned the Essex county express scenario will very probably be very difficult at that player count, however the "bad Resolution" for failing that one is not that bad so I would say it still is probably the best, as was said above you will need an additional card not present in the ECE pack (because it only has enough for 4 players) but it can be easily proxied. Please let us know how it goes.

So, in general, the game balance will be a bit off with 5-6 players. There are already some aspects that scale unevenly by player number, so just be aware that the game might not work "as intended" in terms of balance/difficulty.

I agree with the other posters that the Dunwich Legacy is your best bet; there's a few scenarios in Dunwich where you might find problems with playing with more than 4 players. Essex County Express is one of them, as is Undimensioned and Unseen .

In the Carcosa campaign, there's a major issue in Echoes of the Past ; you're asked to spawn enemies depending on how many players there are in the game (0 for 1 player up to 3 for 4 player), in specific locations, and there are only 3 copies of the relevant enemy. You could hack together a solution by adding in another type of enemy (probably the Fanatic ), but doing so would mess with the balance of doom ramping speed and could end up either too easy or too difficult. The issue of a card that every player requires, as noted by other posters above with reference to Essex County Express , appears in this campaign as well and the issue is worse as it's essentially unavoidable.

The Forgotten Age would be more or less impossible to make work with more than 4 players as things get going unless you rewrite significant portions of how the game works. The Supplies mechanic scales very differently by player count and there's only rules for up to 4; you could extrapolate from there but it would cause a lot more issues. There's mechanics that are less punishing with more players (notably Explore) so part of the difficulty would be lessened. And there's points where you would lack for components as The City of Archives only includes 4 copies of certain cards that every player needs a copy of - far more fundamental and unavoidable than the similar issue in the previous campaigns. That's not even addressing issues like Poisoned and Medicine on top of the lower Supplies count.

Beyond that, any encounter card that hits every player will be that much nastier, because you'll be drawing more cards total and global effects are exacerbated as they hit more people. This is particularly noticeable with Ancient Evils , which just adds a doom to the agenda, no questions asked. It already scales poorly with 4 players, particularly in scenarios with smaller encounter decks, and with 5 or 6 players will cut scenarios far shorter than they're meant to be as you cycle through the deck repeatedly. The upcoming Return to the Dunwich Legacy looks set to resolve that somewhat with Resurgent Evils as a replacement for Ancient Evils (I intend to use Resurgent Evils in place of Ancient Evils in every scenario in the game, not just Dunwich...); in lieu of that, I'd propose a houserule where Ancient Evils has the line "Then, remove Ancient Evils from the game" at the end of its Revelation text. It shouldn't make it that much easier as you're still likely to see it early and often, but it will stop it cycling through and swarming you with too much doom.

If you do end up playing 6-player, be sure to let us know how it goes! I have always wished Arkham scaled up to 5 players, so you could play with 1 of each class.