Spanish version lacks QA

By Los Archivos de Arkham, in Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Hi all, this is gonna be a long ride, but I’ll write a TL;DR at the bottom. Let me just start by saying that, as much as we love this game, the Spanish community is very much disappointed for the apparent lack of support and quality control that the LCG has received from either EDGE Entertainment or FFG España.

Card games always have typos and printing problems, that’s almost a given whenever a new one comes out, and this game has been no different. Dunwich had a couple of scenarios that needed the reprint for locations because of a misprint and, specifically in the Spanish version, the Parlor Car in the Essex County Express was translated in a way that made the clues in this location impossible to obtain by its intended method. Usually, you’d get the clues on the Parlor Car by paying resources, but in the Spanish version it’d tell you to get the clues from the Restaurant Car, which doesn’t exist. This issue was resolved in a second printing, and they offered to replace the misprinted cards at no additional cost.

These issues are also typically resolved via an F.A.Q and Errata document, which FFG España has neither updated in two years nor added the Taboo List to it. We, at Archivos de Arkham (a Spanish podcast and blog dedicated to this game) have unofficially translated the English F.A.Q and Taboo List and compiled a list of typos for our version of the game, which brings me to the main issue: erratas.

If a typo comes from the original version of the card, it is impossible to blame either the translator or FFG España, but ever since The Circle Undone was released, the Spanish version has been plagued with typos unique to it. And I mean plagued as in “there hasn’t been a single product released that doesn’t have a typo” kind of plagued. Let me show you the list.

The Circle Undone

This cycle was hit from the very beginning with an investigator typo and another typo that spread through the whole campaign.

Rita Young

Rita’s reaction ability was translated to: “After you evade an enemy: Either deal 1 damage to that enemy, or move it to a connecting location. (Limit once per round.)”. What changes? Well, the original version lets Rita move after evading an enemy, while the Spanish version lets Rita MOVE THE ENEMY to a connecting location. Whether one option is more powerful than the other is out of the question, but this change does change the core that makes this character special and doesn’t make a lot of sense thematically. It did give us our dear meme Errita Young , though, which is nice.

Enchanted Blade

This is a card that I really like so it breaks my heart to see it be destroyed by a lack of QA. In Spanish, this card lets you "spend up to 2 CARDS", you read that right, up to 2 CARDS, not charges as it should be. It's especially disapointing when you keep reading the card and it says "for each charge you use", so the typo isn't even consistent.

EVERY SINGLE CARD THAT INCLUDES THE EVADE KEYWORD IN THE CIRCLE UNDONE

So, in short, when a card should read “evade”, in the Spanish version it reads “dodge” instead. Semantically speaking, the difference between evading and dodging is minimal, we are aware of that, but… Dodge is the name of another card, which means there is a game element that is called Dodge , which, in fact, does make cards that trigger “when evading”, “after evading” or “something something evading” only playable after playing the card Dodge. In my opinion, it’s a minor typo, since you can clearly see the purpose of these cards is to use them after evading, but it still bothers me.

A couple of months ago, we received a message from the translator in the FFG España forums where we were informed that the translation for a whole cycle is done all at once, and since the whole cycle was already translated and in production, it was impossible to fix it in time. I can barely blame a translator for this. It’s human to make mistakes, and it’s easier to make them if you’re translating a game which you’re not familiar with. BUT, the translator’s work would be reviewed by a Quality Assurance team, which SHOULD be familiar with the game and its mechanics, keywords, etc. and the next issue made me start to question if this QA team even exists.

Return to the Path to Carcosa

Now THIS is the pièce de résistance. In Spain we were lucky enough to receive the Return to the Path to Carcosa box one month earlier. Or that’s what we thought, since that month should have been used to review and test the product. I’m going to talk about three new encounter cards but I’ll try to remain as spoiler-free as possible.

Visions in your mind

One of the additions (recently shown by FFG for the English player) is the Visions in your Mind encounter cards, which replace the Voices in your Head cards for the “Return to… “ version of the campaign. The new cards are Hidden cards that make you take damage and horror if you don’t take a specific action during your turn. There are 4 different cards, which we assumed would require you to do 4 different actions but, the thing is, the text of 3 of those cards was exactly the same. We tried to contact the big names of these community to see if they knew someone who had received the original version of the set, but we were unable to confirm the typo for the Spanish version until now that FFG spoiled this card set. Essentially, 2 out of 4 of these cards have been heavily mistranslated, changing its effect in a major way.

La Comtesse

This is a new enemy for Return to Curtain Call which spawns in the Balcony. This was at first translated for the original campaign as “Palco”, which is the accurate word for a theatre balcony, but for some reason this time it was translated as “Balcón”, which is the word for a home balcony. Essentially, this is as if in the English version the card text said “Spawn – Gallery” instead of “Spawn – Balcony”. The “Balcón” location does not exist in the Spanish version, so this enemy never gets to spawn.

Exhibición Impactante

I honestly have no clue as to how this card is called in the English version, but I’m assuming it’s something like “Shocking Exhibition” or “Shocking Display”. This is a card for Return to The Last King, and translated back to English, the card text would read something like this: “Revelation – Randomly resolve a Shocking Exhibition card under the scenario reference card. This can’t be cancelled”. But… there’s no effect in the scenario that would place a copy of Shocking Exhibition under the reference card, and even if there was, it would have no other effect than just resolving another of these cards,which would DO NOTHING. But in this scenario there are other cards that are placed under the scenario reference card… You guessed it, Sickening Reality cards. To sum up, this misprint removes a big part of the added difficulty that the Return to version of the scenario has.

There’s a bunch more typos for the Spanish version, like Inspiring Presence, which would heal 1 damage AND 1 horror instead of the original 1 damage OR 1 horror from an ally, or the lvl 2 Shortcut, which can be placed in ANY location instead of YOUR location as it was intended, but those were particular cases, instead of whole cycles and scenarios being significantly changed by a mistake.

We still haven’t heard a response from FFG España or Edge Entertainment. Personally, I’d understand them being reluctant to replace the mistranslated cards from The Circle Undone (Rita would still bother me though), but we don’t know if they’ll replace our misprinted cards from the Return to The Path to Carcosa, and those misprints DRAMATICALLY change the flow and feel of the campaign.

Now, we love this game, we’ve been playing since the beginning and watching it grow and change, and we’ve enjoyed every step of it. That’s why we keep buying the products, to keep playing and supporting the team behind it. Sadly, as a consumer, if our words are unheard and this lack of QA continues, we’ll only have our wallets to vote with.

Thank you very much for your time.

TL;DR : the Spanish version of the game doesn’t seem to receive any Quality Assurance treatment. The F.A.Q hasn’t been updated in two years, and the Taboo List hasn’t been added. It’s been up to Archivos de Arkham (blog and podcast) to update the F.A.Q unofficially. Rita Young has a misprint that changes her ability. The Circle Undone player cards have a particular translation error that’s repeated through the whole cycle. Return to the Path to Carcosa has about 3 typos that really mess up the feel and flow of the campaign. We still haven’t heard anything from FFG España or Edge Entertainment about the “Return to” typos and it’s really grinding our gears, and we think in that case a card replacement is in order.

Agreed with this post. This situation has been very badly managed by FFG Spain.

Hi,

I have sent several messages to Asmodee Spain and it is a shame the support they give to this game. There are several players who do not understand English and find a product that is impossible to play without the help of someone who indicates errata.

For more than a month we have "Return to Path to Carcossa" and know what typos are and do not deign to upload an explanatory note.

In addition, they now have the edition corrected for next release.

It is a shame...


Thanks a lot for this thread.

Very often, Spanish translations by Edge are awful. I remember having an argument with one of their translators in the forum (he was quite unprofessional, confrontational and condescending by the way) because of the way he translated Chaos in the Old World.

I know this is not an option for a lot of people out there, but if you can, avoid translated material and stick to the original version. Just to give a couple examples:

1. In Lord of the Rings, they translated "Burning Brand" as "Burning Mark" (dammit, there's even a picture in the card to know what that means). Merely aesthetics, but that gives you an idea of their level. "Celebrían's stone" was translated as "Celebrían's Rock", instead of "Gem", and so on. I decided to buy the game in English and not touch the Spanish translation with a ten foot pole after cheking out that disaster.

2. In Netrunner (which is admittedly very difficult to translate), they didn't understand what the original card "Gutenberg" meant by "Johannes Gutenberg ignited the first Information Revolution by inventing the movable-type printing press" and they translated something of the like: ""Johannes Gutenberg ignited the first Information Revolution by inventing the transportable printing press".

3. Warhammer 40k: Conquest was a joke, in general, changing so many things just because, that it was ridiculous. Also, the words were badly chosen and sounded akward, in general. This translator thinks of himself as a misunderstood genius and generally speaking, any game translated by him is to be avoided. Sadly he translated a lot of warhammer games for Edge. He was the same genius that translated "Dark Knight" as "Black Knight" and "Berserker" as "Furious" in any Terrinoth game. No comments.

4. Speaking of Terrinoth, in Rune Age, they translated correctly "Stronghold", but when it came to translating the Deepwood Archers' ability to refresh a stronghold, they chose a different word (something along the lines of "citadel"). That one is funcitonal, although more or less easily corrected. Same thing happened with Death Angel, when they transalted "Corridor" as "Pasillo", only to find that one location card made reference to the "Corredor" terrain card. What the...

5. Chaos in the Old World told you that "Ruining bestows X points", instead "Ruiners score X points", mixing bad wording with a functional mistake. The answer was that "it is properly explained in the rulebook" (No **** Sherlock!). The Slaneesh card displayed a severe mistake regarding the advancing wheel condition and some Khorne cards in The horned rat were translated with functional errors, allowing you to do things you were not supposed to. The translator told me that I was being "over pedantic" when I pointed out those mistakes and some more.

Unfortunately, I was forced to buy Arkham Horror in Spanish because of lack of distribution in English here (it is already a pain to pay a lot for LOTR when ordering online), but I'm not surprised by the lack of quality and support: if you are lucky, translation errors are purely formal; if you are not, they heavily affect gameplay. Now I have to look for erratas every now and then, besides playing with "Pete, Trash Can". It is shameful. 😞

Edited by Freeman

Oh, and this translation of AH:LCG's rules reference is definitely a winner, too:

"Unlike the fight and engage action, an investigator can only perform an evade action against an enemy engaged with him or her."

That was translated as:

"A diferencia de las acciones de combatir y enfrentarse, un investigador sólo puede realizar una acción de evitar contra un Enemigo enfrentado a él."

Although in most cases the proper translation for "a (an)" is "un" or "una", here it should be translated as "la", as in "sólo puede realizar la acción de evitar contra un Enemigo enfrenteado a él". Since in Spanish "una" means both "a" and "one", the translator did not foresee the ambiguity, causing that some people understood that

"Unlike the fight and engage action, an investigator can only perform one evade action against an enemy engaged with him or her.", instead of as many as you can.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Edited by Freeman