How do you like my new look? Better now?

I was already familiar with the older edition of Arkham Horror from a local gaming club I attended in university. I was intrigued by the co-op nature of the game, but the bits were old and everything had a very ghetto feel to it. I still enjoyed playing it, but it wasn't my first choice. Then I was introduced to an older edition of Twilight Imperium, which I also enjoyed for what it was, but again wasn't too impressed with the bits (all cardboard tokens.)

Fast forward a few years, shortly after I graduated. I saw TI3 sitting on the shelf at a local gaming store, checked it out and was suitably impressed by the quality of the bits looking at the pictures on the back. Knowing that I would like the game play from the previous edition and now seeing it upgraded with shiny bits, I had to own it! Anyway, that got me into FFG games in general, so when I later found out FFG had made a new edition of AH, I knew without even researching it would be a good game, and I ran out and bought it. I was not wrong in my assumption, I'm glad to say. =)

I hadn't really read any of Lovecraft's works directly before I bought the game, although I was familiar with the basics by reputation. After playing the new edition of AH a few times, I eventually went out and got into reading the original stories, which really only added to the flavour of the game when I played it. I've tried to focus on the stuff actually written by Lovecraft himself, so I haven't really dug into the stuff written by other authors, but I enjoy basically everything about the Mythos that I've seen. =)

Out of curiosity Stevo-O, since I never managed to play Twilight after getting it (due to Arkham) I wonder if AH has affected how often you manage to play it?

hey ashdiamond, you look so much better! sorry for the late reply, my computer seems broken!

Mine is quite a strange story... some years ago, my (former) boyfriend and I were client of the same comics / game store. We had a common account that was registred under my name. I ordered basically some comics, while he was more into boardgames. At a certain point of our lives, he reserved a copy of Arkham Horror (without informing me about this); after a while, we broke up.

The game arrived, my boyfriend was gone and, well, I bought it. I wasn't that happy. The game remained on a shelf for quite a long time, unopened. I simply didn't want to play with it, nor I wanted to call my former boyfriend, asking him for money or starting arguing again about stupid things.

And then a couple of years ago, I started playing it, and since then, I never stopped ::laughing:: it's just... one of the greatest games ever.

And the moral of the story is always buy your ex-boyfriends' games. Alas, this moral does not apply to me because I have to taste for boyfriends ;.(

Avi_dreader said:

Ah Avid you make it so easy some times....but I think we will let this one pass. It was a day of victory in the FFG forums as Kroen will never be returning, be sure of that.

Back to the topic

I have been playing board games since well..hrrm.... whenever Magic the Gathering came out and I discovered the games beyond Milton Bradly and Crossfire!.

I have to say I passed on Arkham during the previews because I am a very competitive person. So these co-op games didn't seem like my cup of tea. Of course that was before Arkham, Lord of the Rings, Pandemic, Shadow over Camelot...etc.

I laughed at the concept of cthulhu and had never heard of Lovecraft. The day the game arived at my game store the own opened a store copy for testing that night. I was hooked after being forced to play it. I grew to love the mythos and the author's works. I had a blast playing a co-op board game that wasn't all "Frodo and Samwise" if you know what I mean . This opened doors for me. I met new people and could fit into the crowds better at game-cons and venues.

This is how it has always been for me. I wasn't into star wars until I played the TCG and wanted to feel immersed. I tried to watch the first few episodes of Naruto and gave up thinking it was going to be boring. When the Gamecube games hit the youtube I saw how fun they looked so I modded my system and held tourneys with the game at Street Fighter and Tekken venues. As I played the game I grew attached to the characters and had to see this show. Never regretting watching that show made for teens to this day. I didn't get into video games until Zelda Ocarina of Time. Never read Lord of the Rings until after I saw the movies. I didn't get into comics until after playing Heroclix. So on and so forth.

I am actually a huge sports fan than I am the usual gamer/geek/nerd/fanboy/what have you, so it is REALLY hard for me to fit into Warhammer, Magic, WoW, etc. crowds.

However, it is my love for teamwork, which I developed with lacrosse, football, basketball, and rifle competitions, that has made me such a large contributor to these forums and other game sites and allowed me to blend in. Sites that allow me to share my ideas, variants, and various tactics and strategies, that has contributed to all the help I can provide.

Whoops. That was an embarrassing typo ;'D I meant to say no taste.

Curator said:

I'd like to believe that.

avec said:

He meant never until tomorrow ;') Which is... KROENY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLHEAD! ::Cough cough:: Sorry...

LOL even when he is not here he throws threads off topic. He who must not be named.

Anyways Avid thanks for the good laugh. That typo was awesome. Still doesn't top my friend's essay where he wrote about sacrifice and typed herpes in stead of heroes on his note cards. While trying to sound serious about the heroes that have died over time defending our proud nations, he nearly had to stop and let the judges of the debate quit laughing. Broke the seriousness of the debate for sure. Poor guy.

Its so cool reading everyone's first time discovering AH.

Curator said:

Who? What? Why does it feel like I've been time traveling?

Anyway I'll chime in on topic. I was first introduced to Arkham Horror when a friend of mine and I were in the store looking for a game to play we oggled it for a few minutes then bought Killer bunnies. A few weeks later my friend picked up his copy with DH and we pressed out respective wives into helping us try it our. We beat Yig in an ending battle (nothing really exciting).

It was our second match with two other gamer friends that was the interesting one. Shude was the ancient one. Now the interesting thing about this game was that up till now we totally misunderstood some of the rules and didn't realise we could spend clue tokens to seal gates thinking instead that you needed an elder sign. We somehow managed to win by closing every gate in Arkham with no seals down. We were smacking our foreheads after the next time we read the rule book though.

I bought my copy with Innsmouth shortly after.

Avi_dreader said:

I do ;-) but my ex-boyfriend didn't like games. Luckily my new boyfriend does...

johnwatersfan said:

No one's ever going to let me die this down, are they? ;')

I've long been a fan of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos; my dad's fault, ever since he read The Color Out of Space to me one Halloween night... don't remember how old I was. But I only picked up Arkham Horror recently, via a rather circuitous route of voracious reading, trying my hand at my own Lovecraftian-style horror stories (badly), participating in and later running a number of Call of Cthulhu RPG groups, and even playing Mythos card game. Somehow I missed the sanity-blasting, gibbering monstrosity of counters and cards and boards that is Arkham Horror. I picked up a copy of the base game a couple months ago. After playing three games (one solo), I ordered all the existing expansions for the game and set about inducting my fellow graduate students into the AH cult. I host a AH game nearly every Sunday usually with 6-8 players.

Out of all the games I've played to date, one in particular stands out. A group of four intrepid players, each controlling two investigators set out to stop the dreaded Yog-Sothoth (not generally considered particularly vicious) from entering this world. The first half of the game went routinely, gathering goodies, defeating monsters etc. Then something changed. Yog-sothoth has a thing for investigators who get lost in space and time. In one turn, Carolyn Fern had an unfortunate encounter with a dimensional shambler, Monterey Jack fell into the Abyss, and Leo Anderson was driven insane in R'yleh. The next turn Jenny Barnes got a bad draw from the outerworlds deck, failed the required roll and went whoosh. And "Ashecan" Pete was struck by lighting and devoured after being kicked into the streets by an encounter while the Lighting storm mythos card was in play.

Each time one investigator was devoured, we replaced him or her with a new one. By the end of the game, one of my friends, by himself, had lost 5 investigators to the Yogurt Monster. When Yog finally awoke, only one character had made it through the whole game intact and the derth of good items and spells and gate trophies made the final combat a lost cause. Great, frustrating game! But I will never look at yogurt the same way again.

There's something about the way AH can kick your butt that makes you keep coming back for more.

Reading Lovecraft to children on halloween night, I am so doing that in the future.

Ornendil said:

Oh, AMEN. Arkham Horror is the best abusive relationship to have. Delightful story! Sounds like you have a terrific group of cultists.

Cthulhu may be the one we name all the terms after, but Yog has emerged as the base game's nastiest Ancient One. Many would say that Yog is the only base game AO that remains competitive with all the expansion AOs. I think my personal record for devourings (playing one Investigator in a multi-player game) is 3, and that involved Innsmouth and some bad luck with Ghatanothoa.

I wrote this story out before, but I think the topic it was in was removed thanks to Kroen's antics. Anyway, the story begins a couple years ago when my friends and I decided we wanted to play through the old dungeon romp, HeroQuest. If you're unfamiliar, it was basically a dungeon crawler, where I controlled all the monsters, and set up the game board as my four friends playing the heroes (Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf, and Wizard) explored each dungeon. The game itself had maps for 14 quests, and I had the other four American expansions with 10 quests each. So we played through the main game and the first expansion, and started on the second when one of my friends ended up moving away and kind of put an end to our playing. This is the kind of game where you continue from week to week, all equipment carries over, etc., so it would have been difficult to get someone new to just jump in. And now that I think of it, to this day, I've never played through that 3rd and 4th expansion, even though they came out in the mid-90's.

So a few months later I find a game for the Wii titled Dokapon Kingdom. It is kind of a Mario Party style game (which itself is like a video-board game) mixed in with an RPG and Monopoly. 4 players compete against one another to claim all the cities on the map by defeating the monster boss of that city. To do that, each player goes in turn order, spins a spinner to determine how many spaces on the board they can move, and the spaces can be for item/weapon/magic shops, you can pick up free stuff, have a random encounter with a character, or most likely fight a monster in turn based battle, which provides experience to gain levels and increase your power, and is the reason you need weapons and magic. So my 3 remaining friends from HeroQuest decided to give this a shot and this game lasted us for several months, playing once a week. The story mode of this game takes a long time, and is a blast. But again, it was the type of game that needed the same people over and over on a consistent basis, and anyone new that wanted to play usually didn't have the time to commit to a 50 hour game.

I still missed the board game aspect though, but never knew what kind of depths that board gaming has gotten into. Throughout college and afterwords, I had only been exposed to party/quiz type games when my college friends had game nights, or my wife's family got together. Apples to Apple, Battle of the Sexes, Balderdash, etc. was all fun with the right crowd, but my mostly videogaming background is where I kept up with researching strategy type games and had no idea what the board game world had to offer. And it was actually on the videogame website, www.gamefaqs.com, that I went to their special interest message boards, found a forum for tabletop gaming, and jumped into a thread about co-operative games.

There were several suggestions, but what caught my eye was that Arkham was completely co-op, no need for a game master to control the bad guys, and it could even be played solo. This was just in March of this year, and I immediately started reading all I could on this game, on BGG, on Wikipedia, and then started reading all the rules for the main game and expansions. My wife got sick of me talking about it, and I basically had the rules memorized and could run a game before I had even seen it. I talked to my friends to see if they would be interested, and finally ordered the game the day before I was leaving for Disney World for a week. That would it would be waiting for me when I got back.

Well, to make a long story less long, I loved it. It was great being able to be one of the players and not the bad guy, and with all the cards and expansions, the game would be different each time, as opposed to other games' set quests. It also wrapped itself up in one play session, so anybody that wants to play can at any time, without the need to commit weeks or months of their life. Because of all these things, I've gotten about 9-10 people (including my wife) that will play regularly. I even just got in the mail the remaining expansions (got Pharaoh and Dunwich early on). This game gets played once or twice a week and I can't see myself getting bored of this game for a very long time.

DoomTurtle said:

Ah, I remember Advanced Hero Question. it was a great game, especially for those just entering the world of role playing and massively complex board games (MCBGs). I think between my friend and I we had all the expansion and literally hundreds of figures. Hero Question figures were the first minitures I actually painted. Somehow I was always the evil one. And i think I actually made a Chaos Knight(?) costume... lame, yes, but I was 10 only yrs old at the time, and had yet to realize that dressing up as one's favorite fantasy boardgame character was not the best way to go about impressing the ladies... looking back, it's probably a good thing that the quest for relationships didn't begin til later in life

I never got to play advanced HeroQuest. I looked into it, and figured we would transition into it, but like I mentioned, we never actually ever got through all the regular expansions. Back when I was younger when it first came out, we must have either gotten board, or couldn't get together enough. And then when we got older and started over, real life got in the way.

But I can't say there is anything lame about a Chaos Warrior costume. Those things were badass. A giant suit of armor and an Axe bigger than your head. That thing would destroy lame.

Agreed ;') a chaos knight costume would be awesome.

DoomTurtle said:

You don't actually know what "cool" is, do you?

Joking!

hm, a Heroquest expansion for Arkham? Ok perhaps not . But I do want to create my own full expansion. Had been messing around with converting adventures from the RPG, but perhaps it's time for something new... or a good HPL story that hasn't yet been included in any of the expansions. Have to think on that.

I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but I really like the idea of the 'difficulty' cards that came with BGW. So far I think the Black Goat and the King in Yellow are two very well done expansions that add the most to the game (madness/injury cards, the BGW herald/cult etc)

I was going to start a thred but desided against it. After a hard day of job hunting ( I'm a recent college grad ) and dealing with family, its nice to know that I can escape in to a Mad world where life is as colorful as it is terrorizing. Arkham Horror is a great a stress relief. I HEART ARKHAM HORROR!!!

Innsmouth13 said:

Yeah, struggling against inhuman forces trying to rip the veil of reality and destroy the world is something real life teaches us how to deal with, with ease ::laughing:: (Julia still remembers a quote from an old japanese anime saying "if you are not prepared to die every day, then it's better if you don't go to the highschool". Always loved it!)

Just joking.