Seeing how I am forced to live vicariously through others while stuck in a work week (12 hour shifts, but whole next week is always off and has plenty of time for Arkham), I figured I would start a topic that I have been curious about (and to give me something Arkham related to read at work).

What has been your worst experience with Arkham and what was the setup and situation (expansions, player numbers, AO or something else that wrecked it)? All but one of my games have been fun or fantastic but I did have a really bad one that threw me off the game for a while. Ive noticed that new players seem to love Akrham or in rare few cases hate it (as the new players did in my worst game).

Curious on what tends to make for bad combos.

8 players, everything but Innsmouth, to many new players = board game hell in my case.

For the record my most memorable game was 5 players with DCotP and Dunwich.

I've learned not to use any expansions at all when teaching new players (and even not playing a character myself for simplicity's sake), but it was a hard lesson learned. There are players who hated the experience and never want to give it another go, and occasionally there are players who love the game far beyond my expectations.

I've even had a single game where most of the new players wanted nothing more to do with the game, but one guy couldn't wait until next time.

Though, for theme's sake, I leave in the expansion universals: Injury/Madness, Personal Stories, Epic Battle.

I once played a game that had 3 monster surges by turn 4.

(edit) I should note that they were all in innsmouth and the monsters mostly went bareling down the street to the nearest vortex....that game didn't last too much longer.

Expansions: IH, DH, KH, and KiY. Dilution of Next Act handled by Tibs rule (when resolving mythos card from expansion other than KiY roll two dice and flip over Next Act card if sum is 3).

Ancient one: Cthulhu with Dagon & Hydra as heralds.

Result: Defeat by Act III at end of 8th turn, with all three acts brought into play by dice rolls, not actual act cards.

For what it's worth, previous game had been against Hastur + King In Yellow Herald (same expansions). Turned out terror never budged in that game and he was handly sealed away. So he decided to sneak in a surprise for the next game.

I just played a game against Yig in which there were no monster surges and one gate-on-seal. You can imagine how that one ended.

Tibs said:

Awesome last ditch effort slapped down seal #6 or closed the final gate with no gates open in just the nick of time ?

"Howard Payne: Pop quiz, hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do? "

Or did your bus blow up? You're no Keanu Reeves then !

One seal, total. Clues were few and far between, and luck was at a minimum.

That meant an extremely slim Epic Battle deck and no more than one clue may be spent per round of final combat (I use both recommended house-rules). Yig still had 6 doom tokens on him when the last man fell. It was actually kind of nice to see him so fierce.

Also I once had a game where the first gate was in Devil's Reef, the second was a monster surge, and the third was an "all monsters move" resulting in all the monsters plunging into the vortex and awakening the AO. The AO was Shub, so nobody had managed to get a single monster trophy...

I had just bought the Kingsport Horror expansion, so me and my brother decided to just use that in addition to the base game to immerse ourselves in the new content. Ancient one was Yibb-Tstll, herald was Tulzscha and guardian was Hypnos. Basically, what happened was that a rift opened almost immidiately, and our efforts to close it were thwarted by the all the monsters' inability to die (I have never seen so many ones in my life) as well as unlucky Arkham encounters that drove us insane several times in a row.

In the meantime, Hypnos was busy spawning a boatload of clues, and when Yibb-Tstll finally woke up thanks to the rift, she had approximately the same combat rating as Azathoth.

Worst game i played was with innsmouth against azathoth with Father and Mother...

1st mythos: Gate of the game: Devils Reef (one moves in the vortex: Deep ones rising at 3)

bonus mythos (because of father dagon): gate at The unnameable

2nd turn (3rd mythos): monster surge (3 on each gate because of 6 players) all move to the vortex, Deep ones rising at 6

AO wakes up, World is destroyed.

Maybe not the best to start with...

I had a similar Azathoth + Father & Mother experience but it took longer than 2 turns to end the world. Is that possibly a record for short game?

The worst games I played were a set... Two games in a row, I shuffled the mythos deck after each game. In each game my second draw was the mythos card that removes all clues from the board (needless to say, I won neither game, although I played each to the bitter bitter end).

These tales are delightful.

Let's see...Glaaki, still my greatest nemesis, was having a good run at us: our monster control was adequate, but we kept drawing cards that would automatically raise the Terror Track, sending out Servants to rob us blind. We had a few Seals...there were enough surges to keep Glaaki in the mid-Doom range...then came the Terrible Experiment. And we drew BAD Things: Gug, Hound of Tindalos, Cthonian, Shoggoth...oh, and a Byakhee. (Yay.) Everyone was too beat up to handle most of that, but Marie defeated the Byakhee to buy us another turn. The next turn was the Vampire, who drove Mark insane. Then came a Colour...and a Dimensional Shambler...we threw everything we had at that **** Vampire, and everyone either went insane or unconscious. First Marie, then Pete, then Mark AGAIN, all in the same turn.

Terrible Experiment failed. Terror Track at 3, going to 10. By the time it hit 6, all Glaaki's pals were out. So Glaaki was awake by Terror 7...and then devoured us all at Terror 10.

And we all sat there, blinking quietly to ourselves.