So, some friends and I set out to play some Arkham today. We played 2 games of base Arkham with no expansions. The first game was a relative breeze. Although we weren't able to win by sealing gates, we did rather handily defeat Ithaqua. So, standing there basking in the glory of our win, we decided to play another game...and oh how Arkham laughed!
So, the second game. We randomly pulled Hastur as our elder god and then randomly pulled Jenny, Gloria, and Joe Diamond as the investigators. We were a bit worried due to needing 8 clue tokens to seal instead of 5 but we jumped in anyway. Things went fairly well for a while, we managed to seal 2 and close 2 gates, all while keeping the terror level at 0. Interestingly, almost every monster we had pulled were flying mobs, or cultists. So, we only had one monster in the streets and 4 in the sky. Then, on our mythos phase we drew 'The Terrible Experiment' rumor card.
Jenny stepped up big time. She had pulled 'Sword of Glory' on a trip to the curiosite shop and started whaling on monsters in the streets to control the rumor card. After she killed 3 mobs in the streets on her encounter phase from the rumor card, the flying mobs dove in on the next mythos phase. Amazingly, she killed them as well. After those 2 rounds, she had killed 6 mobs. Meanwhile, Gloria had managed to close and seal our next gate while Joe started amassing clue tokens.
Over the next few rounds, Jenny continued to kill mobs in the street and eventually managed to clear out the rumor card by herself. Keep in mind that while this is going on, we are still opening gates and spawning mobs during our mythos rounds. At this point, things are starting to look kind of hairy. We kept spawning monster surges and overloading the outskirts, thus driving up our terror level and making Hastur more powerful. But, we gamely kept at it and came up with our strategy to seal the three final gates.
Jenny and Gloria both headed to open gates while Joe went to collect his last few clue tokens. Jenny had gained a ton of clue tokens from cashing in monster trophies and both of them were in position to seal gates. They both moved through the outworlds and returned to close and seal their gates as Joe entered the final gate loaded with clue tokens, but low on sanity.
At this point, we had 5 gates sealed, the doom track had gotten pushed up to 7, Jenny and Gloria were both out of clue tokens and low on stamina and sanity with monsters in their immediate streets. But, we figured Joe would come out of his gate and seal it to finish the game. Right about this time, Arkham decided to smack us down.
Joe emerged from his gate and attempted to close it, rolling 5 dice and getting 5 misses. Because he only had 8 tokens, he chose not to use a clue token to reroll, but simply would wait til the next round to attempt closure again. Next mythos card--monster surge! Now Joe is at his location with an open gate and a newly spawned mob. After carefully weighing the options Joe elects to stay and deal with the monster and get the gate closed. 11 misses later, Joe is in the hospital.
We are now teetering dangerously close to awakening Hastur with gates so we make another push. Jenny is amazing. She traverses the length of the board, kills 4 more monsters and manages to again amass enough clue tokens to close and seal a gate. Meanwhile Joe and Gloria are attempting to keep the monster limit under control. Luckily we went a few rounds with gates opening on sealed locations.
And then, in the final throws of the struggle, Jenny dove into a gate. Again, the end was in sight. Joe and Gloria kept killing mobs while Jenny was in the other world. Of course, after dangling success in front of us twice, Arkham gave up all pretense of playing fair and popped the 'No One Can Help You Now' environment card before Jenny could emerge. **** it all!
This was followed by new gate spawns and doom tokens to fill up Hastur's track and destroy us all.
Man that was a good game!
