Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Re: My group hit a bunch of obstacles with Arkham Horror.

[quote name="fabio"][quote name="Last"]1.) Random monster pool. You can get a large and moving Torg on the first turn, which at worst crushes your team and at BEST blocks off certain areas of town forever. This is the biggest complaint of my friends who play rarely. It's just unfair. 2.) There's only 9-12 turns per game before a massive boss fight occurs, which isn't enough turns to get into the "feel" of things. There's HUGE stacks of adventures to be had in Miskatonic U, a haunted house, a greasy spoon, a foreboding forest, a lunatic asylum, a waterfront, and more. Sounds like fun! However, the strategy boils down to (a) get the retainer from the newspaper, (b) hang around the curio shoppe making money and buying up weapons while (c) sending the Gypsy or your spellcaster through gates and (d) winning.[/quote] 9-12 turns? Usually the rule of thumb is the turn length is around 1.5 times the number of doom token spaces on the ancient one's sheet. There's a big problem with the base game bosses in that most of them were way too easy to kill in battle. There's also a problem with the later expansion (Innsmouth) bosses being way too hard to kill in battle (almost statistically impossible). Cthulhu, Yog, and the "auto lose" guy (Astrathoth?) are the only base bosses that strike the right balance. After that the Dunwich and some of the Kingsport bosses are the best (though the giant rat god and spider are ridiculous). Once you get a boss tough enough to want to avoid fighting, the rest of the game changes away from weapon shopping. You can prolong the game by never closing gates you can't seal (except to avoid "too many gates open" to wake up the boss), as that increases the chance of a monster surge which avoids adding doom tokens. [quote]This is the biggest complaint of my friends who play often(ish), because we spent about a hundred bucks on this stuff with the expectation that we'd have a variety of fun adventures in a great setting and instead it turns into the same thing over and over. The expansions add even more cards and locations that look super interesting but I'll never know because I'm in the fucking curio shoppe preparing for Astatoth. Even in the base game, there's plenty of things that require ~5 turns of dedication before they become useful (deputy, Silver Twilight Membership, Ma's Boarding house), during which your character isn't helping the team very much so these always get skipped.[/quote] While the expansions add a lot of good stuff, I'm really not a fan of the expansion town boards. They just"banish" one or two players to running errands up there where they feel totally disconnected from the rest of the game (plus all the base game characters just weren't designed with the speed to be town hopping via the horrendously inconveniently placed train station). I'd recommend leaving them out. [quote]3.) 4+ hours is too long considering how few things happen. "Ashcan Pete went to the Misk U., found a spell he couldn't cast, lost a fight to a vampire, recuperated in the hospital, went to the Dreamlands, found a motorcycle, and then got devoured by an Elder God. It took four hours." "Gilda got a retainer from the newspaper, bought an elder sign at the Curio Shoppe, went through two gates, sealed one, recuperated at the Asylum, and got devoured by an Elder God. It took four hours." All my friends are old faggots so the idea of playing a 4 hour game with a 30% chance of anybody winning is a hard bargain. [/quote] The longest game I've ever experienced was 3 hours, and that included setup time. Have everyone just move and do encounters at the same time. [quote]4.) The rules are hard to follow because there are a ton of exceptions at all times. Even my most experienced team (we've played a dozen games) still need the rulebook and wiki open to make sure we aren't skipping or overlooking some situational detail, yet we still miss certain things.[/quote] Yeah that gets kind of ridiculous. [quote]Do you have suggestions on any house rules to fix these? I could slow down the doom track to allow more time for exploration, but the game already takes 4+ hours even with players who know the rules. I could stagger the monster pool (having an 'easy' cup for the first few rounds and a 'hard' cup for later, or having a 'draw two monsters, play one') but that seems pretty cheap. I don't know! So far, the house rule is "Eh, let's play something else instead."[/quote] Most strong monsters are faily easy to sneak past. The only real bitches are Gugs and the star vampire, or when some special card dumped "strong, but immobile" monsters into the streets. I'd recommend playing with the Dunwich and King in Yellow expansions. The injury/madness cards are a great help in not losing all your shit when you die, the ancient ones are faily baalanced, and the terror level is now a source of tense danger. Kingsport has some good things in it (mostly the final battle cards to add some spice and unpredictability to the boss fights) and might be worth it. You can safely ignore the other expansions, although Innsmouth adds ONE great thing with the personal mission cards (help balance out the older "obsolete" characters). If you need the game to be easier then get the Beyond the Threshold expansion, because holy shit it almost breaks the game helping you. [/quote]