A Horrific Alternative

 I miss playing Dungeons and Dragons. I miss playing hand after hand of Magic the Gathering. I miss board game night quite a bit more.  Running through games like Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Pandemic, and Cosmic Encounter was always fun. I could blame their absence in my life on the pandemic, but that wouldn't be the whole truth. 

The reality is that to play those games I need to maintain a social group of people interested in playing those games. I have not been investing the time and energy into doing that in quite some time. The pandemic became an opportunity for me to focus on my job, my home, and my family. I allowed the connections to my gaming friends to weaken and falter. 

I went into the summer determined to change that up. I still love my friends. I still have been collecting up my Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder Second Edition books. I have ideas in my head for tons of adventure. Now we are a couple of weeks away from school starting again and I have not made any moves to form my group or get any games started. 

Instead I have been making some career changes. I don't blog about work so that is all you are getting here. I have been cleaning and organizing on my house. I have played a few video games. I have been working hard on my health hoping to start moving back into a place where I am not constantly sick. That has been fairly difficult a task I was surprised to find out. Changing up my diet through trial and error has certainly helped. I have also made myself rest when I have needed it. Most of all I started getting my teeth fixed which has been avoided for about twenty years. 

Still, my need for narrative adventure is pretty high. I can calm it a bit by running Link through Hyrule or playing through quests in Skyrim for the 50th time. That scratches the itch without really relieving it. Plus there are no dice involved. Rolling dice are good for the soul. 

To soothe myself further, I have been playing with myself. *ahem* That is to say I have been sorting, organizing and playtesting decks in Arkham Horror the Card Game. I have loved AHCG since it released in 2016. 

Arkham combines some of my favorite gaming elements. It is a deck building game which taps into the same creativity I enjoy about Magic the Gathering. Players take the role of different characters encountering the mythos. In a good group this can lend itself to role playing of whatever intensity is desired by the players. I have to admit I skip that when working through a scenario alone. 

Best of all Arkham is self running narrative. Events unfold in response to the actions of the player characters. This means that different decks will interact with different situations in vastly different ways. For example, my Zoey Samaras Guardian deck smashes through enemies with a fierce intensity, but is not great at searching for clues which is the primary method of advancing the story. For that reason when playing a solo game I also run Ursula Downs the Seeker who can race through a scenario finding clues and parleying with potential allies with nearly unmatched speed. 

Building and piloting a deck takes a degree of knowledge and skill. Anyone can flip the cards, but making the right choices at the right time is the difference between completing a scenario victorious or getting lost in space and time. Being able to build and play test a deck solo is a massive advantage over classic dueling games like Magic the Gathering. 

Having collected all of the expansions for Arkham except one, I have tons of cards. In the last year Fantasy Flight has been releasing Revised editions of the game. Rather than releasing in Deluxe and Scenario based increments on a six month cycle, we now get a split in the Investigator and Campaign expansion for the cycles. As of the Edge of the Earth Campaign this means that it is easier to organize the cards than it has been previously. I am thankful for the change though the first six campaigns and the core set do not benefit. 

To explain this a bit further let me describe the original core set. When you tear into the original 2016 release of the core set you get 103 cards to build Investigator decks with. Then there are 82 unique cards that work as Act, Agenda, and Mythos cards. Think of those as the Mythos cards as NPCs, Monsters, Locations, Traps, and story.  Those are pretty simple to organize. You can put the player cards into binders for easy access. You can sleeve up the Mythos cards and put them into a card box.  It is nice, simple, and portable if you don't look too hard at the 5 baggies worth of tokens or the need of a chaos bag that replace a dice mechanic. 

From that base set you get three solid scenarios to play. It is a half sized campaign, but I have played it through the most of anything in the game.  Then came the first deluxe expansion - The Dunwich Legacy. It gave us five new investigators and about 40 total player cards. It also included Mythos cards for two scenarios introducing a new Campaign. On a monthly release schedule after Dunwich we got scenario packs for the next six months which include: 

• The Miskatonic Museum
• The Essex County Express
• Blood on the Altar
• Undimensioned and Unseen
• Where Doom Awaits
• Lost in Time and Space

Each one of these scenario packs would add a few player cards typically between 9 and 15 as well as all the Mythos cards you would need for a single scenario. That means that the last player card for the first expansion is number #39 while the first player card for The Mistaktonic Museum is numbered #105. This is an organizational nightmare. 

I never say things like," I am so OCD," but it drove me a little nuts that the player cards and Mythos cards for the expansions were sequentially numbered rather than having the two types split. I understood that the designers were not thinking ahead to the end user. I compensated for this by having a binder for the different types of player cards. That meant to carry the game to someone's house or a game store to play I would be carrying 7 card binders and at least one box of cards for scenarios. I would also need to bring along all the tokens and baggies required to play the game not to mention deck boxes for my built decks. This is not so simple. At one point I had my very own Arkham Horror the Card Game duffle bag. 

As of Edge of the Earth FFG has started to separate the Player and Mythos cards with different expansion symbols. Also the Investigator cards and Campaign cards are sold in two different boxes. That means if I want extra player cards I can buy two or more sets of them without having to have duplicate campaign cards that won't get used.

They also nicely redesigned the Campaign box. It has all the space to store sleeved cards for every part of the cycle and more. It is really nice to be able to sleeve up everything from unboxing day. I do wish the Campaign box included the dividers that I have only seen printed in the return to boxes, but I understand that the dividers are a big part of why people buy the return to products. 

 

As of yesterday I have all of my Investigator cards in binders by set. That makes it easier to find cards when deck building. I tend to use the online card database which references the set the card came from making it easier to search. I admit I have considered building and maintaining my own index. That way when I want Pathfinder I know to which binder and page to go to. 

I am waiting on a shipment of clear sleeves so I can box up all of my Mythos cards and be ready for multiple campaigns. Right now I have the Core Set and Dunwich Legacy completely sleeves, organized and ready to go. That means I need to sleeve these campaigns:

• Path to Carcosa
• The Forgotten Age
• The Circle Undone
• The Dream Eaters
• The Innsmouth Conspiracy
• The Edge of the Earth

Along with these stand alone scenarios: 

• Curse of the Rougarou
• Carnevale of Horrors
• The Labyrinths of Lunacy
• Guardians of the Abyss 
• The Blob that Ate Everything 
• Murder at the Excelsior Hotel 
• War of the Outer Gods
• Machinations through Time

I enjoy all the sleeving and time spent putting stuff like this together. I count all of that toward the play time of the game. For a long time now I do a value calculation on the games I invest in. Video games have to give me at least 1 hour of game play for each dollar I spent on the game to be a good value. 

For example, If I spend $78 on a bundle of Final Fantasy I-VI on steam then I need to get at least 78 hours of enjoyable game play out of them to see good value. I far exceeded that on the pixel remaster of the Final Fantasy games getting at least 20 hours or more out of each individual entry. 

For boardgames and roleplaying games we introduce a multiplier. I need to get a minimum of 10 hours of enjoyment for each dollar I spend. That enjoyment can include sleeving, reading, organizing, play testing, and playing. Maybe I should include writing about it as well. 

I have quite a bit of money tied up in Arkham Horror the Card game. Investing some time in enjoying the game is a really good feeling. Talking to cultists and slaying ghouls is just plain fun. Granted I don't really want to deal with any of the Elder Gods, but that is probably part of it.