Arkham Horror doesn’t want you to play it. It wants to happen to you. At almost no point in the game do your decisions have any bearing on what’s happening. It is a frustrating and pointless title that has been improved upon several times over and there’s no reason to return to. In fact, a third edition of the game dropped just last year which I’ve not yet played (I’m too scared). And back in 2013, the ever-popular Eldritch Horror released, which essentially functioned as a massive bug fix to Arkham Horror‘s myriad core issues. There have also been expansions, card games, spin-offs, you name it. So Arkham Horror is a bit of a franchise at this point, and certainly one of Fantasy Flight Games’ flagship products. The original version came out way back in 1987, which is the only reason I can think of for the game’s legendary status, because it is horrible. It probably has the worst ratio of rules complexity to strategic complexity of any game I’ve ever played. It is also interminable, obnoxious, dull, and lifeless.
I hope you’re not expecting an exhaustive rules refresher on a terrible game from 15 years ago, because I’m not going to give one to you. What I will say is Arkham Horror is a co-operative game about defending the city of Arkham from a variety of Lovecraftian monsters, including the likes of Cthulhu himself. Players choose investigators, deck themselves out with a variety of items, weapons, and spells, and go traipsing about the city looking for clues to help them seal the otherworldly gates that keep pooping monsters out into the streets. There’s also a mega monster, called an “Ancient One,” who slowly stirs awake as the game progresses and causes various problems the investigators must contend with. Describing the game in this way makes it sound exciting, but it so, so isn’t.
Investigators have several stats such as Sneak and Fight to track, which are constantly referred to for skill checks. The numeric value of the stat tells you how many dice you get to roll during a related skill check, and any rolls of 5 or 6 are considering “Successes”. I think it’s funny that despite all of its theming and flavor, Arkham Horror just shoves regular old D6s into your hand every time you need to make a roll. Before going any further, I want to be clear that I am not in any way against skill checks as a mechanism. They can be a fun way to add a little uncertainty to your turn, and games like Merchants & Marauders use them to mostly great effect. The designers of Arkham Horror, though, seem to think they’re the only mechanism that exists and force you into doing skill checks for EVERYTHING. This is a problem for obvious reasons. The more dice-rolling, the more RNG. The more RNG, the less player agency. This ain’t a role-playing game; the dice here aren’t a necessary storytelling device to influence the Dungeon Master’s progression of the narrative. There is NO reason to have this many skill checks in a board game. The only game I’ve seen this many skill checks in that works is Kingdom Death: Monster, but the reasons for that are complicated and will have to wait for their own review.
Rolls aren’t just limited to skill checks either. I played a game of Arkham Horror where another player drew a card that made them roll for raw damage. They rolled a 6. Their character’s maximum health was 5. Ludicrous. Who thinks crap like that is fun? The game even insults your intelligence by pretending you can prepare for future skill checks by allowing you to adjust your stats at the beginning of each game round (the amount you can adjust them is based on another stat, of course). This idea is thematically dumb, sure, but it is also meaningless 95% of the time. Unless you have played the game enough to have a good sense of where the encounters are that check certain skills, you will just be guessing.
Each round, players move their investigators during the movement phase and have encounters during the encounter phase. You’d think something as simple as a movement phase wouldn’t have much to complain about, but that is not the case. Moving past monsters forces you to make skill checks, and may even force you into combat (combat sucks, by the way). If you had gone through a gate and are currently in the otherworld all you do on your turn is move to the next space over. Furthermore, if you were knocked down the previous round you don’t even get to move and must spend your entire movement phase standing up. Not exactly a lot of interesting decisions to be made here, but the basic goal of movement is to get to locations with clue tokens, then to a gate, through it, survive the otherworld, and finally come back and seal the gate using your clue tokens. I want to point out that performing these tasks has NOTHING to do with strategy, it is simply what you must do to win the game and there’s no way around it.
After movement come the encounters, which can mostly be summed up in a single sentence: draw a card for the location you’re in — Arkham or otherworld — and do the thing the card says. It will probably make you do a skill check, and you will probably fail it. Now, if you’ve been following along, you may be noticing something really odd about this game. That is that you don’t DO anything in it. A good 75% of the game is moving around the board and reading cards. The only exception to this are the special location abilities that you may use in lieu of having an encounter there, such as healing up at the hospital or buying items at a shop. The way the shops work in Arkham Horror is ridiculous, though. You draw the available items randomly from a deck, so you have no way of knowing their cost or worth ahead of time. What kind of idea is that? What sense does that even make? Players have such little agency in this game they can’t even decide to go to a store that sells an item they need and buy that item. This game is all about its theme until it just decides not to be so it can suck even harder.
By the way, I hope you like incessant and unintuitive admin because, apart from reading cards, that’s the bulk of the Arkham Horror experience. It is particularly egregious in the end-of-round Mythos phase. This is the part of the game where bad things happen that make the next round an even more miserable experience than the previous. Each Mythos phase starts with the drawing of a Mythos card, causing new gates, monsters, and clues to appear, monsters to move around the map, and some random card effects that suck and aren’t fun. I have to say, the visual layout of these cards is tragically awful, and I’m not exaggerating. The order you are supposed to execute the listed card effects jumps all over the place. You start in the bottom left, shoot up to the middle, then the bottom right, and finally the top. That’s right, you do the top last. Did the graphic designer even play the game? Did they delegate this particular task to their 5-year old niece or something? Seriously, what happened here? If anyone knows, shoot me an email because I really want to know. I find the layout of these Mythos cards to be a fascinating microcosm of what I imagine to be the game’s overall design process, but I digress.
Arkham Horror supports up to 8 players. The idea of playing it at that count fills me with indescribable dread. Can you imagine waiting for 7 other players to take their movement turns just so you can stand up because you were knocked down the previous round? I shudder to think. There are plenty of other things to complain about in Arkham Horror, but I think I hit the major points. I didn’t talk much about how crap the combat is, or how annoying it is to keep track of the monster icons and stats which govern their movement and behaviors, or any number of other issues because it all trickles down to the same core complaint: doing nothing but rolling dice and hoping for the best in a ridiculously long game with zero interesting decisions in it is not fun. Sure, it’s better than the train-wreck that is Betrayal At House On The Hill, but not by a whole lot. At least Arkham Horror kinda works if you treat it as a storytelling game and nothing more, though it is still overly linear and frustrating. Really, there’s just no reason to play it; it’s a bad game. Simple as that. I don’t mind Eldritch Horror nearly as much, which makes me curious to see if Arkham Horror (Third Edition) is a further improvement. I’m sure I’ll find out someday, but for now there is only the one thing of which I’m 100% certain: I have no plans on visiting this particular iteration of Arkham ever again.
Arkham Horror gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.