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LTathLLet Us Now Praise Arkham Horror, 2nd Edition
Fhtagn, y’all.
So within the last several months, I found myself on several otherwise unrelated occasions hyping, defending or reflecting on Arkham Horror, 2nd Edition and my experience of it. It got me to thinking.
Most of you have not played Arkham Horror 2e in the past year. There are plenty of good reasons for this, among them…
* The game is long. 4 hours is a reasonable average estimate.
* The game is sprawling. Even if you have enough table space to accommodate the board and components (not a given), setup alone is maybe 15 minutes, probably more if there are first-timers at the table.
* Its systems are fiddly, its ruleset dense and unintuitive, strewn with modifiers and exceptions.
* The progress of the game is driven overwhelmingly by chance—drawing cards, pulling chits, rolling dice.
* A consequence of that randomness is that any given run of the game may prove to be hopelessly unwinnable.
Additionally…
* There aren’t as many copies around. 6 years ago, Fantasy Flight released its revised 3rd edition, and stopped supporting 2e.
* 3e is only one of several strong implementations of the theme to have been released in 2e’s wake, including Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness, and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, which critical and popular consensus has deemed the best iteration of the franchise to date.
But the first five items above comprise the key points of the case against AH2e. Each is unassailably true.
Arkham Horror came out of Chaosium, the tabletop game company whose bread & butter was and still is the definitive H.P. ovecraft RPG Call of Cthulhu. The first edition was designed by Richard Launius, intended as the boardgame adaptation of Chaosium’s signature title. A roll-and-move affair, 1e was well-received in its time, but spent a modest 4 years in print (1987-1991). In 2004, online game company Skotos picked up the IP, developing and releasing the game through Fantasy Flight. Keeping Launius’ basic structure of intrepid investigators attempting to close inter-dimensional gates before an ancient evil awakens, FF’s Kevin Wilson radically overhauled and built out the game’s systems, redesigned the board, and added the baroque trappings that came to define the title. It was released to great acclaim in 2005, and became the template for all of FF’s subsequent Cthulhu-themed releases.
A pinnacle of the Ameritrash style, AH2e starts from the premise that the best game = the most game. Opening up the box, you find a game board https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6034812/arkham-horroe size of someone’s front window, richly designed and illustrated in lush, saturated colors. The main play area is a schematic map of the town of Arkham, Massachusetts, but there are spaces well off the map. One is simply “The Sky”. Another carries the label “Lost in Time and Space”. You’ll be punching hundreds of bits, all satisfyingly chunky cardboard. Fully illustrated 1” square mega-chits https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4493725/arkham-horror for monsters. Tokens for sanity and stamina. Tokens for clues. And elder signs. And money! Tiny bank notes, 1s, 5s & 10s, all the same chunky cardboard. Are there cards? Brother, there are decks and decks of them, unique text on nearly every one. So many cards you need another freaking table. And that’s before you add in an expansion or two. Which you’re gonna do, because hey, you’re a boardgamer, dammit.
There are no elegant euro mechanics to be found in 2e, no action/operations points, no drafting, no multiple paths to victory. Because it’s a co-op, there isn’t even the unpredictability of an opponent’s strategy to differentiate one play from another. Your opponent is one of the Great Old Ones, a Lovecraft-derived mega-bad guy like Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep or Shub-Niggurath. And while each of these BBEGs feature modest variations in their strengths and weaknesses and provide some kind of global effect to color the gameplay, the overall arc is the same for each: they’re really evil, really strong, and if they wake up, they’re probably going to eat you. They wake up if you fail in your task of sealing six of the inter-dimensional gates before the Great Old One’s doom track fills up. If the track fills up, the good guys get one more chance at victory, a last-ditch, often hopeless final battle, i.e. massive dice-fest that would send any devoted euro gamer to the asylum.
So what’s the good news? Where is the praise promised in the title of this post? It starts with the looks on the faces of your friends (especially non-hobbyist types) who have never played before, when they step into the room and see the table for the first time. Maybe they’ve played Catan, or Wingspan, or Pandemic. This is something different altogether. Their eyes go big. No muted browns or greens here, no pale blues—this table is bursting with colors, rich and saturated. The big eyes wander to the second table (“second table, whaaaaat?”) featuring something close to two dozen unique stacks of cards, a couple of them taller than your average hamster. Whatever they’ve played before, this is something *different*.
And even if your guests are experienced gamers who are no strangers to big games with immense table presence (your Wars of the Ring, your Star Wars: Rebellions, your Twilight Imperia) this is still something they’ve never seen before. Because every other epic game provides a suitably epic venue for its action—entire continents, planets, galaxies. Arkham Horror 2e is an equally massive, sprawling, epic event that spans… a modest-sized town in Massachusetts (plus maybe a nearby village) over the course of a few days in 1926.
That combination—the investiture of its small-time setting with epic trappings—is the secret sauce of AH2e. And unlike its epic kin, the players are not factions, nations or entire races of beings. In AH2e, you’re just a person, an individual human who enters the game with maybe a gun, a bottle of whiskey, an ancient tome, and a backstory. The writing—and there’s a lot of it, much of it pure color and atmosphere—is consistently excellent. It far outstrips the literary elements of, say, Gloomhaven, and even (IMHO) exceeds story-driven adventures like Ryan Laukat’s games.
Besides staring gear and some colorful background, each investigator comes with a reasonably large player card https://boardgamegeek.com/image/67034/arkham-horror. he bottom half of each card is dominated by six ranges of numbers grouped into three sets. These are your ability scores, and rather than a simple number, each character has a 4 digit range. (Your speed may be 3 - 6, but your sneak only 1 - 4.) Furthermore, the scores ascend and descend in opposite directions, forcing you to choose your emphasis for the turn. If you’re going for speed, you’re not going to be able to sneak as well. If you’re focusing on holding your shit together so as not to lose sanity when confronted with terrifying monsters, you’re not going to be able to fight as effectively. The start of every turn will have you adjusting one or more of the ability sliders to land on a new set of numbers for your complementary abilities (e.g., sneak vs speed) based on your goals for the turn.
When people complain about AH2e being fiddly, this is what they’re talking about. And it *is* fiddly, resetting something so fundamental as your ability scores at the start of every turn. The ability sliders were the first system jettisoned when Fantasy Flight adapted 2e into its subsequent iterations; all later versions of the game give investigators fixed ability scores. But AH2e’s ability sliders, fiddly as they are, do something special—they bring the characters to life and invest them with an immersive sense of play. Every turn begins with putting yourself in your investigator’s shoes—what does my dude need to do this turn? And what am I going to sacrifice to help them do it?
The ability sliders allow characters to react organically to their circumstances. The soldier might have to do some sneaking. The professor may do best to set aside his arcane knowledge and place his trust in blind fate. AH2e’s investigators are flexible creations, and as a player, you’re engaged with them and their needs constantly. It’s all of a piece with the game’s zoomed-in perspective. There’s a granularity to the kinds of decisions you’re making here that you simply don’t find in other games, and it all works together—with the writing, with the art—to create a unique kind of immersive intimacy.
But now here come the detractors, with an annoying but correct observation, that being: The dirty little secret of 2e is that for all of its chrome, it’s actually not especially true to its source material. Orthodox Lovecraftians take particular issue with the “final battle” coda of a losing game. The idea of a small band of humans somehow defeating Cthulhu with a couple of shotguns and a cavalry saber, they observe, is patently absurd. And they’re right. By the terms of the Lovecraft mythos, there is no conceivable way any human could prevail in close combat with an Elder God. The intrepid and unlucky souls who populate Lovecraft’s Arkham principally grapple with the agents or progeny of Great Old Ones, almost never confronting the deities head-on. AH2e’s final battle generates strong distaste even among fans of the game. Some groups prefer to ignore the final battle altogether, calling it a loss once the Great Old One awakens. This is supposed to be Lovecraft, after all, right? Read the stories. There are no heroic last stands, no snatching victory from the jaws of annihilation.
The most recent iterations have corrected this, bringing the game narratives more into line with the source. The villains are cults and avatars of the Elder Gods, rather than the gods themselves, and the tales the games tell now follow a sequence of story cards that dictate different win conditions depending on the scenario chosen. It’s a modular solution, one that offers a greater variety of story arcs and types of strategic challenges. And of course, it has the virtue of conforming to the conventions of the literature. The stories it tells are at least a faithful simulations of a mythos tale.
And yet… something is lost. Not just the unthematic final battle, but something more ineffable and, for me, precious. 3e and the card game will give you a story that’s truer to Lovecraft’s models. But the stories themselves are on rails. There may be a handful of points of divergence to provide a range of potential endings, but whatever path you follow is one that the game has laid down for you.
In AH2e, the path you follow is your own, completely unique, never to be recreated. That path may not resemble anything like what H.P. ovecraft wrote. Your AH2e game may feature a nun with a flamethrower speeding through the French Hill streets on a motorcycle, a cabaret singer decoding the Necronomicon, or a graduate student rising to become the Chief of Police. Is this Lovecraft? No. Is it awesome? Good god, yes. AH2e flies the Ameritrash banner as high as any game ever has, its loud, clashing colors snapping in the breeze. Like it’s a-trash brethren, AH2e is out to tell you a story. Narrative logic, game balance… these can be sacrificed in the pursuit of giving you something that feels—in the moment, at the table—absolutely epic, dramatically agonizing, borderline absurd.
If you complete the introductory campaign in AH: The Card Game, you either beat the cult, or you don’t. And regardless of the outcome, you succeed or fail in the same way that thousands of other players have. If you complete a game of AH2e, you either stop the Great Old One, or you don’t. But the way that you succeed or fail is absolutely unique, following twists and turns nobody could’ve predicted, and the story you get may be one that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.
This absolutely unique, procedurally generated story is of course the product of the hundreds of points of randomness seeded through AH2e—all the die rolls, card draws and chit pulls—plus the dozens of decisions a given group of investigators makes over the course of the game. The flipside of a game state so reliant on random inputs is that sometimes, those random inputs tilt one way or another, and it’s especially noticeable when the tilt is against you. Even in its neutral state, AH2e is no walk in the park. The decks of cards that define the narrative more often deal you harm than offer aid. It can be a difficult game to win.
And sometimes, unfortunately, the game doesn’t let you win. The game is designed to hit the players with a preponderance of negative events. And randomness being what it is, sometimes that preponderance tips over into a crushing super-majority. Your die rolls are shit. The monsters coming out are gugs and dholes and the fucking color out of space, instead of your garden variety cultists, maniacs and zombies. The cards have new gates opening not at the end of every turn, but during the turn too, adding extra to the doom track and sucking your unprepared investigator into the Plateau of Leng. Sometimes, the game just beats you, and it sucks to go down knowing you never had a chance.
Of course, most of Lovecraft’s characters never had a chance, either.
Remember the dirty little secret, how AH2e isn’t that true to its source material? Well, scratch that dirty little secret and you’ll find an underlying truth, which is that the game actually embodies its source material to a degree that not only exceeds its reimplementations, but may be unique among boardgames, period.
The completely unwinnable games are actually far and few. But here’s a moment that happens commonly: the dawning realization that the game may be slipping away from you. It usually creeps in somewhere around the 160-minute mark. You’ve invested so much time and focus in this game, even seemed to have things under control for a while. But suddenly, there are a lot of gates open. The streets of Arkham are clotted with monsters. The general store has closed down. Rumors have paralyzed the town. How did things go so wrong, so quickly? There have been moments during play where I’ve found myself staring at the board in blank despair, uncertain if I had the strength to go on.
That is to say, I felt like I was in a Lovecraft story.
The investigators are down there on the board, struggling against the great old ones. And you are up here, struggling against the game—not only the aggressive bent of its random results, but the thing itself, as it exists on the table and in the rules. And what appeared at first glance to be mere fiddliness is now revealed as a creeping horror that drains your sanity. Did you remember to adjust your ability sliders during upkeep? And did you roll to see if you keep your retainer, or lose your blessing? The terror level just went up; did you mark that on the terror track and remember to discard an ally from the ally deck? Better do that now; the ally deck is the one at the far end of the table… no, the *other* table. And oh, yeah, speed checks are at a -1 penalty because it’s raining; did you remember to apply that last turn? Don’t forget, your investigator now has agoraphobia and loses sanity if they finish their turn in a street area, so that may affect how far you’re going to need to move, which is going to make it even harder to sneak past that shoggoth, which, if it sees you, is going to put you in the hospital. Your fellow investigators with the good weapons could maybe take it out, but one of them is lost in time and space and the other is stuck in Dunwich with no money to catch the train back to Arkham. Time for a mythos card? A gate opens at the Historical Society, a clue appears at Velma’s Diner, monsters with a moon symbol move following the black arrows, but monsters with a hexagon symbol move following the white arrows, except for the dark young at the Unvisited Isle, which don’t move at all. And oh yeah, the rain stopped and the sun came out… which means that sneak rolls are now at a -1 penalty. Goddamn it. Fuck this fucking game.
With its 2005 design, lack of balance, byzantine mechanics, decks of cards that may come into play once every 25 games, surface-devouring sprawl and absurd leaps of narrative logic, AH2e practically dares you to try to play it, let alone win it. Pick up that gauntlet, and you are confronting an adversary of immense size, arcane logic and malevolent intent. It is out to devour your time and your hopes as completely as it has devoured your table space. And thus, for about four hours, life imitates art.
And then it’s finally over. Maybe in exhausted relief. Maybe in the flush of a pure RNG victory via the final battle. Maybe in grim dejection. But whatever outcome you arrived at, it was probably a crazy ride getting there, desperate victories and crushing failures, badass monster slaughter and maximum-stakes stealth, punishing twists of fate and reliance upon plan C, then D, then E. The details are vivid. The turning points are stark. Did you get beat? Read the literature—you were supposed to get beat. Did you win? More power to ya. There’s no such thing as a cheap or easy victory in this game. Either way, that set of dice rolls, card draws and player decisions is never to be repeated. The story is your own.
Other games don’t make me feel that way. I may be playing a starfaring race in Eclipse or Twilight Imperium, but I don’t feel like I’m personally doing the exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating. I played Here I Stand; I was the Vatican. I didn’t feel like the pope. I felt like a guy with some unique mechanics and win conditions. For me, the closest a game has come to Arkham-levels of engagement and immersion have been the Pandemic Legacy games… also, worth noting, co-ops that invest you in a character over a long period of time. Something like Memoir 44’s Operation Overlord variant could plausibly echo its source to the same degree, the scale and challenge of a massive undertaking with inconsistent communications and limited options. I admit I haven’t played it.
There’s a final piece of conventional wisdom about AH2e, that it is ultimately a better “experience” than it is a game. Like the rest of the conventional wisdom about AH2e, it is basically true. The process and impact of playing the game ultimately outweigh the narrative and/or tactical satisfaction generated by that play. Which is another way of describing immersion. It comes back, once again, to fiddliness. AH2e crams your field of vision with details, and then backs that up physically with its overabundance of bits and cards. The game surrounds you. And maybe that’s the ultimate value of the deck that comes out once every 25 games. What is immersion if not the sense that your environment continues to exist outside your field of vision? That deck of cards is like a promise that if you turned your head, more of the game would appear to maintain the illusion.
They don’t make games like AH2e anymore. That’s a good thing, mostly. Generally speaking, games should be winnable, every time. You shouldn’t need to keep handy a deck of cards that gets used once every 25 games. Five or more factors modifying a single die roll is too many. We know these things now.
They also don’t make buildings like Chartres or the Alhambra anymore, either. There are very good reasons for that. A wildly different set of circumstances, priorities and resources dictated their construction. But they answered the challenges of their creation with extraordinary ambition and an appeal to the sublime. Step inside the nave of Chartres, and you are in the presence of something different. The scale. The light and shadow. The craftsmanship tucked into every corner. I can’t really describe it to you. It’s more of an experience.
Yeah, that’s right. I just compared a Cthulhu boardgame to Chartres cathedral. Ridiculous, I know. But look, they’re both relics of bygone times. And they’re both relics we can step inside of and walk around in, and marvel at the scale of the thing, and feel like we’re somewhere different for an hour or four. That’s all I’m saying.
Well, that, and the game is fucking glorious. When I win, I feel like I barely averted the apocalypse. And when I get devoured, it feels like cosmic justice—what hubris, to think that I could play and win this game! Whatever the outcome, I’m wrung out, dazed and crazy, can barely believe I just spent hours and hours around this table, amid this scattered mess of cards and tokens. And even then, in that moment, I am one bad decision away from setting the sucker up and going on the ride again.
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Fhtagn, y’all.
So within the last several months, I found myself on several otherwise unrelated occasions hyping, defending or reflecting on Arkham Horror, 2nd Edition and my experience of it. It got me to thinking.
Most of you have not played Arkham Horror 2e in the past year. There are plenty of good reasons for this, among them…
* The game is long. 4 hours is a reasonable average estimate.
* The game is sprawling. Even if you have enough table space to accommodate the board and components (not a given), setup alone is maybe 15 minutes, probably more if there are first-timers at the table.
* Its systems are fiddly, its ruleset dense and unintuitive, strewn with modifiers and exceptions.
* The progress of the game is driven overwhelmingly by chance—drawing cards, pulling chits, rolling dice.
* A consequence of that randomness is that any given run of the game may prove to be hopelessly unwinnable.
Additionally…
* There aren’t as many copies around. 6 years ago, Fantasy Flight released its revised 3rd edition, and stopped supporting 2e.
* 3e is only one of several strong implementations of the theme to have been released in 2e’s wake, including Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness, and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, which critical and popular consensus has deemed the best iteration of the franchise to date.
But the first five items above comprise the key points of the case against AH2e. Each is unassailably true.
Arkham Horror came out of Chaosium, the tabletop game company whose bread & butter was and still is the definitive H.P. ovecraft RPG Call of Cthulhu. The first edition was designed by Richard Launius, intended as the boardgame adaptation of Chaosium’s signature title. A roll-and-move affair, 1e was well-received in its time, but spent a modest 4 years in print (1987-1991). In 2004, online game company Skotos picked up the IP, developing and releasing the game through Fantasy Flight. Keeping Launius’ basic structure of intrepid investigators attempting to close inter-dimensional gates before an ancient evil awakens, FF’s Kevin Wilson radically overhauled and built out the game’s systems, redesigned the board, and added the baroque trappings that came to define the title. It was released to great acclaim in 2005, and became the template for all of FF’s subsequent Cthulhu-themed releases.
A pinnacle of the Ameritrash style, AH2e starts from the premise that the best game = the most game. Opening up the box, you find a game board https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6034812/arkham-horroe size of someone’s front window, richly designed and illustrated in lush, saturated colors. The main play area is a schematic map of the town of Arkham, Massachusetts, but there are spaces well off the map. One is simply “The Sky”. Another carries the label “Lost in Time and Space”. You’ll be punching hundreds of bits, all satisfyingly chunky cardboard. Fully illustrated 1” square mega-chits https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4493725/arkham-horror for monsters. Tokens for sanity and stamina. Tokens for clues. And elder signs. And money! Tiny bank notes, 1s, 5s & 10s, all the same chunky cardboard. Are there cards? Brother, there are decks and decks of them, unique text on nearly every one. So many cards you need another freaking table. And that’s before you add in an expansion or two. Which you’re gonna do, because hey, you’re a boardgamer, dammit.
There are no elegant euro mechanics to be found in 2e, no action/operations points, no drafting, no multiple paths to victory. Because it’s a co-op, there isn’t even the unpredictability of an opponent’s strategy to differentiate one play from another. Your opponent is one of the Great Old Ones, a Lovecraft-derived mega-bad guy like Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep or Shub-Niggurath. And while each of these BBEGs feature modest variations in their strengths and weaknesses and provide some kind of global effect to color the gameplay, the overall arc is the same for each: they’re really evil, really strong, and if they wake up, they’re probably going to eat you. They wake up if you fail in your task of sealing six of the inter-dimensional gates before the Great Old One’s doom track fills up. If the track fills up, the good guys get one more chance at victory, a last-ditch, often hopeless final battle, i.e. massive dice-fest that would send any devoted euro gamer to the asylum.
So what’s the good news? Where is the praise promised in the title of this post? It starts with the looks on the faces of your friends (especially non-hobbyist types) who have never played before, when they step into the room and see the table for the first time. Maybe they’ve played Catan, or Wingspan, or Pandemic. This is something different altogether. Their eyes go big. No muted browns or greens here, no pale blues—this table is bursting with colors, rich and saturated. The big eyes wander to the second table (“second table, whaaaaat?”) featuring something close to two dozen unique stacks of cards, a couple of them taller than your average hamster. Whatever they’ve played before, this is something *different*.
And even if your guests are experienced gamers who are no strangers to big games with immense table presence (your Wars of the Ring, your Star Wars: Rebellions, your Twilight Imperia) this is still something they’ve never seen before. Because every other epic game provides a suitably epic venue for its action—entire continents, planets, galaxies. Arkham Horror 2e is an equally massive, sprawling, epic event that spans… a modest-sized town in Massachusetts (plus maybe a nearby village) over the course of a few days in 1926.
That combination—the investiture of its small-time setting with epic trappings—is the secret sauce of AH2e. And unlike its epic kin, the players are not factions, nations or entire races of beings. In AH2e, you’re just a person, an individual human who enters the game with maybe a gun, a bottle of whiskey, an ancient tome, and a backstory. The writing—and there’s a lot of it, much of it pure color and atmosphere—is consistently excellent. It far outstrips the literary elements of, say, Gloomhaven, and even (IMHO) exceeds story-driven adventures like Ryan Laukat’s games.
Besides staring gear and some colorful background, each investigator comes with a reasonably large player card https://boardgamegeek.com/image/67034/arkham-horror. he bottom half of each card is dominated by six ranges of numbers grouped into three sets. These are your ability scores, and rather than a simple number, each character has a 4 digit range. (Your speed may be 3 - 6, but your sneak only 1 - 4.) Furthermore, the scores ascend and descend in opposite directions, forcing you to choose your emphasis for the turn. If you’re going for speed, you’re not going to be able to sneak as well. If you’re focusing on holding your shit together so as not to lose sanity when confronted with terrifying monsters, you’re not going to be able to fight as effectively. The start of every turn will have you adjusting one or more of the ability sliders to land on a new set of numbers for your complementary abilities (e.g., sneak vs speed) based on your goals for the turn.
When people complain about AH2e being fiddly, this is what they’re talking about. And it *is* fiddly, resetting something so fundamental as your ability scores at the start of every turn. The ability sliders were the first system jettisoned when Fantasy Flight adapted 2e into its subsequent iterations; all later versions of the game give investigators fixed ability scores. But AH2e’s ability sliders, fiddly as they are, do something special—they bring the characters to life and invest them with an immersive sense of play. Every turn begins with putting yourself in your investigator’s shoes—what does my dude need to do this turn? And what am I going to sacrifice to help them do it?
The ability sliders allow characters to react organically to their circumstances. The soldier might have to do some sneaking. The professor may do best to set aside his arcane knowledge and place his trust in blind fate. AH2e’s investigators are flexible creations, and as a player, you’re engaged with them and their needs constantly. It’s all of a piece with the game’s zoomed-in perspective. There’s a granularity to the kinds of decisions you’re making here that you simply don’t find in other games, and it all works together—with the writing, with the art—to create a unique kind of immersive intimacy.
But now here come the detractors, with an annoying but correct observation, that being: The dirty little secret of 2e is that for all of its chrome, it’s actually not especially true to its source material. Orthodox Lovecraftians take particular issue with the “final battle” coda of a losing game. The idea of a small band of humans somehow defeating Cthulhu with a couple of shotguns and a cavalry saber, they observe, is patently absurd. And they’re right. By the terms of the Lovecraft mythos, there is no conceivable way any human could prevail in close combat with an Elder God. The intrepid and unlucky souls who populate Lovecraft’s Arkham principally grapple with the agents or progeny of Great Old Ones, almost never confronting the deities head-on. AH2e’s final battle generates strong distaste even among fans of the game. Some groups prefer to ignore the final battle altogether, calling it a loss once the Great Old One awakens. This is supposed to be Lovecraft, after all, right? Read the stories. There are no heroic last stands, no snatching victory from the jaws of annihilation.
The most recent iterations have corrected this, bringing the game narratives more into line with the source. The villains are cults and avatars of the Elder Gods, rather than the gods themselves, and the tales the games tell now follow a sequence of story cards that dictate different win conditions depending on the scenario chosen. It’s a modular solution, one that offers a greater variety of story arcs and types of strategic challenges. And of course, it has the virtue of conforming to the conventions of the literature. The stories it tells are at least a faithful simulations of a mythos tale.
And yet… something is lost. Not just the unthematic final battle, but something more ineffable and, for me, precious. 3e and the card game will give you a story that’s truer to Lovecraft’s models. But the stories themselves are on rails. There may be a handful of points of divergence to provide a range of potential endings, but whatever path you follow is one that the game has laid down for you.
In AH2e, the path you follow is your own, completely unique, never to be recreated. That path may not resemble anything like what H.P. ovecraft wrote. Your AH2e game may feature a nun with a flamethrower speeding through the French Hill streets on a motorcycle, a cabaret singer decoding the Necronomicon, or a graduate student rising to become the Chief of Police. Is this Lovecraft? No. Is it awesome? Good god, yes. AH2e flies the Ameritrash banner as high as any game ever has, its loud, clashing colors snapping in the breeze. Like it’s a-trash brethren, AH2e is out to tell you a story. Narrative logic, game balance… these can be sacrificed in the pursuit of giving you something that feels—in the moment, at the table—absolutely epic, dramatically agonizing, borderline absurd.
If you complete the introductory campaign in AH: The Card Game, you either beat the cult, or you don’t. And regardless of the outcome, you succeed or fail in the same way that thousands of other players have. If you complete a game of AH2e, you either stop the Great Old One, or you don’t. But the way that you succeed or fail is absolutely unique, following twists and turns nobody could’ve predicted, and the story you get may be one that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.
This absolutely unique, procedurally generated story is of course the product of the hundreds of points of randomness seeded through AH2e—all the die rolls, card draws and chit pulls—plus the dozens of decisions a given group of investigators makes over the course of the game. The flipside of a game state so reliant on random inputs is that sometimes, those random inputs tilt one way or another, and it’s especially noticeable when the tilt is against you. Even in its neutral state, AH2e is no walk in the park. The decks of cards that define the narrative more often deal you harm than offer aid. It can be a difficult game to win.
And sometimes, unfortunately, the game doesn’t let you win. The game is designed to hit the players with a preponderance of negative events. And randomness being what it is, sometimes that preponderance tips over into a crushing super-majority. Your die rolls are shit. The monsters coming out are gugs and dholes and the fucking color out of space, instead of your garden variety cultists, maniacs and zombies. The cards have new gates opening not at the end of every turn, but during the turn too, adding extra to the doom track and sucking your unprepared investigator into the Plateau of Leng. Sometimes, the game just beats you, and it sucks to go down knowing you never had a chance.
Of course, most of Lovecraft’s characters never had a chance, either.
Remember the dirty little secret, how AH2e isn’t that true to its source material? Well, scratch that dirty little secret and you’ll find an underlying truth, which is that the game actually embodies its source material to a degree that not only exceeds its reimplementations, but may be unique among boardgames, period.
The completely unwinnable games are actually far and few. But here’s a moment that happens commonly: the dawning realization that the game may be slipping away from you. It usually creeps in somewhere around the 160-minute mark. You’ve invested so much time and focus in this game, even seemed to have things under control for a while. But suddenly, there are a lot of gates open. The streets of Arkham are clotted with monsters. The general store has closed down. Rumors have paralyzed the town. How did things go so wrong, so quickly? There have been moments during play where I’ve found myself staring at the board in blank despair, uncertain if I had the strength to go on.
That is to say, I felt like I was in a Lovecraft story.
The investigators are down there on the board, struggling against the great old ones. And you are up here, struggling against the game—not only the aggressive bent of its random results, but the thing itself, as it exists on the table and in the rules. And what appeared at first glance to be mere fiddliness is now revealed as a creeping horror that drains your sanity. Did you remember to adjust your ability sliders during upkeep? And did you roll to see if you keep your retainer, or lose your blessing? The terror level just went up; did you mark that on the terror track and remember to discard an ally from the ally deck? Better do that now; the ally deck is the one at the far end of the table… no, the *other* table. And oh, yeah, speed checks are at a -1 penalty because it’s raining; did you remember to apply that last turn? Don’t forget, your investigator now has agoraphobia and loses sanity if they finish their turn in a street area, so that may affect how far you’re going to need to move, which is going to make it even harder to sneak past that shoggoth, which, if it sees you, is going to put you in the hospital. Your fellow investigators with the good weapons could maybe take it out, but one of them is lost in time and space and the other is stuck in Dunwich with no money to catch the train back to Arkham. Time for a mythos card? A gate opens at the Historical Society, a clue appears at Velma’s Diner, monsters with a moon symbol move following the black arrows, but monsters with a hexagon symbol move following the white arrows, except for the dark young at the Unvisited Isle, which don’t move at all. And oh yeah, the rain stopped and the sun came out… which means that sneak rolls are now at a -1 penalty. Goddamn it. Fuck this fucking game.
With its 2005 design, lack of balance, byzantine mechanics, decks of cards that may come into play once every 25 games, surface-devouring sprawl and absurd leaps of narrative logic, AH2e practically dares you to try to play it, let alone win it. Pick up that gauntlet, and you are confronting an adversary of immense size, arcane logic and malevolent intent. It is out to devour your time and your hopes as completely as it has devoured your table space. And thus, for about four hours, life imitates art.
And then it’s finally over. Maybe in exhausted relief. Maybe in the flush of a pure RNG victory via the final battle. Maybe in grim dejection. But whatever outcome you arrived at, it was probably a crazy ride getting there, desperate victories and crushing failures, badass monster slaughter and maximum-stakes stealth, punishing twists of fate and reliance upon plan C, then D, then E. The details are vivid. The turning points are stark. Did you get beat? Read the literature—you were supposed to get beat. Did you win? More power to ya. There’s no such thing as a cheap or easy victory in this game. Either way, that set of dice rolls, card draws and player decisions is never to be repeated. The story is your own.
Other games don’t make me feel that way. I may be playing a starfaring race in Eclipse or Twilight Imperium, but I don’t feel like I’m personally doing the exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating. I played Here I Stand; I was the Vatican. I didn’t feel like the pope. I felt like a guy with some unique mechanics and win conditions. For me, the closest a game has come to Arkham-levels of engagement and immersion have been the Pandemic Legacy games… also, worth noting, co-ops that invest you in a character over a long period of time. Something like Memoir 44’s Operation Overlord variant could plausibly echo its source to the same degree, the scale and challenge of a massive undertaking with inconsistent communications and limited options. I admit I haven’t played it.
There’s a final piece of conventional wisdom about AH2e, that it is ultimately a better “experience” than it is a game. Like the rest of the conventional wisdom about AH2e, it is basically true. The process and impact of playing the game ultimately outweigh the narrative and/or tactical satisfaction generated by that play. Which is another way of describing immersion. It comes back, once again, to fiddliness. AH2e crams your field of vision with details, and then backs that up physically with its overabundance of bits and cards. The game surrounds you. And maybe that’s the ultimate value of the deck that comes out once every 25 games. What is immersion if not the sense that your environment continues to exist outside your field of vision? That deck of cards is like a promise that if you turned your head, more of the game would appear to maintain the illusion.
They don’t make games like AH2e anymore. That’s a good thing, mostly. Generally speaking, games should be winnable, every time. You shouldn’t need to keep handy a deck of cards that gets used once every 25 games. Five or more factors modifying a single die roll is too many. We know these things now.
They also don’t make buildings like Chartres or the Alhambra anymore, either. There are very good reasons for that. A wildly different set of circumstances, priorities and resources dictated their construction. But they answered the challenges of their creation with extraordinary ambition and an appeal to the sublime. Step inside the nave of Chartres, and you are in the presence of something different. The scale. The light and shadow. The craftsmanship tucked into every corner. I can’t really describe it to you. It’s more of an experience.
Yeah, that’s right. I just compared a Cthulhu boardgame to Chartres cathedral. Ridiculous, I know. But look, they’re both relics of bygone times. And they’re both relics we can step inside of and walk around in, and marvel at the scale of the thing, and feel like we’re somewhere different for an hour or four. That’s all I’m saying.
Well, that, and the game is fucking glorious. When I win, I feel like I barely averted the apocalypse. And when I get devoured, it feels like cosmic justice—what hubris, to think that I could play and win this game! Whatever the outcome, I’m wrung out, dazed and crazy, can barely believe I just spent hours and hours around this table, amid this scattered mess of cards and tokens. And even then, in that moment, I am one bad decision away from setting the sucker up and going on the ride again.
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