Arkham Horror: The Card Game Review

👥 1-4 Players | ⏰ 1-2 Hours | 🧑‍🧒 14+ Years

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a card game of course, but it feels more like an RPG or a choose-your-own-adventure game. 1-4 players (1-2 if you’re using the old core set) become investigators in the quaint but creepy town of Arkham, Massachusetts. You’ll find horrible monsters and harrowing mysteries, all wrapped in haunting campaigns.

Gameplay:
Each time you play, you’ll set up a specific chapter in an overarching campaign. Each investigator will build their own deck of cards, grab the scenario deck for the chapter, and get ready for some investigation to ensue.

One main mechanic you’ll find throughout the game is skill checks. Each investigator will have a base stat for the skill, and you can give them boosts via cards in your hand or in your play area. The real madness comes in when you draw a modifier from the chaos bag. It will give you a random modifier number (normally negative ☹️) and you’ll compare your final number to the challenge number. If it’s equal to or higher, you succeed!

The real fun is in all the choices and consequences in this game. During a chapter and at the end, you’ll make decisions and face the consequences, good or bad, that will carry over between chapters. You also get to change your deck over the campaign to represent your growth as an investigator.

Highlights:

• As an LCG (Living Card Game), the real fun in this game comes with all the expansions, especially the campaign ones. There are many to choose from and they all look super fun! I only have The Forgotten Age.
• The story aspect of this game is so amazing and well-made. It is my favorite campaign game narrative-wise. Every text snippet immerses me in the story just a little more, all adding up to an excellent experience. The way things carry over between chapters makes it even better.
• It is a relatively easy game to transport, especially if you take it in a smaller box.
• Fantasy Flight Games always does a great job, in my opinion, of making their games easy to learn. I appreciate the “Learn to Play” rulebook being laid out well so that you can learn it quickly and clarify more complex rules in the “Rules Reference” as you encounter them.

Downsides:

• If you have the old base set, the way you have to find your own chaos bag is not fun to figure out. I was confused why they didn’t include one, but they have remedied it in the Revised Core Set. So if you have that, no need to worry about this issue.
• I wasn’t a big fan of how short the campaign in the base box was. It definitely left me wanting to get another campaign though, so I guess the marketing strategy worked on me 🤪.
• This might be a hot take, but I personally did not like all the tokens. I just ended up using my mini dice I bought for Marvel Champions for the same reason. It’s just hard to move multiple tokens back and forth across cards and the supply. That’s probably just personal preference though. They are high quality tokens and serve their purpose.

Flying Solo:
This game is one of the smoothest solo experiences I’ve ever had. There’s no “solo mode” per se, you just play it with the same rules as you do with multiple people. They did an awesome job of scaling the scenarios for each player count. The scalability reminds me of Marvel Champions, probably because Fantasy Flight made both 😆.

Final Verdict:
Arkham Horror: The Card Game is an amazing story-based card game. It has a lot of expansions and addons to enrich the experience. It could have used a longer base game campaign, but all in all, it didn’t make me want to play the game any less. I would definitely recommend this game to solo gamers, horror fans, and campaign game fans.