Arkham Horror

[Balcerzak]

Long story short, I was hoping to organize a game of this over Skype on a coming Saturday, assuming there are enough interested parties. I'll go into a little bit of detail about the general premise of the game, and provide some links for people to educate themselves further if desired.

Arkham Horror is a cooperative board-game for 2-8 players that lasts usually six to eight hours, in my experience. If everyone knows what they're doing and things proceed smoothly it can be completed in less, but it's generally best to schedule a full day for it. The plot is like something straight out of Lovecraft, and for good reason. A Great Old One is stirring in its slumber, and this is causing all sorts of uncanny disturbances in the town of Arkham and neighboring vicinites. Your character is one of a group of investigators drawn into the mystery for some reason or another, and the goal is to put an end to the otherworldly disturbances by one of a couple of methods.

As mentioned, the game is cooperative, so I think it would lend itself considerably easier to coordinated online play during a skype call than many other boardgames I enjoy, as there's no elements of secrecy needed for one player to keep hidden from another player.

I'm just going to give a very brief, very minimal rundown on some of the basic concepts but for a more full explanation I heartily recommend anyone interested to visit Fantasy Flight's website where they provide free pdf copies of the rules for your browsing pleasure. Alternately, there's a fairly informative wiki that might prove useful, or you can ask questions here and I'll try to answer them. I'd be running Base + Dunwich Horror, as that's what I own, and I feel Dunwich adds a lot of really important rules to base like Injury/Madness, etc.

[spoiler=super super brief and incompletely introduction to the game][spoiler=Sample Investigators]

You have two main health stats, Stamina and Sanity. If you run out of either it's bad, but not the end of the game, you'll have to go to the Hospital or the Asylum and there will be some other penalties. Stamina damage is incurred by losing combat checks, or random things happening during encounters. Sanity damage is sustained upon witnessing the horrors of mysteries man was not meant to know or expended when casting spells.

You have 3 sets of paired attributes. Speed/Sneak governs how many squares you can move on the board/how adept you are at evading the notice of monsters.

Fight/Will governs how good you are at dealing damage/retaining your sanity in the onslaught of terrors unimaginable.

Lore/Luck are an indication of how well versed you are in matters beyond mortal ken/how lucky you are.

They're paired so if you choose to set yourself up to have a high Fight, you're going to have a (relatively) lower Will. Your Focus is the number of stops you can adjust sliders during your upkeep, so if you need to prep yourself for a big battle in a coming turn, try to plan ahead.

Every Investigator has a unique special skill, and everybody has a set location to begin on the map, in addition to both fixed and random possessions, including money and clues. Clue tokens can be some of the most valuable things in the game, as expending them is necessary to seal gates.

[spoiler=Sample Great Old One]

I picked the most cliche one to demonstrate, sue me. There's 5 main areas of interest on the GOO card. Their Combat Rating (in this case -6). If the investigators cannot stop the GOO from awakening, they must attempt to defeat it in mortal combat, and that number affects how difficult that feat is by modifying their combat rolls.

The Worshippers section mostly modifies other monsters that crop up from time to time. The "Stirs in their slumber" ability in the center is the most important, and sets the tenor of the game. Cthulhu just makes everything harder, because you have less health resources, whereas people like Yog-Sothoth will make Gates harder to seal, or Shub-Niggurath will make all monsters harder to defeat, or etc.

The Doom Track is the list of numbers down at the bottom, which serves as your time limit in a matter of speaking. Each time a Gate to an Other World appears, it increments by one, and when it's filled, you have failed to prevent the GOOs awakening and must fight it.

Then theres the bits dealing with how it attacks and defends against the investigators on the right.

[spoiler=Sample Monsters]

There are five main types of monsters: Normal, Flying, Fast, Stalker, Unique. They're indicated by their colored border and only really affect how the monster moves. All its other stats are found in three main areas. There's the awareness rating on the front that modifies how difficult it is to sneak past, then there are the horror and combat ratings on the back, that detail how scary and how insane it will make you, as well as how difficult to fight and how much damage it deals if you fail. The toughness (# of blooddrops) is how many successes you need to get to defeat it.

[spoiler=Map of Arkham and Dunwich]

A general overview of some of the locations, and the layout of the gameboards.

In general, skill checks are made by totally up the relevant base skill (found on your investigator sheet's current slider rating) with any bonuses you get from equipment carried (bullwhip, derringer, tommy gun, etc.) and subtracting numbers based on the difficulty. Whatever your final number is how many dice you roll. The number of 5s or 6s rolled is how many successes you get. Different checks may require more than one success, but many only need one.

I guess what I'm asking, is is there any interest in people maybe joining me for an enjoyable game at some point?

[Original Alear]

I am interested! Would this involve using vassal (I don't understand how vassal works at all) or some kind of online version of the game? Would you use a webcam or something to take pictures of the board?

I don't know if this matters, but I have the base set, but no dunwich horror or other expansions.

EDIT-I feel like I should add that I'm completely unavailable on the weekend of May 30th-31st.

Edited May 16, 2015 by Severlan

[Balcerzak]

I don't know anything about vassal, I was thinking of either trying to webcam, or maybe set up a somewhat minimalist googledocs spreadsheet to act as a "map". I'll get back to you on what works best after some testing. Hopefully a couple other people are curious enough to maybe join in. I remember there being at least one or two lovecraft fans on the boards here somewhere.