I was reading about Jason Maxwell's adventures in solo Arkham Horror, so I had some time today and thought I'd give it another solo whirl. I went with three investigators (at random): Monterey Jack (aka The Archaeologist), Vincent Lee (aka The Doctor), and Gloria Goldberg (aka The Author). The town of Arkham and was pitted against Ithaqua. Well, with an inexperienced player, some bad dice, and a bad card draw, the town and its inhabitants never had a chance. Five rounds in and I hadn't closed a gate, hadn't had a gate collision (so the doom track and gates were at 5), and my best shot at closing a gate had gone up in flames when Gloria tried and tried to kill a horror in another dimension and couldn't roll 3 passes on 8 dice. My 6th round card was one that put 5 monster on the card and one new one each round. When it got to 8, the terror track shot to 10 and I just never had a chance after that. Now, I've never played this with a group, but the thing that seems to take the longest to me is simply the setup of the game. I can get through monster movement and such pretty quickly, I'm not sure what all the fuss is. Even if I was doing it for the group, it isn't a big deal. No, the real problem with this game is that it gives me a similar feel to Pandemic while being 8x more fiddly. In all fairness, AH oozes with theme. Ah well. I'll probably keep pulling it out on occasion, but it still is just so-so.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Oh the Horror
I was reading about Jason Maxwell's adventures in solo Arkham Horror, so I had some time today and thought I'd give it another solo whirl. I went with three investigators (at random): Monterey Jack (aka The Archaeologist), Vincent Lee (aka The Doctor), and Gloria Goldberg (aka The Author). The town of Arkham and was pitted against Ithaqua. Well, with an inexperienced player, some bad dice, and a bad card draw, the town and its inhabitants never had a chance. Five rounds in and I hadn't closed a gate, hadn't had a gate collision (so the doom track and gates were at 5), and my best shot at closing a gate had gone up in flames when Gloria tried and tried to kill a horror in another dimension and couldn't roll 3 passes on 8 dice. My 6th round card was one that put 5 monster on the card and one new one each round. When it got to 8, the terror track shot to 10 and I just never had a chance after that. Now, I've never played this with a group, but the thing that seems to take the longest to me is simply the setup of the game. I can get through monster movement and such pretty quickly, I'm not sure what all the fuss is. Even if I was doing it for the group, it isn't a big deal. No, the real problem with this game is that it gives me a similar feel to Pandemic while being 8x more fiddly. In all fairness, AH oozes with theme. Ah well. I'll probably keep pulling it out on occasion, but it still is just so-so.
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2 comments:
For once, I can see that I agree with you. It's a long, fiddly cooperative game. AH is oozing with theme, and does keep you fairly engaged. However, I always ask myself when playing it: why am I not playing Descent instead?
AH is an average game that is worth having around and busting out now and again. The main benefit to AH over Descent is that I can get my wife to play AH :)
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