And then, win or lose, you're going to start tinkering with your decks. But what a structure, and what addictive gambling! By the time the ghouls have dragged your starting investigators down into their hideous burrows, you'll want to try again. Of course, it's gambling disguised inside a grand narrative structure. How much do you really need to pass that test? Enough to throw away half your hand when you might need it for the next challenge? No? How about a quarter then? An eighth? Your soul? This, then, is the slavering squid beak with which the game ensnares you. Before you draw, though, you can discard cards to get a bonus. This is normally a specified stat like combat or willpower, modified by a token from the bag. To succeed, you need to beat a difficulty. But the results are worthwhile: a careful tailoring of difficulty, a stitch of narrative and a thread of probabilities for players to ponder.Д«etter, though is the simple mechanic that the bag builds on to determine success in completing tasks. Like the rest of scenario setup, building the bag is a pain. Most are simple bonus or penalty values, but there are a few more specific effects which again depend on the scenario. Instead of a dice there's the comical sounding 'chaos bag' which contains a mix of counters specified by the scenario.

You build a map from location cards and move round it by taking actions, including drawing and playing cards. Speaking of the plays you make, there's plenty of smart and novel design here, too. I had reservations about the limited number of scenarios in the box, but they proved unfounded: there's plenty of stories in the base game alone. Between the different plays you can make, the different progressions you can see and the different ways a campaign can unfold, you'll never see the same game twice. It also means that there's a lot of story based variety in the game. This allows you the chance to pull some value from the ashes, albeit with a millstone around your neck. So, a poor result in your first scenario carries through to the next. Adventures, you see, link together into campaigns. So it's possible to do badly and still complete the scenario and carry one. There are various end paragraphs, of various level of success. The different order in which these come out can lead to different narrative outcomes. Except that instead of picking paragraph numbers, you're directed to them by combinations of the progress cards. The game comes with a little booklet of paragraphs, a bit like a choose your own adventure.

Yet that could also be okay, though, because of the novel and smart adventure-like structure. The turn over at different rates, although safe is say that if the monsters progress runs much ahead of player progress, you're heading for a loss. This includes two decks which track progress, one for the players and one for the monsters. To play, you choose and set-up a scenario. And then there's the third key departure, which is the narrative element. So playing with no more than two is fine. That's could be okay, though, because another way in which it differs from the standard LCG model is that it's solo or co-operative. In fact, you don't have enough to make more than two decks. But when you come to build them, you'll find there's not actually that many. At first, it's wise to go with the suggested starter decks. You do build a deck from the selection of cards in the box. It promises to be a Living Card Game, and it both is and isn't. At dawn, zombie-like, I staggered out under their baleful influence to secure and play a copy. At night, in dreams, eldritch horrors whispered in my ear that it was new and exciting. Arkham Horror: The Card Game, though, promises to be different. Yet, year after, year release schedules continue to put a lie to that presumption. You'd have thought there was only so much Lovecraft that gamers could stomach.

Octgn image packs arkham horror