You might think that I’ve already done a review on this game, and actually, I was a bit surprised I hadn’t, but what I had done was a Board Game Battle between Arkham Horror LCG, Mansions of Madness, Elder Signs, and Arkham Horror 2nd Edition. So today we’re going to take that deeper look at Arkham Horror LCG.

In Arkham Horror LCG, you are taking on the role of an investigator looking to solve various mysteries that are plaguing the town. However, these mysteries aren’t like anything you’ve dealt with before, and are you fully equipped to take them on? The answer is probably just barely. You do this by gaining clues, fighting monsters, and managing your hand of cards and cards in front of you. And you travel around from location to location searching for clues and possibly finding horrors that you’ll now have to deal with.

Each case uses different locations and you might have to face off against ghouls in your house or be searching for cultists hidden about the town. Can you find them all in time or can you escape your house before the ghouls over run it. And those are an example of how the scenarios and cases can change as those are the first two that you play out of the base box.

Arkham Horror LCG is a story driven deck builder, and that’s the best description I have for it. You have your mystery scenarios, but also each character has a deck of cards that you can put together and that they play from and that you can upgrade between sessions. That means that you could get a better weapon into your deck as you become more prepared to take on different challenges. You generally play through the scenarios in a box with the same characters that you start with, but they give you a wide variety of characters that you can use. You might be someone who makes sense, like an FBI Agent or Reporter, or you might be trying to solve these crimes as a waitress. And their decks are going to be built slightly differently depending on the character. This is much more of a deck builder in the lines of Magic the Gathering versus a deck builder like Dominion where you are adding in cards midgame.

What I think really works in this game is the unique feel of the scenarios, and though I haven’t played a ton of the scenarios I really have liked the ones that I’ve tackled. Too many games you play them an handful of times or different scenarios and they end up feeling like they are similar, but in Arkham Horror LCG you can see the care put into developing unique scenarios and changing up mechanics for scenarios, and it gives it an extremely thematic feel. These scenarios aren’t easy, but Arkham Horror LCG also gives you ways to adjust the difficulty, so that if you want to play a simpler and more story driven experience, you can do that. Or if you want to really challenge yourself with a nightmarishly difficult scenario, you can adjust the level to make it that as well.

That’s one thing that I haven’t talked much about, with how you change levels is that you add more or different tokens to your modifier bag. When you want to do something like shoot a gun, evade a monster, or search for clues, you look at your stat and play any cards that you want to modify that card and use cards that you have in your inventory to hit a target number. But you’re always going to pull tokens from the modifier bag, and it could be fine, or it could give you that plus that you needed to succeed, or you might pull a negative, or you might pull one of the special tokens which will have unique rules depending on your scenario.

For me, this is a really great game. If I remember correctly, the battle came down to Arkham Horror LCG and Mansions of Madness, and I really love both of those games. Arkham Horror LCG is probably harder to initially get to the table, but then is easier to repeatedly get to the table. It’s a fun game with a ton of a content now and will keep you nice and busy playing. It’s also a game that you can play up to 4 people if you have two copies of the base set, but I really think that Arkham Horror LCG is a great solo game and I enjoy playing it that way. I’m excited to play more of it because it even seems like there is more design space that I haven’t seen yet.

Overall Grade: A
Gamer Grade: A
Casual Grade: B

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