Arkham Horror LCG Session Report: In the Clutches of Chaos (The Circle Undone Part 7)

By Chris Renshaw

Disclaimer: If you haven't heard about Arkham Horror: The Card Game, you might have trouble with this post. Also, potential spoilers ahead. 

Last Time...

We are slowly getting closer to the end! Last time, we went to an island that no one ever ventures to because *surprise* - people ventured to it to conduct a ritual. We decided to side with the Witches Coven, which meant we tried to put a stop to the ritual. Of course, this just meant that things went sideways and the leader was possessed by a hundred year old dead spirit.

You know, the usual.

Just as a reminder of what investigators we are playing as again:

Myself: Diana Stanley
Cory: Rex Murphy
Jimmy: Mark Harrigan
Mike: Tony Morgan

It starts with love creepy text...

You might read the Agenda card above and say “Hey, that reminds me a lot of Pandemic”. You’d be correct - this scenario is just a big Arkham themed game of Pandemic. “Breaches” are forming throughout the city, and you need to travel to all the different places and do various tasks to keep the number of breaches down. If you get too many breaches at a location, an “incursion” forms. What happens when an incursion forms? Well, doom gets advanced, and oh yeah - all of the connecting locations get an additional breach, causing more potential incursions….you know, like Pandemic.

Luckily, sealing these breaches is what you need to move the story forward, as the breaches get sent to the Act deck. When you have 3 breaches on the Act deck, you can spawn a clue on a random location. After that, you get back to normal Arkham Horror mechanics (get enough clues, then spend them to advance).

One Multiple things, I don’t know why...

While the main mechanics of this scenario are very different, the overall scope of the scenario is a very stereotypical one: do what you can until things get bad and you have to resign. There *technically* is a way to “complete” the scenario, but (Spoiler) we never had a chance of getting to that. We spent most of the scenario spread out across the map, staying near locations where our particular investigator had a better chance of removing breaches.

The problem with this scenario is that while we did a great job of removing breaches and generating clues, that’s all we had time for. We didn’t have the spare actions to run to the various random locations where the clues appeared to try and get them. If we had done that, the chances of breaches going out of control was too high.

It doesn’t even matter how hard you try...

Oh yeah, remember encounter cards? Those are still a thing. While the mythos phase is when breaches are spawned, it only just takes up the “place a doom on the agenda deck” portion of the phase. You still have to go through all the encounter cards, which cause more breaches to potentially spawn. Meaning that if you’ve done the math and whittle down enough breaches to keep things “safe”, you might get thrown a curveball when these cards come out as they drop more breaches than you planned and an incursion appeared.

In the end…

Then the possessed baddie comes out. After that, not sure what else really happens in the scenario because by the time we got to this point, we knew that it was time to piece out. We all hightailed it to the church and resigned. There’s a lot of expositional text to go through after you complete the scenario, whereupon you receive a certain number of “tally marks” depending on how you did throughout all of the campaign so far. We ended up with 5 tally marks - which sounded really good, but at the time we weren’t sure if that would end up being a good thing or a bad thing. We’ll find out in the conclusion, as we end up catching a ride on a flying demon to the realm of Azathoth. It’s time to once again keep an ancient one from consuming us all!

What did you think of this Session Report? What other board game could Arkham Horror do a scenario based on? Let me know in the comments, or you can hit me up on twitter or facebook. Also, did you know we have a Patreon? Go check it out if you want to join our community, get bonus episodes of the podcast, and receive cool dice!