Arkham Horror LCG Battle Report: Echoes of the Past (Path to Carcosa Part 3)

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, I continued our recap of playing through the Path to Carcosa campaign. Now that we’ve witnessed a crazy play and made a party get “lit” (har har), it was time to get down to business. The next scenario, Echoes of the Past, has us go to the nearby museum to investigate a rumor that this is not the first time that “The King in Yellow” has come to Arkham.

Just a reminder of what characters we are playing again:

Myself: Jenny Barnes

Cory: Mandy Thompson

Jimmy: Jim Culver

Mike: Tommy Muldoon

First of all, the game kind of brushes over this, but I think we broke into the museum? Or someone else did and we walked in behind them. But you end up meeting one of the caretakers later in the game and he’s all “oh hum how can I help you”? Just another ordinary day in the Arkham museum.

The way that “Echoes of the Past” plays out is that there are several rooms that fill up with clues that you need to go get, pretty standard for Arkham. However, there are cultists that are populated throughout the museum that turn these clues into Doom, expediting your chances of failure. Also, with the play, we are playing through the last scenario that I’ve played before this group. Any future scenarios and I will be 100% as in the dark as the rest of the group.

Getting back to Echoes of the Past, the cultists that started on the board were way off in the furthest portions of the museum. You are allowed to place them wherever, but we didn’t read ahead to see what they would be doing and so we thought this would give us time to prep. Nope. Instead they would eat away at our clues as it took us several turns to get there. Luckily, I drew my favorite card, Dynamite Blast, and used Elusive to get next to one of them and take them out. I them remarked to my fellow investigators the irony of using dynamite inside a museum and all the clues still being there in one piece.

One new aspect that we’ve been dealing with in our Carcosa campaign is the “Hidden” keyword. For those who don’t know, every turn you have to draw and resolve a mythos card, which is always bad but its a matter of how bad is it right now? When you draw a hidden card, instead of playing immediately, it gets held in your hand and limits you in some way. Not only that, you can’t tell others why you are unable to help them due to said limitations.

SPEAKING OF MYTHOS CARDS SCREWING US OVER….I grew to loathe this card. “The King’s Edict”, which we seemed to draw 5-6 times over the course of us playing, not only takes away more clues, but makes any enemies you fight stronger depending on the number of clues on them. It felt like 3 or 4 turns in a row we had one of us draw this card, making it hard to fight the growing amount of cultists on the board. Especially when you are me and manage to get this guy attached to you:

Not only is he equipped to me, but he’s now +1 fight and evade thanks to The King’s Edict. Also, I haven’t been able to draw a weapon to (literally) save my life. The best I could do was evade the guy and let Mike, who is our go to guy for fighting, take him out. Eventually, we managed to get enough clues and get Mr. Peabody, the caretaker, to hook up with us and help us find more clues.

There is a passageway keyword used during this phase that allows you to move to a “hidden library”, but the mechanic was super hard to understand. Peabody’s card makes it clear you can give passageway to a card, but it wasn’t obvious how the keyword worked. Yes, we can give the library passageway, but we didn’t know how we get another location to have passageway to connect to it. Finally, we realized that Mr. Peabody’s office has the keyword passageway by default, its just not obvious because its the only other card that had the keyword.

Unlike the last time I attempted this scenario, we did manage to make it to the Hidden Library. Once we were there, we knew we needed a lot of clues to end the scenario. So we loaded up with clues before we went into the Hidden Library — only to find out the library itself had all the clues we needed. Oh well. We ended up finding a neat jewel thing, and were given the choice to take it or keep it in the library. So of course we stole it. What’s the point of breaking and entering if you don’t steal stuff as well?

What did you think of this Battle Report? Are you surprised that I went 2 sessions without accidentally or purposely cheating (I am)? Let me know in the comments, or you can hit me up on twitter or facebook.