Arkham Roundup: 02/24/19

A roundup of some recent Arkham Horror: The Card Game announcements, previews, community postings and other items of interest.

In The Clutches of Chaos Announced

Fantasy Flight has announced the fifth Mythos Pack of The Circle Undone, titled In the Clutches of Chaos. It looks as though this scenario may be drawing inspiration from the gameplay of the Arkham Horror board games, with the investigators racing around the city of Arkham to close breaches as the city destabilizes. That seems suitable given this cycle’s focus on exploring Arkham itself. There are a handful of player card previews in the article, including a very exciting card for the Mystic class, so be sure to take a look at the announcement.

The Secret Name Previews

Speaking of player cards – on their latest episode the Drawn to the Flame podcast had an opportunity to preview a new player card from the upcoming The Secret Name Mythos Pack. You can check out the card image here. Not to be outdone, the Mythos Busters have announced that they too will be previewing a card from The Secret Name over on their Twitch channel tomorrow night (Monday, February 25 at 9:00 P.M. central).

The Circle Undone Errata

An error has been discovered in the scenario The Witching Hour from The Circle Undone where, depending on which random locations are in play, it’s possible for the scenario to be unwinnable in a small number of 1- or 2-player setups (games with 3 or more players are unaffected). An official errata to fix this issue should be forthcoming but for now we have a temporary solution from lead developer Matt Newman, shared in a post on this thread at the FFG forums. Matt recommends setting the scenario up with 5 Witch-Haunted Woods locations in play instead of just 4 (following the usual instructions for distributing the locations as evenly as possible). He says a future edition of the FAQ will either make this change permanent or address the issue in some other way.

Videos

Over on the Atlas Agency YouTube I’ve just uploaded a (belated) scenario impressions video covering The City of Archives:

I also recently pieced together something a little different on YouTube: a sampler playlist featuring one video from each of the Arkham-related YouTube channels. If you’re looking to explore Arkham video content, this should be a good way to get a taste of the different creators who are out there. I limited this to active channels that are specifically focused on Arkham Horror: The Card Game. 

I limited this playlist to English-language channels, but in putting it together I did come across a newly-launched Spanish-language Arkham Channel, Los Archivos de Arkham, which may be of interest to some of you.

Arkham News Roundup: Week of 01/06/19

A roundup of some Arkham Horror: The Card Game announcements, previews, community postings and other items of interest from the past week.

Return to the Dunwich Legacy Release

The biggest news of the week was that the Return to the Dunwich Legacy upgrade expansion released on Thursday. I’m currently working on my first run through the updated campaign, using a Minh and Leo pairing to play two-handed solo. It’s still early – I’m only through The Miskatonic Museum – but so far I’m enjoying the experience. I’ve especially liked what I’ve seen so far of the set’s “replacement” encounter sets.

Return to the Dunwich Legacy does have an unfortunate production issue that was spotted pretty quickly after its release, discussed over on this thread on BoardGameGeek. It’s not so much an issue with Return as it is with the Dunwich Mythos Packs; it has to do with a cosmetic change that was made at some point in the past to the unrevealed sides of certain location cards in The Miskatonic Museum, The Essex County Express, and Where Doom Awaits. Early printings of these Mythos Packs featured “blank circle” symbols in the upper left-hand corners of certain locations. These circles were removed in later printings. Return to the Dunwich Legacy uses the “no circle” design for its location cards, so if you have an early printing of one of these Mythos Packs then you’ll be able to tell when an unrevealed card is from Return. 

On the left is an Exhibit Hall from Return to the Dunwich Legacy. On the right is an Exhibit Hall from an early printing of The Miskatonic Museum. Note the tell-tale circle in the upper left.

See the image above for an example of what this looks like. We don’t yet know what Fantasy Flight will offer as a fix for players impacted by this, but fortunately it’s only a small number of cards that’s affected.

The Circle Undone Previews

We were treated to a couple of new previews for The Circle Undone this week. First, over on FFG’s site they previewed the box’s sixth and final new investigator (with a bonus look at 1 new Mystic player card). Then, over on Drawn to the Flame, Frank and Peter got to preview another of the expansion’s new Mystic cards. And, though I think this one was technically last week, the Mythos Busters also recently got to unveil a new Survivor card.

At this point it’s likely we’re near the end of the official previews for The Circle Undone. We’ve had quite a bit previewed:

• We know all 6 of the box’s new investigators along with all of their signature cards (though we still don’t know the deckbuilding restrictions for a few of them).
• Between the official previews and the Mythos Busters preview we’ve now seen all 4 Survivor cards.
• We’ve had previews for 3 Mystic cards. In addition, the fourth card is partially visible in a card fan on the Spanish Fantasy Flight site.
• We’ve seen 2 Seeker cards and 2 Rogue cards.
• We know the least about the new Guardian player cards. We know their Tarot asset and we have some partial information on one card (Delay the Inevitable, from the card fan in the initial announcement). We don’t know the main text of Delay the Inevitable and we don’t know anything about their remaining 2 cards.
• We saw 1 Neutral card and 1 new Basic Weakness in the Tarot preview.

As far as I know we don’t have a final release date for the box, but I expect it’s not far off. A January release doesn’t seem to be outside the realm of possibility.

Articles

Just yesterday the blog The Strange Solution posted an excellent wrap-up/debrief on the Forgotten Age campaign. It’s a great discussion of what worked and didn’t work this cycle, and I’m in agreement with most of the author’s points about the scenarios and the campaign’s overall mechanics.

That’s it for this roundup. If you’re out there playing Return to the Dunwich Legacy this week, I wish you good luck in your campaign.

Arkham News Roundup: Week of 12/16/18

A roundup of some Arkham Horror: The Card Game announcements, previews, community postings and other items of interest from the past week.

Official Player Card Previews

On Monday of this past week Fantasy Flight posted a preview article showing off a few of the new player cards from the upcoming Return to the Dunwich Legacy upgrade expansion. Unfortunately, due to the fact that these player cards leaked online a few weeks ago, this preview wasn’t quite as exciting as it might otherwise have been.

It looked like that might be it for the week, but Fantasy Flight came through on Friday with a great Circle Undone preview article showcasing the remaining 2 unknown investigators from that deluxe box: Joe Diamond, the Private Investigator; and Preston Fairmont, the Millionaire. Both feature unique mechanics that should make for interesting play. The article also shows off 2 player cards from the deluxe box, including a new Rogue event which introduces the idea of a “resource test.” Some random observations:

• I wonder if “resource tests” might be a recurring theme for the Rogue player cards this cycle, similar to the way Mystics had token sealing in Forgotten Age. If so, could we see a new skill icon for boosting resource tests? Another possibility is that resource tests could be a theme within a scenario in the campaign. That might fit for something based around the Order of the Silver Twilight.
• Last cycle featured the Illicit trait as a minor Rogue subtheme. The trait’s been present from the beginning (every Rogue weapon so far has had it), but we saw it called out by Finn and Fence. With Preston Fairmont barred from taking Illicit cards, I wonder if we might see the trait take a back seat for this cycle.
• You can see what’s probably some new player card artwork as the black-and-white background image behind the Joe Diamond card fan: a tarot card of Death, which may be a suite-mate to the previously previewed Rogue asset The Moon XVIII.

Developer Interview

If you enjoyed last week’s interview with Matt Newman over on Drawn to the Flame, you can check out another interview this week over on the Mythos Busters podcast. There’s some overlap in the discussion with the previous interview from Drawn to the Flame, but plenty of new info as well (including some talk about the Guardians of the Abyss scenario pack).

 

Arkham News Roundup: Week of 12/09/18

A roundup of some Arkham Horror: The Card Game announcements, previews, community postings and other items of interest from the past week.

The Circle Undone

On Tuesday Fantasy Flight ran a new preview of The Circle Undone introducing 2 of the box’s new investigators: athlete Rita Young and psychologist Carolyn Fern. Thanks to some teaser images from a trade magazine and a foreign-language publisher the community had already been aware we’d be seeing these 2 investigators in this box, but it’s nice to get official confirmation and it’s even nicer to get previews of their signature cards. Thanks to the novella promo we’ve already had Carolyn available for a while now, but with this preview we can finally see what her “real” signature cards Hypnotic Therapy and Rational Thought do. We know The Circle Undone will have 6 new investigators total and with this article we now have 3 officially previewed (a fourth, Marie Lambeau, has been spotted in an outside teaser but hasn’t been officially announced, and we’re still in the dark on the remaining 2).

Developer Interview

One of the highlights of every expansion cycle for me is getting to listen to the Drawn to the Flame podcast’s end-of-cycle interview with lead Arkham designer/developer Matt Newman. They’ve been able to do these interviews following each cycle, and this past week Drawn to the Flame episode 93 went up with their post-Forgotten Age interview. It’s about a 2-hour episode, but it’s well worth the time if you’re at all interested in hearing about the thought processes behind the design of this latest cycle. It includes discussion of the player cards, gameplay mechanics, and scenarios, and they don’t shy away from discussing how the cycle has been received by the community. And if you haven’t listened to Drawn to the Flame’s interviews from the previous cycles, I highly recommend both of those as well (the interview for The Dunwich Legacy is episode 22 and The Path to Carcosa is episode 57). The post-Dunwich interview, if I remember right, had some excellent explanations of the basic themes of the player cards for each of the game’s classes.

Fantasy Flight Merchandise

Last month Fantasy Flight released a series of 2019 calendars featuring artwork from 5 of its game lines, and it wasn’t long before the Arkham Files calendar sold out. I noticed this morning that the Arkham calendars have been restocked in Fantasy Flight’s online store, so if you were trying to pick one of those up and you missed out before you might want to head over there now and pick one up while you can.