Cosmic horror has seen a resurgence of late. Lovecraft, thanks to the aid of the public domain, has seen a thoroughly widespread infection of the public consciousness. Bits of his horror show up in television shows like True Detective, stories and comics from people like Junji Ito, music from Metallica, DeadMau5 and Iced Earth.

But, perhaps the most famous spread of Lovecraftian lore is in the boardgame sphere. Fantasy Flight has been pretty prolific in offering a line of products focusing on Arkham and all the horrors from which it spawns. These range from card games, dice games to sprawling board expedition games. I’ve written before of my enjoyment of Elder Signs. Thus, I was interested to hear that Fantasy Flight was releasing a new living card game. I’ve also written about their Netrunner product and not only was this new game going to follow a similar release structure but it was also going to be cooperative.

My biggest stumbling block with Netrunner was there’s no middle ground. Either the people I play are very interested in it and I’m wholly outmatched due to my shallow deckbuilding options or I can’t find anyone willing to put in the time and effort to learn the labyrinthine system. But if there wasn’t a competitive element that gave someone with a greater experience lead a significant advantage in the game then I figured it might be quite good for our table.

Thus, I eagerly played the first scenario of the Arkham Horror: The Card Game (referred to as simply Arkham LCG after this).

Arkham Horror: The Card Game and all associated image belong to Fantasy Flight Games

And today I’m going to give you my first impression.

It was… ok?

I enjoyed it. The game was certainly entertaining and took a card game in a direction I’ve never seen. There’s a deckbuilding portion which, I had mistakenly assumed, meant it would somewhat similar to Netrunner. You see, you select an identity in a similar manner: in Arkham you pick an investigator and they belong to one of five classes. Each investigator has a specific power and they have deckbuilding restrictions. For instance, I chose Agnes Baker: a waitress at the local diner who was once a deadly witch in a past life. Agnes, for whatever reason, is haunted by the power she formally wielded and is capable of utilising that power to cast some classic lovecraftian spells. As part of her deck building, I could choose cards from both her class (the Mystic) and the Survivor class as well as neutral cards. Other investigators likewise had access to one other class for their deck construction.

Each class has its own speciality too. The Survivor class, from half my deck construction, appears to focus on skill checks and turning failures into successes and successes into ever better results. My fellow investigator was Roland Banks, a Guardian/Seeker cross that specialized in fighting monsters and investigating locations.

It’s an interesting system but I’m not sure how I feel about the deckbuilding portion. Granted, we had access only to the core box which meant that our decks were built for us since there cards that come in the box only allow you to make two legal decks. But decks are apparently thirty cards maximum and in the course of a game you won’t ever really go through them. So there will certainly be a need for redundancy like Netrunner, however you’re fighting against a clock since doom accumulates every round and once it reaches a threshold you’re forced along that scenarios acts.

I’m not sure how I can talk about the scenario itself since it seems highly specific with little variability. What you do during a scenario is move your investigator from location to location attempting to collect the prerequisite number of clues needed to proceed. You have three actions per turn to play items, fight monsters and perform your investigation checks. You must find the necessary clues before the doom accumulates and ends your game. So even though you can spend an action to draw a card – much like Netrunner – you’re disincentivized to do so otherwise you’ll run out of time to finish the scenario.

Now, the locations and the events that happen in them are pretty specific to your mission. I won’t spoil much, but we started the game in our study and the door to our room mysteriously vanished. That’s the sort of opening that won’t really have much recurrence in other stories. So while it sort of followed the loose outline of a standard haunted house, the details themselves were closer to like a round of Imperial Assault.

And this is where I run into my major gripe with Arkham LCG. There is very little variation within the story itself. The act progresses with the same requirements each time. The locations you visit have the same effects each time you go to them. The doom counts up the same track with the same penalties. There really isn’t much reason to replay a scenario, even if it’s only to try out a new class. You’ll have much better idea of what you’ll be facing and will no doubt have to up the difficulty of the game solely to keep interest.

Course, the way the game improves difficulty is neat. Instead of rolling dice, whenever you perform a check you must draw from a bag of chits. These chits will modify your skill number compared to the check’s difficulty – determined by the level of “shroud” in the room you are performing the check. Nearly all the chits in the bag are negatives (one’s even an auto-fail) but the degree that these chits reduce your skill can be adjusted at the start of the game. We played on normal so most of our chits were negative 1 or 0 adjustment to our skill check. You can change it so there are far more negative 2 or 3 chits floating around the reduce your odds of success. But I’m not certain how effective this balances your foreknowledge of the tasks you’ll face and your ability to adjust your deck and fine-tune it for the challenges you know are behind each door.

Even worse, I loathe Arkham’s pricing scheme. I praised Netrunner for not being nearly as gouging to the customer as Magic: The Gathering. However, despite being the LCG format, I feel like Arkham is far worse than Netrunner. You see, because you are playing campaigns and following a story, you can’t really skip releases. The core set launched with a story with three missions in it. But the next releases are set to follow this order:

Arkham LCG does provide new and updated art for familiar characters and monsters from the Lovecraft universe and I absolutely adore them for it.

A deluxe expansion the provides the first two missions of a new story arc followed by six booster packs each containing the next story in the sequence. Most of the cards contained in these releases are thus the cards necessary to run that story (the act and mission cards, monsters, locations and rewards specific for that arc). It is impossible to buy the deluxe expansion and simply pick and choose which story boosters you want from its release as they all tie into one another. And it’s not like these releases are cheap either.

The deluxe box sells for around $25. Each booster is $15. For a single post core campaign, you’re looking at $115 for a complete experience. While this is on par with Netrunner, I was never going to purchase each card released since they weren’t necessary to play. Sure, it put me at a disadvantage but it didn’t lock me out of the game. And, for the most part, I could replay with one or two deluxe expansions and just the core quite happily with multiple different deckbuilds that would provide wholly different experiences.

Arkham LCG simply does not work that way. As I mentioned, the core doesn’t change even if I pick two vastly different investigators. The Dunwich Legacy will be the same. And to my knowledge, there isn’t really anything you can do to spice things up. The game requires a set series of events that are triggered by predictable conditions.

Ultimately, it’s the kind of game I simply can’t justify buying. It’s fun and I’ll gladly play with someone but when I look for a game I’m looking for something that I can really get my money’s value. I loathe legacy style games and I won’t ever buy a game that can only be experienced once before losing all value.

Now, I know other people are not held back by these stipulations. And, perhaps for them Arkham LCG would be a far more interesting investment. At any rate, I’m eager to finish off the core campaign and see where things go but I simply don’t see myself stopping by the counter to get my own set to force Kait through at the dinner table.

Which is a shame because I was really hoping to get her into the Lovecraftian universe.