The Lurker

So there's this awesome board game called Arkham Horror (made by Fantasy Flight Games - check them out!). We tend to play it with great frequency, enjoying all the chaotic and crazy happenings that drive us insane (and occasionally outright kill us) in the town of Arkham. It's a game that can seat up to 8 players, which is good since we usually have at least 6 around the table and not many games reach that level. It's a full co-op game, and filled with all manner of fun, frightening, and hysterical happenings. It's the only game where when your character stumbles into a room filled with brains in jars, his first thought is, "I wonder if I'll get smarter eating these things." (No, seriously, that's exactly what happens).


Anywho, I had asked Dan to pick up the new expansion for the game while he was at GenCon in a few weeks. Somehow, he hit a timewarp this weekend and picked it up for me early (it was, evidently, pretty easy since it happened to be out at the store he was at for a tournament). So, several weeks early, we got to try out the new game! I spent a good deal of time setting it up so we'd use only the base game and new expansion (this marks the seventh expansion to the game, so you can imagine it's getting pretty big now). Boy, it was one of the most fun games we've played in a while! I would have to say this is the best small-box expansion to Arkham Horror.

So what's new? Glad you asked.

First, it has the Lurker, a new Herald. Heralds are the guys who are trying to pave the way for the Old One to arise. They generally add a few more challenging rules to the game and make it harder for you to win. This particular one increases the difficulty of closing and sealing gates (the primary win condition), and also introduces a new element: Pacts. There are three kinds. You can bind an ally to you, you can gain a Soul Pact, or a Blood Pact. All three of them are really good as soon as you get them, and allow you to gain Power which is really useful. But there are also Reckoning cards that pop up fairly regularly. They may be good ("Anyone with a Pact gains a spell!") or they may be bad ("The person with the most Power dies!"). Eep! So you're constantly wanting to take Pacts, but then hope that only good stuff happens to you. A true balance of "do I really want to gain more power if it may kill me"? I ended up being killed by a Reckoning because I was getting to greedy with the Pacts.


Next are the Relationship cards. I read the rules for them and was not very impressed. They offer a lot of good things without the typical balance of "could be good, could be bad" that Arkham Horror usually does. So we house-ruled them to act a little differently.

Basically, everyone picked a partner in the game. We did it by couples. Each partnership got a Relationship card that they could share. But in exchange, if your partner ever lost all of his or her sanity, you lost one sanity. If your partner ever lost all of his or her health, you lost one health. And if your partner died, you lost one of each. Kinda like a karmic tie thing. Things were great with both Ellen and me dying over the course of the game and Laura and Dan getting zapped for it.


Finally, the last major change to the game deals with the gates. There are all new gates for the game. Some of them have two different Other Worlds you can travel to. You get to choose the one you want to go to, and can travel back to that gate from either one. Generally, though, those gates are a little harder to close and seal than the ones that have only one choice.

The gates with only one choice on them now have different icons and abilities to them. Some might say that if you try to close the gate and fail, you lose one Sanity, or a monster might appear. Others do bad things if they open on a space that already occupies a player by adding Doom or outright killing the player. Still others move around the board, swallowing up people as they go. it was always crazy to see what these gates did!

The expansion had all of this in addition to a bunch of new Mythos and Other World cards, a few new Encounter cards for the Arkham locations, and a few new items and spells to collect. Overall, the expansion gets two big thumbs up from me.