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

Last time, I talked about how I managed to finally get a regular group to try out the Arkham Horror: The Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games. We played through the first scenario in the core box, The Gathering. I played my deck pretty horribly, but we managed to make it through to the end.

Well, now it’s time to talk about Part 2 of the core box: The Midnight Masks.

Just a reminder of the investigators that everyone is playing: 

Myself: Skids O'Toole 

Jimmy: Agnes Baker 

Cory: Daisy Walker 

Mike: Roland Banks 

In Midnight Masks, we had to run around and collect clues from various locations as per usual, then turn in enough clues to unlock a “cult member” that we could interrogate. There are 7 total cult members that you can investigate, any of which that the group fails to investigate “get away” (aka, they’ll be back in the last part). The past couple of times that I’ve tried this scenario, I/we managed to get a couple of the cult members taken care of before things get crazy and we have to resign or else we’ll die.

What shocked me about this play is that for it being the second time playing, everyone took to their given role really effectively. Jimmy and Mike realized that they are responsible for taking out the baddies and monsters (Mike using his strength, Jimmy using his magic and spells). This helped us out, as this scenario introduced the ability for cultists to have doom tokens on them. By keeping the number of enemies on the board low, it helped keep the Agenda from advancing too quickly, as these extra doom counters didn’t stay out very long.

Cory understood that she was the best at getting all the clues so ran around trying to get as many as she could. I helped out where I could by providing bonuses to people with my skill cards. This helped us out until I could get out my gun and start working on clearing out enemies as well. Additionally, I actually made use of my special ability, and didn’t get tied up when my personal weakness, Hospital Debts, came into play!

We actually were able to get 4 of the 7 cult members out on the board, which was a record for me! Almost each of these cultists had a special “Parley” ability where you could talk/persuade them instead of straight up killing them. Every time, I asked the group what they wanted to do, and the answer was always the same: oh we’re gonna kill them. There’s no mercy with this group!

Eventually, we did have to resign from the game. Not necessarily because things were getting rough, it was more the fact that it was getting late at night and we had just finished killing the 4th cultist. We knew that to continue playing, we were going to need another 8 clues and then spend them to get an additional cultist member. This was likely to add another 45 minutes on to our play time so we declared victory and packed it up for the night. But, I’m sure in hindsight that was probably a mistake that we’ll pay for later. However, I did finally get to use the dynamite blast card to take out the pesky masked cultist! So we won’t have to worry about them later on!

Did you like this "battle report"? Would you like to see future write ups as we continue the campaign (or other games)? Let me know in the comments or on twitter/facebook! Next up is The Devourer Below!