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

In previous articles, I talked about my experiences playing the Arkham Horror Living Card Game (LCG) with a brand new group of people. Well, for the past year, I’ve also been solo playing through the first “full” campaign, which is called the Dunwich Legacy. After a long time, I’m finally getting close to finishing a campaign, especially since I’ve had most of these cards for a couple of years now.

Who am I playing for this campaign? None other than Jenny Barnes! I’ve fallen in love with a deck build I found online (it is dubbed the “campaign-breaker”). I’m even using it during the Path to Carcosa playthrough that we are starting soon. What I enjoy about the deck is the versatility: having cards that give me extra actions and combining that with Jenny’s ability to get a bunch of resources so that I can get done what needs to be done.

However, that plan doesn’t always work out in the end. Largely because Jenny’s character specific weakness, In Search of Izzie, gives you trauma if you haven’t solved it by the time that the scenario is over. So by the time that I have gotten to “Where Doom Awaits”, the 7th part of The Dunwich Legacy, I’ve racked up quite a bit of Physical and Mental trauma. Not exactly a good place to be starting out with. Also, because of some choices that I had made in previous scenarios, I started this scenario with one monster already on the board.

No problem! Even though the monster is a hunter, it starts one space away so I have some time to prep before it gets to me. I spend my first turn getting set up playing cards and preparing to fight it. Except I don’t have a weapon yet….and Arkham decides to double down on this by giving me a second monster as my first Mythos card. Great, now I have 2 monsters engaged with me and I’m already at half sanity - and it’s only Round 2!!! Needless to say, I only made it one more round before I went insane.

Since that play went so poorly, instead of moving on to the next scenario, I decided to reshuffle everything and start that scenario all over again. This time, however, luck was on my side as in my opening hand I managed to get Dynamite Blast, one of my favorite cards to play-because of my mental image of it being used! Without hesitating I chucked the Dynamite at the Conglomeration of Spheres to get in some hits before it got to me. This helped out this gameplay a lot, but the scenario was still faaaaaar from easy.

Instead of drawing a second monster, this time when I went through the Mythos phase I got Beyond the Veil, which while very intimidating wasn’t a big threat at the moment. However, the game really wanted me to have that trait, because not long after that I drew a second one. I’m learning to adapt my thinking when it comes to Arkham Horror, because even when cards look horrible, I’m always telling myself, “well, it could have been a lot worse”.

In the same theme of the lingering monsters from my first attempt at the game, much of this attempt was just me attempting to manage the board. It felt impossible to get to where I needed to be to advance the scenario because I was just trying to get through a glut of enemies. Had I been playing with another person or investigator, this probably wouldn’t have been much of a big deal. With just one investigator, it got rather difficult. So I quickly got to the second agenda card in the scenario, which has to be one of my favorites:

I love the creepy text on this card! Really drives home the point that I’m probably screwed. In fact, by the time that I got to the second Act card, I was already close to dead. And by “already close to dead”, I mean that I had been lingering with 1 health left for several turns, just waiting for the final blow to finish me off. The second act brought out the lead cultist, Seth Bishop, who looked to be the final nail in the coffin. But wait! I have enough clues and I’m at the place where I need to be! What do I do?

<—— CHEAT MODE ENABLED ——>

So yeah, I cheated. Technically, when a monster spawns at your location it auto engages with you. I made it so that it didn’t auto engage so that I could use my turn to finish off the scenario. I’m sure several of you are disappointed in me, but that’s fine with me. I’m not playing for a championship or any kind of prize, I just want to get through and experience the entire story that has taken me a year to get to. And I really didn’t want to play through the mission a third time, or switch to another investigator. Doesn’t really matter anyways, as the end of the scenario is pretty much a loss as well since a rift is opened up to another dimension, just waiting for an old one to devour the Earth. Time to do what any sane person does: jump into said rift! Clearly nothing can go wrong in this process, and we’ll see what “awaits” next time.

What did you think of this Battle Report? Have you managed to get through an entire Arkham Horror campaign? Let me know in the comments, or you can hit me up on twitter or facebook.