Arkham Horror LCG Battle Report: The Unspeakable Oath (Path to Carcosa Part 4)

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

Last time we talked about Path to Carcosa, we had gone inside a library to investigate a rumor that weird play “The Yellow King” had toured through Arkham years beforehand. In our search, we found that one man, Daniel Chesterfield, survived that encounter and was now being held at Arkham Asylum. So in this scenario, we venture to the asylum to find the Joker…..I mean Daniel Chesterfield. This was the first scenario in Path to Carcosa that I haven’t previously played before, so I was kind of excited to play this scenario and experience some new content. 

As always, I’m stunned by how well Arkham Horror can take a set of cards and use them creatively to create an immersive experience, whether it be a train in the Essex County Express, or an Asylum here in The Unspeakable Oath. When the intro text finishes and has you “locked” in the asylum, you get a glimpse of it as there is no “resign” action on any of the cards unlike several of the other previous scenarios. There are several rooms to explore, but several of them remain locked. The game also adds in cards like Straitjacket to add to the ambience of the game, giving me images of investigators running around kicking things in order to find clues. 

It didn’t take long, however, before I was in over my head. While I was able to get Lone Wolf and Arcane Studies out fairly quickly, which helps with money generation and discovering clues, I also managed to get out my basic weakness card Psychosis and get an enemy attached to me. Psychosis gives you a damage whenever you take a horror, so I racked up on the damage and horror rather quickly before I could get rid of that card.

We finished off the first act card and flipped it over to reveal a set of options to get the key we needed to move forward. Basically, we got a chance to succeed at several skill tests before we end up knocking the nurse over and taking the keys by force. Luckily, it didn’t come to that for us, although we thought it might. This was because at the time that this card was revealed, nobody was in a good position to attempt any of the skill checks. Cory managed to try an intelligence check first and succeed, so we didn’t have to worry about any future repercussions this action might have. 

At this point, I felt like I stopped being pretty useful, as I was spending my turns trying to deal with my problems instead of moving towards our goal. My search for Lizzie weakness came out so I had to attend to that, plus I had taken a lot of hits so I wasn’t really outgoing towards finding Daniel. I did have my moments, though, like the classic Dynamite Blast to kill off a bunch of monsters so that people could get through locations easily. Also, on several of the cards there were statements like “remember you set a fire in the kitchen” if you removed all the clues on several different cards. We assumed that this would play into us escaping the asylum so I attempted to work on getting those locations clear.

This scenario has 4 different Act cards for you to complete in order to be successful, so when we had already spent a lot of time on 2 of the cards, and the Agenda deck starting to progress quickly, we were getting rather worried about the remaining parts of the Act deck. Rightfully so, as towards the end the Agenda deck started throwing out these powerful monsters that we had not seen up until this point. With some luck on token pulls and some teamwork, we managed to get the pieces we needed and find the exit in the garden. At one point, I even moved into an area and engaged with some enemies to let others pass by easily, then later played the classic Elusive card to punch out and get back to the exit.

I love all the twists and turns of this scenario, very much Arkham Horror at its best. The narration dump at the end filled us in with some information about a certain elder god that starts with a H...and proceeds to tell us that if we mention their name out loud we will take penalties in game as well. Now that we have learned a lot about the menace we are facing, I’m assuming that the next piece of the story will have us working to try and prevent said elder god from invading our realm. Isn’t that always how these stories work?

What did you think of this Battle Report? What type of investigator is your favorite to play? Let me know in the comments, or you can hit me up on Twitter (twitter.com/ChrisTheProf) or Facebook (Facebook.com/boardsandswordspod).