By Chris Renshaw 

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...

Apologies that it’s been awhile, our group has gotten stuck on a specific encounter and all my Arkham thinking has gone into trying to finish that one. More on that next time. Last time, we decided that going to an old house of a rumored witch was a good idea. After adventures running around in time and space, we agreed that yes, a witch did in fact live at that house. So what’s next?

Just as a reminder of what investigators we are playing as again:

Myself: Calvin Baker
Cory: Rex Murphy
Jimmy: Mark Harrigan
Mike: Tony Morgan

Welcome to the Black Parade

Members of my family recently have been binge watching seasons of American Horror Story, and they are currently on the “Freak Show” season. For some reason, these creepy text Agenda Cards now remind me of that show, when you’d think that it would remind me of the “Coven” season. Maybe it’s just because this one has what looks like a circus attraction on it.

Moving on, in this scenario, we are investigating some more spectral occurrences that have been reported in the “Hangman Hill” area, which isn’t ominous sounding at all. After enough investigations, these Heretic spirits spawn, which need to all be “banished” in order to win the game.

Pulling out my Hair-atics

Each Heretic has a specific condition that it takes to “banish” it. However, you don’t know what that condition is until you either: spend a clue to look on the back of the card, or defeat it. Obviously, you’d spend the clue to look right? Normally, none of the effects trigger when you look at the back of the card, but one Heretic specifically has a clause that triggers when you Parley to look at the back, causing it to attack the person spending the clue.

Ouch.

Knowing when to cut your losses

The “best” part about this scenario was that for many of the Heretics, you need to bring them to a specific location and use an action at that location to banish them. The catch is that the location needs to be out of clues in order to trigger that action. Which seems ok until you see that the location you need is on the other side of the board and it has 8 clues on. Meanwhile, you are taking out the Heretic, only for it to cause some sort of negative effect until it is banished (lose resources, health, sanity, etc). If you can’t/don’t take the negative effect, it flips back over and you have to defeat it again.

In a fairly typical move for playing Arkham, we saw that there was no way that we could get rid of all 4 heretics before we ran out of time/health/investigators. Everyone agreed that we would eventually call it quits and resign - just we weren’t exactly sure when that point was. Luckily, we managed to get one “easy’ Heretic to banish and we walked away having banished 3 of them.

Thoughts while Running Away

This was a very cool looking scenario. Each of the locations had a “spectral” side and a non-spectral side, and you were constantly having to flip between sides in order to advance the plot. The artwork in the images helps sell that you are in the same space, but now haunted by a bunch of spirits. The encounter deck follows through with setting this scene by having 2 different encounter decks: one for when you are on normal locations and one for being on spectral locations. You could have different players pulling from different encounter decks all depending on which location they ended their turns out. Considering how many “when the encounter decks run out” treachery cards there are, we could game the system a bit by shifting characters to the other encounter deck when one of them started to run low. 

Secondly, due to getting items from previous scenarios, this one introduced probably one of the most helpful cards to date: The Spectral Web. First of all, it was a Spell, so we could finally get rid of those Wraith cards without having them haunting a location waiting for us to fail an investigation. Secondly, it allowed those of us who were gathering up clues to help fight the Heretics, even if we weren’t the ones doing the fighting. One of the other investigators could initiate the fight (since we all had the card) and if we had clues on us we could use them to help. Really bummed that we couldn’t add this card to our decks for the rest of the campaign.

What did you think of this Battle Report? Have you picked up the new investigator starter decks? Are they worth it? Let me know in the comments, or you can hit me up on twitter or facebook. Also, did you know we have a Patreon? Go check it out if you want to join our slack community or get cool dice! Next time, you’ll get to read about the only scenario so far that its taken my group 3 attempts to complete.