Month: May 2025

Other encounter sets in this scenario: Dreams, Chilling Cold, Locked Doors, Rats, Striking Fear
Artifact: –
Glyphs: Depths (“decipher an alien language” at Tillinghast Esoterica)
XP: 4 (locations) + 2 (Sadie and Naomi) + 2 (Enforcers) = 8XP
Blind Playthrough: One Last Job

My take on this encounter deck:
Mostly dominated by Chilling cold, Striking Fear and Locked Doors, this scenario can be downright hateful. Luckily, there isn’t a whole lot of pressure on the investigators in terms of enemies, so as long as the group can keep a solid average pace, they will be fine even if some turns might be completely spent banging against a locked door or limping around frozen in fear.
The enemies in the encounter deck are all very weak, due to the scenario mechanics that allow discarding Criminal enemies for a clue or two you could even make an argument that Swarm of Rats is the most dangerous enemy in the deck. Huh, that felt weird to type out.
As to be expected from an encounter deck dominated by Core Encounter Sets, willpower tests are everywhere. In terms of initial deckbuilding, you may want to make sure that you can at least have a solid chance at passing a willpower(3) test, otherwise Frozen in Fear or End of Negotiations can make things very hard for you.

My take on this scenario:
It’s fine. The low stakes and lack of any sort of pressure on the investigators feels kind of weird. The final showdown is pretty neat, but also somewhat formulaic on repeat plays because it doesn’t really ask the players, the investigators or their decks to do something, but is based almost entirely on the Parley ability on the act card.
What i do appreciate about this first scenario is the XP handout. I believe that the scenario 1 should be getting players on their way with their decks and a payout of up to 8xp does a good job of achieving that. The xp is also not completely unearned either. You usually will expect to grab the ones from the Midnight Mask locations, the Enforcers and one of the gang bosses for 5 or 6xp in total, depending on your luck with the random Downtown location. But getting the final two xp requires defeating both gang bosses in one turn and beforehand also clearing the location they are at from clues. That’s not trivial to do and will likely require an investigator that can evade (or tank) the Elite enemy engaged with them to stall for time.

Threat: Low

About as generic an enemy as it comes, the Gang Soldier is not here to actually threaten the players, but to be something to use your clues on for progressing the act. Often you’ll want to punch this guy once, so you only have to spend one clue to interrogate him, but there’s enough clues in the scenario that you can also just pay two in many situations.

Threat: Low

Looks much more imposing than the Gang Soldier, with an ability that manipulates doom. But in practice the Informant often ends up being just as easy to handle. After all, you can just engage her and then spend a clue to immediately send her to the discard pile and progress the act. There is potential for her slightly inconveniencing you when you don’t actually have a clue available yet. That can force you out of her location and having to gather a clue somewhere else so you can get rid of her. Or you can just spend the resources, that works too and can save you some actions.

Threat: Low to Mid

I like this one, that’s a very cool and evocative design. Even when you are confident in your ability to pass the intellect or agility test, this does potentially throw off some combat math. This is usually not terribly important while dealing with Gang Soldiers and Informants, but Caught in the Crossfire can really complicate the already tight situation where you face the two gang bosses. Note that once the Forced effect triggers, the card will discard itself at the end, no matter if you passed or failed the test.

Threat: Mid

This works kind of like Caught in the Crossfire, in that it is not much of a problem during the first two thirds of the game, but will be an issue during the final showdown. If you draw this while the first gang boss is already on the board but you didn’t engage them yet, it will likely attach to them. You’ll want to make sure that you get rid of End of Negotiations before advancing the act and get all the other enemies involved.

My take: This is the first new campaign-wide encounter set that you see when you play The Drowned City and in fact, it’s the only non-Core encounter set in the first scenario (aside from the scenario specific one, of course). Fortunately, it manages to make a great first impression as this set of just two different cards, but 3 copies of each is both impactful and synergistic. There is some minor discard theme strewn about the whole campaign here and there and Dreams does a good job of teaching you that in Drowned City, your cards in hand aren’t safe.
I like this encounter set a lot, especially Tortured Visions is excellent at keeping investigators on their toes and making sure they can’t take every card in their hand for granted.
It’s a bit unfortunate that Drawn to Darkness whiffs completely when drawn by an investigator that already has it. This is something that happened with past encounter cards before, but seems particularly relevant on a treachery that is this difficult to get rid of and will, once drawn, in most cases stay in the player’s threat area until the scenario is over. And is also in the encounter deck three times. That being said, it’s a minor complaint at best and i assume it also stops being a noticable issue if you play with more than two players. If you are feeling charitable, you might even count it as the game throwing a bone to solo and two-player groups.

Threat level: Low to High, very investigator dependent

Depending on your investigator, this is a card that can possibly ruin your day. It has no built in way to get rid of it without losing your hand, making this backbreaking for anyone relying on their cards in hand to do their job. The best example is probably Marion who thrives on having a lot of events in her hand to string together. And going down to zero cards is not only hugely impacting her as it would be very difficult to rebuild your hand size afterwards… but it’s actually quite difficult to do in the first place. Meaning that Drawn to Darkness will impact you for many rounds, just to leave you empty once you dealt with it anyways. As a result, it’s most often not even going to be worth trying to empty your hand and just try to suffer through it somehow. Since there are three of these in the encounter deck, you also don’t want to risk drawing a second one just when you finished rebuilding your hand after getting rid of the first.
On the other end of the spectrum, asset based investigators can pretty much ignore Drawn to Darkness completely as it will not impact them much beyond possibly having to discard a card or two on the turn they drew it.
One thing i noticed a lot with this card (and a couple others in Drowned City) is that drawing it while already affected by another copy of it will turn your Mythos phase into a freebie, as the limit of one per investigator will just make the treachery discard without effect. Playing with two investigators, this happens relatively often and adds just another reason why going for the forced discard through an empty hand is rarely going to be desirable. If your investigator is particularly vulnerable to Drawn to Darkness, you may want to try and convince whoever in your team is able to play red cards to pack an Alter Fate or two. That’s a pretty great card in this campaign anyways, so hopefully it shouldn’t take too much convincing!

Threat level: Mid to High

A deceptively impactful card. A horror and a card doesn’t sound like much and at first glance this looks like just the latest version of a horror vs willpower treachery. But Tortured Visions is tuned up from that baseline in many ways. It’s direct horror instead of just horror, so that 1 point will bypass your soak. The discard is random, which can knock important cards out of your hand. Even if you maintain a high number of cards to have disposable spares, you can only lower the chance to lose whatever you want to hold onto. Drawn to Darkness being around means that you can’t count on having a high hand size in the first place, meaning you are more likely to sorely miss whatever you have to ditch here. Again, there are three of these in the encounter deck, direct horror and random discard are both effects that stack very well if you happen to draw multiples. And if your current hand size dips low enough, the test on the card becomes difficult enough that even investigators with 5 willpower will have a problem passing it. After all, what are you going to do? Commit cards to the test? That will only increase the hand size issues that the Dreams set already puts on you. Pretty nasty card, this one.

Important Update!

The game is currently undergoing a sort of soft-reboot with a new Core Set coming out, marking the begin of what FFG call “Chapter 2” of the game. This changes a lot of the details behind this guide, so please read the following bit before continuing.

-> Advice to New Players in 2026 <-

Intro

Three years ago, I wrote a rather massive Wall Of Text detailing how to buy your way through all of the existing content to get your Arkham LCG collection up to full. That guide is still consistently in the Top 3 to Top 5 of the most visited pages on this site, so i regularly updated parts of it since there’s clearly a demand for that sort of thing. However, todays reality is that much of it is simply no longer all that applicable, so instead of rewriting large parts of it, here’s a new Buying Guide.
And there is one important shift in focus here that i am making. The old one was basically detailing how you would slowly buy your way into a full collection. But with large swaths of the product line being out of print, that is not a good approach to have anymore. What I’d like you as a new player to the game to focus on is *playing the game* because it’s fun, not collecting it just for completionist’s sake.

I will go, in order, over the following:
– Why the new Buyer’s Guide
– The Second Hand Market
– The Core Set
– First player expansion
– First campaign expansion
– Sanity check: Is this the right game to go deep on?
– Where to go from here
– Print and Play

The Elephant-Sized Shoggoth in the Room

There sadly is a bunch of panic mongering and doom saying around the forums, discords and the subreddit for this game around right now, related to Fantasyflight Games’ decision to start phasing out old content in favor of new releases because their printers simply can’t handle the volume of constantly keeping more than a decade’s worth of product for their LCGs (Arkham is not the only one) in print. This means that old content is going to go out of print, permanently. And as stock for these older sets run out, they won’t be available in stores anymore some time after that. The only source for them then becomes the secondary market, with unreliable supply and prices.

If you are new to the game, this is not actually a problem unless you make it one. There is not a single product for this game that you NEED to enjoy what is available. Even if you never lay your hands on Dunwich, Carcosa and Forgotten Age, you will still be able to have a great experience. Your cardpool will be excellent and you will be able to play great campaigns. If someone anywhere tells you something to the effect of “Without Dunwich, new players can’t build decks.” or “Without Carcosa, new players can’t enjoy a good campaign.” or even “What’s the point of starting a collection if you can’t have everything”, they are flat out wrong and you should stop listening to that person immediately because quite frankly they are sabotaging your experience. You do not need to buy yourself into the game spending thousands of dollars, don’t let yourself be gatekept by narrow-minded folks like that. If someone tells you that you can’t play Drowned City without the cards from Carcosa or Dunwich, they are an idiot. Give them my regards, tell them DerBK on AncientEvils.com thinks they are an idiot, then move on. Campaigns aren’t designed to be played with full card pools in the first place, they never have been and most definitely aren’t now.

I want you to keep one thing in mind as i go forward with the Buying Guide and lay out the options that this game has to offer: If any of the things mentioned here are not available to you right now or only for outrageous moon prices on the secondary market, just move onto the next thing. It doesn’t matter. Like… at all. There’s always *something* available and in the storied history of the game, there hasn’t been an investigator or campaign box that wasn’t worth getting.

Honestly, I could almost end the buying guide right here.

The Second Hand Market

This Buyer’s Guide assumes that you are picking off new stuff from the shelves of your local game store or maybe order it online. Of course, there is another way that involves getting a used collection from somewhere. Sources such as eBay, facebook or other marketplaces can offer great deals. And what’s more, give you access to sets that are out of print.

If you can get a really good deal there that could be a godsend. But managing to snipe the collection of someone who is quitting the game is going to be difficult, not a lot of those going around. New players bouncing off of the game and selling their Core with an expansion or two are more common however and can be a good entry for you.

The advantage is mostly on the monetary side. There are four points i would like to raise however to caution you just a bit:

• You can not know if the collection you pick up is complete. If something is missing, that could really ruin your experience as buying singleton cards isn’t really a thing for Arkham.
• Too huge of a collection at once is not necessarily a good thing. Having an overwhelming amount of content at once can shortcut some of the early exploration and learning that is crucial for getting into the game. If you do end up with a large collection on your hands, i would strongly suggest taking the time to separate the player cards by expansion and only introduce them to your “active” pool gradually.
• Especially when it comes to older content, a lot of the price on the secondary market is not dictated by amount or quality of content, but by scarcity. Do not fall into the trap of buying an out-of-print rarity for a certain price when you could have had something more recent instead that’d give you more “bang for your buck” instead of just a collector’s item.
• There was a change in distribution model a while back and there are some legacy box products called “Deluxe Expansions” that look almost like a Campaign expansion but are only the first two scenarios and a handful of player cards. Without the “Mythos Packs” that complete these Deluxes, you wouldn’t have a full campaign. This is something you want to look out for, as it’s a possible angle for an intentional scam or at least a misunderstanding.

But obviously, if the price is right, then starting with a modest collection instead of just the Core can be a very appealing first step. Worst case (aside from getting scammed, i suppose) you can assume that you will be able to sell everything for a similar price again.

The Revised Core Set

Your journey into this fantastic game starts with the box labelled “FFGAHC60“, the so-called Revised Core. There’s an old and smaller Core Set but you would need two of those and they’d still not give you everything that’s in the Revised one. Get the new thing. Well, relatively new, it’s from 2021.

You now own:
– 3 scenarios that together form a mini-campaign. The first scenario is designed to teach you the rules from scratch. The second one is designed to teach you how open-ended scenarios can be in this game. The third one teaches you that designers make mistakes too, as it’s pretty bad and especially for new players it’s also kind of unfair.
– 5 investigators, one for each class. With one exception, these are all representative of their class and give you a great entry into the game. These aren’t underpowered newbie characters either, they perfectly hold up even for people with a full card pool on their shelves. The odd man out is the Rogue, who isn’t really able to play to his strengths. The lack of coherence for the Rogue card pool in general is considered to be one of the very few failures of the Core Set.
– around 100 different player cards, enough to build your first decks. There’s not a whole lot of variance to the amount of things you can build with these or the freedom in what to upgrade, but it’s enough to get a taste of different playstyles between classes. Crucially, many of these cards also hold up when compared to what’s in newer sets. So again, these aren’t just things to replace later, you will keep coming back to these a lot.
– All the components to run the game, like various tokens and the two rule books.

I have a detailed card by card analysis of the Core Set player card pool, which you can find here.

It’s a solid start to learn the game, get what it’s about and the challenges that the game system wants you as a player to solve. What it doesn’t give you is much depth and replayability and you will soon find that deckbuilding options are too limited and that replaying the scenarios over and over is starting to drag.

You might also just find that you don’t enjoy the game. Happens. It’s certainly not for everyone. You aren’t in too deep yet, run while you can :D No, but seriously though. If you didn’t enjoy the core gameplay loop as presented in the Core Set, you won’t be able to fix that by throwing more money at the game.

But if you did replay the scenarios and found the mechanics interesting , that leaves you with two goals you may want to achieve with your first extra purchases: To unlock proper deckbuilding through deepening the card pool. And to get the full gameplay experience provided by a full campaign and the replayability that comes with it. Most realistically, you will probably want to do both at once which you do by getting an Investigator Expansion and a Campaign Expansion, but if you do have to prioritize, my advice is to go for an Investigator Expansion first as tackling a full campaign on just the Core card pool is going to be tough – both because of difficulty (which you can adjust) and because there simply won’t be enough upgraded cards available for you to spend those experience points on you earn over the course of eight or more scenarios.

Turning your card puddle into a card pool

An investigator expansion injects your collection with five new investigators and around 120 new player cards. Your first expansion pretty much just doubles your available player card options right away and is thus a huge step forwards. In theory, anything works here. If you walk into a store and just pick an available player card expansion at random, it’s going to be just fine. You’ll get more options, you can engage in deck building and you got the options to react to specific campaign challenges that you will encounter. Of course, some will be better than others but don’t get too lost in the sauce there. As a co-op game, there is no metagame, no hunt for the strongest cards and no “must-have” staples. You can go by what sounds cool to you.

If you do want to put in the work, you can of course check out my detailed set reviews. Like with the Core Set one i linked earlier, these go card by card and then do an overall analysis of what the box offers to the classes. Of particular relevance to this guide, I do also check out how well the investigators work on just a card pool of their box plus the Core. You can find links to all of these set reviews on the Buying Guide hub page.

If that is too much to go through (and fair enough, it really is a lot more than you need to know) I will give you a quick overview of each investigator box now that you can use as a quick reference:

The Dunwich Legacy: The five investigators have simple deckbuilding, but are quite powerful. Only the Mystic is lagging behind, with an ability that is hard to get anywhere useful, especially on a shallow card pool. As the first expansion the game received, the player cards here don’t really follow a theme, they are more like an extension of the core pool that defines the classes. Some of those staples were actually put into the Revised Core for that reason, others have been replaced by similar cards in other expansions, and so this box is not nearly as crucial as it used to be.
The Path to Carcosa: Six investigators, one for each class and also a neutral one. This neutral investigator is more of a deckbuilding challenge directed at experienced players but the other five investigators are all very strong. The player cards are mostly putting the finishing touches on the base card pool for the classes, with a small nod towards horror mitigation. There are some standouts in here (like in every box) and the investigators are good, but overall i’d call this one of the weaker player card sets that lost a lot of staying power over time.
The Forgotten Age: Four out of five investigators here have deckbuilding requirements based on card traits. This means that they will gain a lot out of having a deeper card pool which may take another expansion to fully bloom. The player cards are overall pretty good and stand on their own. They include archetypes like Relics, Oversuccess and token sealing.
The Circle Undone: Another box with 6 investigators, including an extra Mystic. Many of them are weird in some way, either because they operate out of their classes usual archetypes (Diana, Joe, Carolyn), because they are bit gimmicky (Preston) or because they play around with doom, a very dangerous mechanic if you don’t know what your are doing (Marie). The player cards include stuff for healing/support, Big Money and Tarot.
Dream-Eaters: On the one hand, the selection of investigators here includes rules nightmares Luke and Mandy, on the other hand the super solid Tony and Tommy are straight to the point. Patrice is very unique in her playstyle. All five of them are very worth having. The player cards introduce two new mechanics, Bonded (meaning a card has other cards associated with it) and Myriad (cards that can be played with three copies instead of two and often will have some payoff for this). Both of these mechanics do however work towards there being fewer unique cards in this set, as the bonded cards and extra copies do take up a lot of space which makes this less ideal for new players than the above average power of the cards in here would suggest.
The Innsmouth Conspiracy: Compared to the three boxes before this one, the investigators in Innsmouth are relatively grounded. Amanda is the only one who is a bit weird, with a playstyle focused on using and re-using skills. She sort of only opens up with a deeper card pool and will struggle on just the Core and Innsmouth player cards. However Dexter, Trish and Mary even follow the main class/side class template from the core set and are all easy to build around. The final one, Silas, also deals in recurring skill cards, but in a less extreme fashion than Amanda. The player cards almost exclusively deal with the concept of bless and curse tokens. These tokens are added to the chaos bag as part of the card effects and modify the chances to pass or fail accordingly. This is a huge archetype in itself (and powerful, too) that also integrates well with other cards.
Edge of the Earth: The five investigators here all share the same deckbuilding concept, starting in one class and then only being able to take upgrades from another class, which leads to them basically changing classes over time. All of them are well worth playing. The player card pool focuses for a large part on multi-class cards, cards that belong to two or more classes at the same time. This makes this box excellent for new players, as any of those multi-class cards can go into more decks than usual. It also has a high baseline for power level, making this one of the best first player card boxes to pick up.
The Scarlet Keys: There’s six investigators in here, including another neutral one, Charlie. He focuses on using lots of allies. Carson and Amina both serve a very specific niche, multiplayer support and doomplay respectively. Vincent is a healer, which defies expectations from a seeker character. Kymani and Darrell are more generic members of their class. The card pool includes the Customizables, a group of cards that have intricate upgrade sheets that allow tweaking them in various ways for XP. This is a strong set in terms of raw power, but needs a deeper cardpool to realize this power. This expansion is firmly targeted at entrenched players and i would not suggest it as a super early buy.
The Feast of Hemlock Vale: Notably, Hemlock Vale continues the curse/bless theme that Innsmouth introduced, but without having it be the sole focus of the expansion. One of the five investigators in the box is built on those tokens, while the other four are themed around Tool assets, Parley actions, Science assets and tanking. The five investigators are all very playable, with decent support right there with them in the box. Overall, this is a very good box of player cards, but lacks a bit of focus so new players will not have the card pool context necessary to use everything here as intended.
The Drowned City: Another box with six investigators in it, the regular five are joined by Gloria who previously was only available as a (long out of print) book promo. TDC’s investigators are a solid mix of generic/easy investigators and more advanced ones and are well supported in the box itself. The investigators are dictating the archetypes in the box, there is a heavy focus on events and on discard synergy in particular. Firearms also feature prominently in both Rogue and Guardian. This is a nice box for a new player, the only caveat is that there is a group of cards in there that is more tailored towards players with deep card pools: The Specialist cards are only usable by investigators with specific traits (for example, a card might only be used by Miskatonic characters or by Sorcerers.), so if your pool of investigators is shallow, several of these might not be particularly useful to you yet.

Of the most recent investigator sets, i recommend getting either Drowned City or Edge of the Earth. Drowned City’s card pool does a good job of being centered around the investigators in the box, making for a coherent total that offsets the presence of the Specialist cards which are aimed at more entrenched players. Edge of the Earth gives you the most options in a numerical sense as a lot of the cards have multiple classes and thus each investigator gets more cards added to their card pool here than anywhere else. A good amount of the cards in Edge are also just really good and universally useful. I would specifically discourage Scarlet Keys and (to a lesser extent) Hemlock Vale as a first buy. Scarlet Keys is designed in a way that requires a deeper pool to unlock the potential and the investigators are a bit too special and restrictive to bother with, at least for now. Hemlock Vale is a bit over the place, bolstering a lot of archetypes that a new player lacks the foundation for. Also, while i do like blesses and curses, i don’t think they are good mechanics to throw into a brand new collection as they are best enjoyed when they don’t take up such a large portion of the total pool.

There’s another option that you have here (i hope so at least… to be honest, this one is a bit on the edge right now and it’s difficult to predict how it’ll look in a year or so) and that is getting the so-called Investigator Starter Decks. A line of five individually sold decks, each one focused on a investigator and a supporting card pool. These were aimed specifically at giving new players a head-start into the game and are truly excellent, among the best products FFG ever released for this game. We currently don’t know if they are meant to be reprinted as an evergreen product or not. Fingers crossed that they will be. Right now, these can still be had for reasonable prices and i would want to encourage you to try and get them. Obviously, don’t fall prey to scalper prices, they aren’t worth paying double or triple price for because then you might as well get another full expansion instead. But they are a great shortcut and if you have the option available to get any of them, know that they are very very much worth their MSRP. If you can get all five, they together make up more than an Investigator Expansion, with higher card count and also a better ratio of useful cards that hold up incredibly well. If you can’t get them all, then even just buying one or two of them can help you out a lot. If you have to prioritize, get the Jacqueline Fine starter first, as it comes with a full set of Mystic spell assets that you can use for all sorts of decks and that you’d otherwise have to piece together from various other expansions. The rogue, Winifred, is next as she gives Rogues a clear focus (oversuccess) and several enablers that will also recontextualize Skids from the Core Set. Stella does the same for Survivors, putting “fail forward” as an archetype in the foreground. Nathaniel is a bit of his own isolated playstyle, but his card pool notably plays very well when combined with the Guardian from Drowned City, Marion, as both are event focused fighters. Finally, Harvey is the one who is the least important imo, but his “Big Hand” archetype is one that is generically still very good and his deck comes with lots of powerful cards. He notably also shares a lot of DNA with Daisy from the Core Set, so they lift each other up very well – but they are also kind of redundant.

Getting any of these options, either a full player card expansion or a couple of investigator starters, will give you a much different outlook on both the initial deckbuilding part of the game and on the part where you upgrade and develop your deck forwards through a campaign.

Baby’s First Campaign

Even more than with the investigator expansion, the choice of first campaign to get is one you should mostly decide by going on vibes more than mechanical concerns. There is no introductory campaign that is specifically easy to make for a smooth entry. Even if you were able to pick from any of the old campaigns, it’s not like you could just jump into Dunwich and it’d be a perfectly balanced campaign that’s easy and accomodating. In fact, the early campaigns have plenty things in them that can be frustrating to deal with an in many ways. Picking a more recent campaign off the shelf at your LGS can be a better choice as the designers naturally got better at providing a balanced experience. That is of course not to say that there aren’t campaigns that i’d recommend or discourage, because there certainly are some differences in how some campaigns will be more approachable than others. More important than the base difficulty is the mechanical overhead that some campaigns have. While you can always tweak difficulty (both with the tools given by the rules and by implementing simple house rules), the scenario mechanics are going to be a fixed reality of the campaign and if they are too much to handle or distract from “the good part” then this can be a problem.

As with the Investigator Expansions, i want to give you a quick overview of the campaigns that were released for this game so far.

The Dunwich Legacy: Loosely a continuation of HP Lovecraft’s story The Dunwich Horror. Following the wish of a friend, the investigators are set on a trail that involves the Necronomicon, twisted mutations and Yog-Sothoth. Since it’s the first campaign, it does have some rough edges, both in terms of mechanical design and difficulty, but it’s overall well done.
The Path to Carcosa: Based on Robert Chamber’s The King In Yellow. After experiencing the traumatic premiere of a theater play, the investigators soon aren’t able to discern what is real and what isn’t. The campaign explores themes like insanity and possession, and scratches the fourth wall slightly. This is a very good entry level campaign that has balanced challenges without leaning too far on one specific gimmick or mechanic.
The Forgotten Age: After recovering a strange relic from a temple, time itself starts to dissolve and multiple factions start coming after the investigators. This campaign involves flexible alliances, time travel and parallel universes. It is for a large part set in a jungle and features lots of snakes. Lots and lots of snakes. And snakepeople. This campaign is infamous for its difficulty. It’s a personal favorite of mine, but not for a first buy as its difficulty could make for a frustrating experience.
The Circle Undone: Investigating the disappearance of several people, the players find themselves caught in the crossfire of a struggle between a coven of witches and a mysterious lodge. This campaign deals with themes of fate, free will and dips into the spirit world for many of its threats. This campaign is also quite difficult and does disproportionally punish some investigator archetypes.
Dream-Eaters: Two mini-campaigns in a trench-coat masquerading as a full campaign. Taking inspiration from HP Lovecraft’s dreamworld stories such as “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, this box sets the investigators on two parallel campaigns with 4 scenarios each. One on the fantastical side of the dreamlands, the other in a more nightmarish version with lots and lots of spiders. The campaign structure is ambitious, but personally, i am not a fan. Especially to a new player I would strongly suggest getting a “full” campaign as your first buy so you can get a look at how well this game does character progression and evolving your deck. Also, the requirement to build four decks from one card pool are overwhelming for a starter collection.
The Innsmouth Conspiracy: Based on Shadows over Innsmouth, one of Lovecraft’s most well-known stories. Something is fishy in the small coastal village of Innsmouth and as it turns out, it’s an eldritch influence turning regular folk into fish people. The players awake in a grotto near Innsmouth without their memory of how they got there and during the campaign recover those memories (hopefully) and put an end to the threat coming from below Innsmouth (hopefully). This is a campaign known for being very heavy on fights and for having huge maps that will require a big table. I think this campaign is an excellent candidate for a first buy due to its linearity, relative simplicity and iconic source material.
Edge of the Earth: A continuation of HPL’s At the Mountains of Madness. An expedition is set into the Antarctica to confirm the stories told by the only two survivors of what happened in Mountains of Madness. This campaign focuses on exploration and on interacting with a large cast of non-player characters that make up the expedition crew. It also has some non-linear elements, but not to an extent that allow changing up the campaign all that much.
The Scarlet Keys: Scarlet Keys is a non-linear hunt around the globe for members of the “Coterie”, a Fantasyflight Games original cast of (mostly) antagonists all connected through having mystical abilities and dressing in some sort of red clothing. The campaign revolves around the coterie’s attempts to get “The Keys” under their control while facing another more outerworldly foe. This is a rather involved campaign with high concepts and uneven difficulty that also requires a high amount of CYOA-style bookkeeping between scenarios. Not beginner friendly by any metric and also not terribly representative of the game as a whole.
The Feast of Hemlock Vale: A folk horror themed campaign inspired by HPL’s The Colour Out of Space and movies such as Annihilation, Wicker Man and Midsommar. The players arrive at the island of Hemlock Vale as part of a survey investigating reports of flora and fauna going crazy around there. At the same time, the local village prepares for a big celebration in which the investigators have to play a role, too. This campaign is challenging. While buying this first is not completely out of the question, it does go off the mechanical deep end at various points and that can be very overwhelming when you are still coming to grip with the base rules of the game.
The Drowned City: The most iconic of the Lovecraftian pantheon, Cthulhu himself, is rising from his sleep and coming to Arkham. The investigators spend most of their time exploring R’lyeh and have to deal with its alien architecture and inhabitants. This is the newest of the campaigns and public opinion is still forming (as is my own), but it looks to be a super solid romp through varied scenarios that isn’t bogged down by too much stuff between the action. There are some high concepts here as well, but nothing on the level of some of the Hemlock Vale excess.

Of the recent campaigns, my recommendation is to get either Drowned City or Innsmouth Conspiracy. Edge would also be solid. Drowned City and Innsmouth both score with their iconic setting and enemies. Innsmouth is the last of the linear campaigns before (for better or worse) a change in the release model started to enable some more free-form exploration of how the scenarios flow. Being able to just progress through the campaign step by step is a definite plus for a beginner campaign. On the other end of the spectrum, Scarlet Keys and Hemlock Vale are both very mechanically dense. To an extent that i wouldn’t want to impose on someone who is still struggling to understand what a player window is. Especially Scarlet Keys also asks A LOT of decision making and planning between scenarios and can feel like more of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book than a board game at times. It’s also tonally very different and sheds almost all lovecraftian themes. Not very representative of how the game usually works.
Of the old campaigns, if you can get them, Carcosa is the one that is the easy recommendation. It towers above the other options thanks to being well-balanced and well written. I’ll caution against starting with Dream-Eaters because its weird campaign structure with two mini-campaigns is quite unfriendly to small collections and doesn’t really give you the experience of a full eight-part story line you are looking to explore with your first buy.

Is This The Game For You?

Alright, so let’s say you got yourself a Core Set, an Investigator Expansion and a Campaign Expansion. With current prices you spent around 60€ + 60€ + 40€ = 160€ (or $180). Add some shipping costs, sleeves etc and let’s just assume 200€. That’s a bunch of money to spend on what i would call the bare minimum to get into a board game.

After playing a full campaign a few times with different investigators you likely have opinions and thoughts about it now, so it’s prudent to take a moment and think about what you like about the game and why. And what you don’t like. So before you go off the deep end and start ordering all sorts of crap, have an honest conversation with yourself and consider this:

• For the same money you could get Spirit Island plus most of its expansions.
• Or you could get a complete box of Gloomhaven, chock full of literal kilograms of play material.

Look, i clearly like Arkham a whole lot, but the reality of the matter is that it’s expensive. Not on a level with Magic or Warhammer, but still it belongs to the type of game that asks you to throw new logs on the fire every now and then and these logs are actually made of cash. If you are looking to “only” spend 150-200€, then a Spirit Island or Gloomhaven is going to offer you more game for your money.

Especially if you belong to the circle of people that thinks the actual gameplay is cool, but enjoys neither the reading in the campaign book nor the deckbuilding, seriously consider checking out the alternatives instead. Spirit Island can give you a very similar experience of having to manage a limited amount of resources and actions, using cards to achieve something on the board and getting enemies under control that are being reinforced every round. Gloomhaven features a fantastic campaign experience where you upgrade your deck, your town, your items and get stronger while you play a card-based tactics game. Both games have a wealth of options for player characters and cards that can make up their deck. If you don’t like deckbuilding, you can find a lot of what makes Arkham a great boardgame in these games without that necessary overhead of figuring out decks and builds. Obviously those two aren’t the only alternatives either, just the two i have personal experience with and they are two games that are notorious for the ridiculous amount of replayability they offer for their price point. If you are craving that Cthulhu Mythos flavor, then there’s plenty of that around as well in the boardgame space. It is not too late at this point to trade in your barely played Arkham sets for something that might just bring you more joy if you find yourself at odds with parts of the game.

However…

If you do enjoy the whole package, then also know that it will only get even better from here on. The wild thing about how an LCG works is that every new set you get does not just add value to your collection through its own cards, but also through often allowing you to look at your old cards in a new light. There’s sort of a compounding interest at work here that means that as you add more and more stuff to your collection over time, you will gain more and more from each subsequent addition. But getting to that point means it’s going to become costly. Be very aware of this. Over the course of 5 years, i have now spent around 1500€ just for the cards. Sleeves and various paraphernalia come extra. I don’t regret a cent i spent here, because the game is near-perfect for me. But have that sort of honest internal discussion with yourself (or your playgroup!) before just going on a FOMO induced shopping spree.

Still with us after this? Great, let’s open up the purse and go wild then.

Expanding your collection

Now that you have a campaign worth replaying and enough player cards that you actually end up with different options when building your decks or upgrading them, you can just go with the flow. My recommendation is to keep about an even progression on both fronts, alternating between getting a new campaign and a new investigator box – or getting them in pairs. Don’t rush through it either, especially when it comes to the player cards it will be very overwhelming to try and understand your options when you dump multiple sets into your collection all at once. You are going to get more out of the game if you slowly build up the collection and understand what you have instead of just dumping everything on the table and trying to make sense of it all in one go.

With the basics available, you don’t really need to fret too much about complexity or difficulty either. Just get what sounds good to you and what’s available. As i said before, one of the outstanding things about this game so far is that there is no campaign or investigator box that wouldn’t be worth getting if you can. The player cards all add to your options and make your previously acquired things more deep in the process. The campaigns are all worth playing at least a couple times. Even if a particular campaign doesn’t really agree with you (for me, this has been the case with Edge of the Earth and Dream-Eaters, for you it might be something different), it’s still something to play every now and then and it will add to the longevity of the game for you.

Aside from investigator boxes and campaign boxes, there is some extra stuff that you might want to look at. My personal take is that the mainline boxed products will give you a lot more game for your buck than any of these smaller things. The Investigator Starters that i mentioned earlier are really the only exception to that in my opinion. But just for completeness sake, let’s take a quick look at what’s around (well, to some extent):

Standalone Scenarios: Roughly once a year, FFG releases a standalone scenario. Usually these are designed to be played in a massive multiplayer sort of way with multiple groups, for example at a convention. Most of them are also playable with only one group or even just one or two players, but will usually lose part of their appeal when played that way. These are often printed in more limited quantities at different printers, so after release, they tend to become scarce pretty soon. At time of writing, the most recent one (Midwinter Gala) is already drying up and we are about to get the next one announced. Personally, i don’t think these are much of a priority to get as they are usually very gimmick driven and suffer on replays. Obviously, if you can do the massive multiplayer thing, that does change the outlook considerably and participating in that is fun. But obviously this is not an option that everyone has. If you just want to play these on your own or slip them into a full campaign as a side scenario, they are fine if you find them and their price isn’t jacked up. But they aren’t really worth hunting down.

Return To Sets: The earliest campaigns had a supplementary box released that would add some extra replayability or fix some mechanical issues. Think of it like an update patch for a video game. FFG stopped doing these after Circle Undone because selling expansions for other expansions wasn’t viable enough. As a new player, you don’t need to care about these. You’d need to have the base campaign in the first place to get anything out of these. But maybe even more importantly, they have become collector items that due to their scarcity would cost you hundreds of dollars that you could spend on multiple full campaign boxes instead. If you find one on a shelf for MSRP (likely the most recent one, Return to Circle Undone, or if you are lucky, Return to Forgotten Age), you can just pick them up as an investment, i guess.

Novel Promos: Arkham Files has a rich background with many cool characters, so it should come at no surprise that there are novels around that are set in this world. Way back, these novels used to come with alternate art promos of investigators, sometimes even with alternate sets of signature and weakness cards. Again, don’t worry about it, they are collector items.

But honestly, you can get a lot more enjoyment out of spending your money on upgraded components than these niche products. Instead of spending your money on somehow acquiring a Return To set or a rare standalone, you could put that towards getting nicer game components which will enhance your experience with the game everytime you play it. Personally, i wouldn’t want to miss my upgraded chaos tokens in particular. You can find lots of different suppliers for tokens of all kinds on etsy and in various price categories. But even if you don’t want to spend big on a set of high quality acrylic tokens or metal backed glass tokens for that extra clunk in the chaos bag, then just getting plastic coin protectors to give the paper tokens a bit of protection and better handling will be a game changer.
This is something you can go off the deep end with as well, of course. Chaos tokens, card holders and trays, playmats, resource tokens, a nice chaos bag, sleeves in different colors, action trackers, storage cases… the sky is the limit.

Print and Play, Custom Content

Finally, there is one more way of acquiring more game content for the AHLCG: Downloading it and printing it yourself (or have it printed by professionals). There are two categories of print and play content around, one provided by FFG themselves. And the other by the player community.

Official Print and Play: On the FFG main site for the card game, if you scroll all the way down, you can find a section titled “Support”. This section does not just have current FAQ and printable rule books for you, but also some print and play products. This mostly includes the line of “parallel investigators” which are alternate versions of the existing investigators with different abilities and/or deckbuilding rules. Some of them also come with their own scenario, usually a modified version of one in the official campaigns. These parallel investigators are often a bit on the experimental side with abilities that are not necessarily fit to be printed in a mainline product, but some of them are interesting enough that they can be worth having.

Community Content: The AHLCG has a thriving community of homebrewers that come up with a lot of fan-made works from custom investigators over scenarios to full campaigns. I have done some custom stuff of my own as well, of course. Other sources include Mysterious Chanting, Inexorable Fate and of course various threads on Arkham themed discords and the subreddit. While inofficial content will always vary a bit on its quality, there are definitely fan-made campaigns and investigator expansions around that have the same amount of effort and care put into them as official ones.

The Greater Good

Well, if you made it till here, all that remains is to welcome you into the cult the club. Enjoy one of the damn finest card games on the market.