Month: September 2026

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 4
Scenarios: Average out at Tier 3-, with very little variance. It just kind of always hovers around that level of just barely fine and then steps over the line a few times.
Campaign structure: Linear in terms of which scenarios are played in which order, but there is a significant decision to be made in whether you rather want to align yourself with the lodge or with the witches. Like the Alejandro/Ichtaca divide from TFA, this informs many of the scenarios and adds some variation to their setup. It can even cause a premature ending of the campaign with a special “win” condition after Union and Disillusion if the players support Carl Sanford’s bid for cosmic power (the Return allows for a similar ending on the witches side).
Campaign mechanics: The encounter cards in this campaign heavily test willpower, to a point where low willpower investigators are going to have a real hard time here unless they have a very good plan on how to make up for getting bullied by half of the encounter deck. This far exceeds even the agility focus of TFA, to a point where it becomes a point against the campaign because it just feels one-note and limiting in player choice. Notably, the Return To shifts many of those willpower tests towards agility. That helps, but doesn’t eliminate the problem.
Haunted is a keyword on locations that punishes failed investigation attempts with a variety of effects from forced discard to lost actions and respawning enemies. Personally, i consider Haunted to be one of the very few design blunders in this game as it has a very offputting effect on the game: While Seekers (or other high intellect investigators) can mostly just beat Haunted by testing high enough, Haunted really hits any attempts at flex investigating or using non-Standard means like Survivor fail tech. This just pigeonholes groups into having a main seeker that fully focuses on high intellect while punishing any other more interesting strategy.
Haunted and the Willpower focus together do a nasty job of making way too many investigators a liability, restricting player options from the deckbuilding phase on. If they are on a blind play and don’t know ahead of time, they are just in for a bad time in general unless they by chance already went in with the most basic “Book Vs Shroud” decks that yellow cards can buy.
A more interesting campaign mechanic is that of persistent treacheries. Often themed around witches putting a curse on the investigators, these treacheries are placed in the threat area where they do their thing until dispelled. Getting rid of them usually involves willpower tests, actions and/or having an exhausted witch at your location. Seeing these treacheries build up in your threat area makes for a unique spin on treacheries in this campaign that i like – not as a thing that should generally be done more often, but as a campaign flavor this works well and is grounded firmly in the theme.
TCU is among the more difficult campaigns and probably a bit underestimated in that regard because it’s not a mechanical difficulty, but a numerical one. Shroud values are often high, as are many of the fight and evade values on enemies.
The Return To: The final one of the Return To boxes does some nice things, but ultimately very little to change how much i like (or dislike) parts of the campaign. It has some inspired treachery design and does an okay job of lowering the willpower pressure. It also fleshes out the witch part of the story a bit, giving aligning with them similar payoffs to working the lodge.
More Yapping: I quite like the vibes and style of this campaign, the conflict between the witches and the lodge make for a great background to the supernatural happenings that both ultimately also get caught up in. I do however have a lot of gripes with both campaign wide mechanics and single scenarios, which made me rank down TCU more and more as time went on. I was initially even somewhat high on it. But as the appeal of the flavor parts wears down on replays, the actual gameplay didn’t stand the test of time for me. I had the epiphany last year that TCU is actually the campaign that among all of chapter 1 I am the least likely to want to play these days.

The Witching Hour

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: This introduction does a good job of signaling some things that define this campaign and that the players need to be aware of right from the start. For one, it splits up the group for a portion of the game, making it necessary for fighters to be able to pick up the occasional clue and for cluevers to fend off an enemy at least for a while. It also right out of the gates communicates clearly how this campaign’s encounter decks feel about the importance of willpower tests and putting persistent treacheries into player areas. Whatever you may think about these actual mechanics, it’s at least commendable that they get laid out clearly in the first scenario here instead of springing them on the players as a surprise later on.
Low points: In what’s going to end up as a bit of a theme with the TCU campaign, the player scaling is a bit all over the place. There are some effects based on depletion of the encounter deck, which is going to happen much faster with more players. There are cards that trigger when three of them were draw. Which is quite unlikely to happen in solo or two players while in a full group you might just run into the Piper of Azathoth in the campaign opener. The final bit where doom accumulates based on the number of witches at the story location is also very susceptible to escalating harshly.
Yapping: Most of the complaints i have with The Witching Hour are ones that are shared with the rest of the campaign. Much of it feels balanced towards a full group of four in mind and the scaling back to smaller groups ends up being shaky with huge variance.
It’s an okay scenario by itself however and as an introduction to the campaign and its mechanics it works very well.

At Death’s Doorstep

Rating: Tier 4
Highlights: For the rest of the campaign, TCU will drown us in paragraphs and paragraphs of yapping whenever we interact with Joseph Meiger, but to its credit it does the thing i like here where the initial decision to ally with him rests on our decisions ingame. Meiger is represented by an enemy card that we can parley to be friendly and then rescue. If we want to get friendly with the Lodge, that’ll be an important first step.
I also like the connection to the playable prologue here, with leftover clues depending on how that went.
Low points: The escape from the mansion is pretty cool, especially when you do actually care about the Lodge members surviving. The meat of the scenario however lies in the first two thirds which are mostly about investigating locations, suffering through Haunted effects and watching the doom counter tick up unpredictably. It’s honestly a bit dull when it works well, while there are a couple opportunities for the scenario derailing due to no fault of the players that can sour the whole thing. For example, if you get an early Keeper of Secrets that can’t be killed you might as well reset the whole thing. That any monsters you draw are converted into Ancient Evils (that are then later drawn as monsters anyways, all at the same time) is also a thing with huuuuge variance that can range anywhere from not mattering at all to being game ending.
Yapping: Haunted is one of the game mechanics that i like least. It punishes any investigators that go after clues, but don’t make it their only thing they care about. It can mostly be ignored by the investigators that just stack their intellect skyhigh, while being a huge deal for the likes that pick up the occasional clue with events or survivor fail tech. Through specifically targeting flex investigators, it makes a part of the game (clue seeking) that is already in danger of being a bit samey across the game even more one-dimensional. At Death’s Doorstep is for most of the scenario basically “Haunted: The Scenario”, with much of the encounter deck also being devoted to it, so to a big part my gripes with Haunted become gripes with Death’s Doorstep.
Death’s Doorstep is also the first time we meet the Spectral Watcher, a recurring enemy. Unlike TFA’s Harbinger or Drowned City’s Inescapable, he’s not much of a threat and mostly just a time/action sink in a campaign that already has plenty of action sinks in it. I don’t dislike him on such a fundamental level as i do Haunted, but yeah… he’s a miss for me.
The scenario overall does a some things right, but between my heavy dislike for two of its main features and the first two thirds being somewhat basic, this ranks fairly low for me overall.

The Secret Name

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: This is the closest that the game came to tackling something similar to the Miskatonic Museum again. It’s not quite focused on just one enemy, but both the witch and her familiar are recurring enemies and all the encounter deck has to add to them is a bunch of rats that all get various bonuses that elevate them into credible threats. This all works remarkably well and there’s some real decision space behind how to handle Brown Jenkins in particular.
Low points: The Secret Name is possibly the scenario that doubles and triples down the hardest on the already very oppressive willpower testing that TCU is up to. With more than 20 cards in the encounter deck that test willpower in some way or another, this scenario really puts on the hurt on anyone not able to deal with that. It’s too much to cover with skills, Talents or similar bursts of willpower as well.
There’s also a bit of an issue with the doom mechanics that can run away from you. Especially whenever Nahab is around, there is a huge potential for some bad luck to translate into losing several rounds to an early agenda flip. While the agenda clearly has room for some of that (there is 28 doom across the 4 agendas in total), this still makes the final part become a very close affair that isn’t always entirely decided just by good or bad play.
Yapping: While your usual play of Secret Name won’t actually take more rounds than most other scenarios, it can often feel like this scenario never ends. It’s a very exhausting one with lots of things happening and a constant onslaught of encounter effects. The recurring enemies and the constant pinging by treacheries are designed to wear down the investigator’s sanity and health and i can at least say that from my perspective, the attrition also affects me, sitting in front of the table. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it means that the scenario is engrossing me properly and keeping me engaged. But man, this might just be the most exhausting scenario to play in the game, or at least it was until the Longest Night and Obsidian Canyons came along. That feeling of finally being done with this tour-de-force only to remember which scenario is up next is the biggest pit i found myself in for motivation when playing Arkham. I genuinely have aborted a campaign at this point before because i just wasn’t feeling it. Alright, let’s get to it then.

The Wages of Sin

Rating: Tier 5
Highlights: There are some glimmers of cool things in this scenario, but since none of them are actually realized in a form that could be enjoyable, i’ll talk about them in the yapping part, i don’t really feel like calling them out as highlights.
Low points: This scenario is really difficult and then on top of that coated in a layer of randomness and then a layer of action taxes. And all of that together makes for what is in my book one of the worst play experiences in the game. There’s some genuine challenge here, with hard hitting enemies and large requirements for clues to do the scenario mechanics. But while that challenge is something that i’d like to interact with, Wages of Sin has other ideas and buries you in things you have to do, mandatory action taxes and layers of randomness instead that take most of the meaning out of anything you are doing.
At higher player counts you can push through those and actually get something done, but at one or two players you might as well grab the victory from the locations and resign because you can be lucky if you even get one of the four objectives done.
Yapping: With the amount of scenarios out there, it’s a foregone conclusion that a few of them will be worse than the rest. And i comfortably rank Wages of Sin the lowest of all the scenarios in the game to this point. But what i actually find a lot more frustrating than just the scenario being messy and unfun is how many great ideas it has and then just completely wastes them. Two encounter decks? Cool! Locations that can flip between two states? Also really cool. Imagine we actually got to interact with that for longer than the one or two turns where the locations aren’t locked into either state. Imagine if any of this actually mattered. If this was anything more than just bullshit action taxes and random outcomes.

For the Greater Good

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: Two versions of this scenario exist and they play quite differently. You are either buddying up with the Lodge and have easier entry into the mansion or you need to force your way in. Collecting the different keys you need to solve the scenario is interesting and varied from playthrough to playthrough thanks to some well done randomization. Thematically, it takes a break from all the witchy and spectral stuff that came before it, you are mostly just interacting with the Lodge here and sneaking into their base. This break is appreciated following Secret Name and Wages of Sin.
Low points: It’s a bit unfortunate that the Lodge is actually a bigger issue for you when you are allied with them than if you were to break in. The reason for that is the doom mechanics that the cultists introduce and that are easier to handle if you can just defeat them instead of having to weave your way around and do Parleys. There is also some variance from the random key placements that can make certain setups a lot more difficult than others. I do not believe that to be a huge problem, but it can cause some grief.
Yapping: Some hard hitting treacheries in this one underline the prominent doom mechanics that usually don’t allow you to durdle around too much. I think this is to the scenarios benefit, as i makes sure you hurry through it before it overstays its welcome with all the doom griefing i can get up to. This is a scenario that i rated quite highly in my initial plays of TCU, but also one that once the novelty wears off, doesn’t actually do anything too special. Solid Tier 3.

Union and Disillusion

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: The big mechanical thing here is the Circle Tests, where you test combinations of skills instead of just a single one. This has some fairly neat implications for the icons on your cards, as you may find that you are suddenly able to commit cards with two different icons on them for both at the same time. It’s an interesting mechanic that has some rough edges but overall i think this was worth exploring.
One thing that i find very cool here is how this encounter deck almost feels like a combo deck sometimes. It has damage cards that punish you for taking horror, horror cards that punish for taking damage, horror that begets more horror… and all of it focused thematically around Whippoorwills which return from Dunwich to mess up your Circle Tests. I quite like that.
Low points: Those rough edges with the Circle Tests can randomly be really annoying. Investigators usually have at least one skill they are weak in, often even two. If a Circle Test asks you to test your two weakest skills together, this can be incredibly hard to overcome. At the same time, since the locations which have those tests are randomly selected, you can’t really prepare for it well either… this can make the whole thing feel a bit more random than is comfortable. The Circle Tests are also a hard requirement to progress, so if you are someone like Preston or Patrice with a substandard statline, you better have a good plan on how to solve them. There’s an ability to spend clues to help, but those are rarely sufficient. And if you invest hard into passing one of those tests you better don’t autofail. You get one freebie from the puzzle box you recover in Greater Good, but it’s definitely best to save it for the final test unless you are really desperate.
My biggest pain point with Union and Disillusion however is the Spectral Watcher. Much of the scenario focuses on the Spectral Watcher who keeps following the group around. Every location is connected with another, making it near impossible to get away from the guy which turns him into an even more obnoxious force than usual.
Yapping: This scenario also features learning the fate of the prelude investigators and having a possible confrontation with one or more of them. I’m not really sure if i should put that in the highlights or the low points. It’s… fine. Conceptually, this payoff is cool and the enemy variants of them forcing the investigators to face them alone is a good twist. But it does lack all emotional impact because these guys have not been story relevant in any way. I kind of feel like this is another of TCUs many missed opportunities, the whole abduction story was close to being something interesting and worth caring about but didn’t really get there in the end i think. Nothing we did since Death’s Doorstep related in any way to the initial mystery of the missing people, so the payoff here fails to land.
As a final note, this is also a scenario that feels to me like it never ends. No seriously, it takes foreeeever.

In the Clutches of Chaos

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: This scenario’s gimmick is bringing the mechanics of the Pandemic boardgame to Arkham. Rifts open up and if they stay open for too long, they spread out. The investigators will have to hurry around the fairly large map to race against this spread while also keeping either the lodge or the coven in check. While this scenario was in danger of being too gimmicky, i think they found a great balance here. You are still doing the classic Arkham gameplay of walking around the map, handling enemies and sucking up clues. It’s just that instead of spending the clues towards some act threshold, you are spending them towards closing rifts. It all works surprisingly well!
The scenario also features some heavy hitting encounter cards which do a good job of making this feel like the scenario 7 that it is; this is challenging. And depending on whether you go up against the cultists or the witches, there is a decent amount of variation too.
There’s some concern about player scaling here (like it is everywhere in TCU) but overall this is just a very good scenario.
Low points: The randomization can be rough, there are some nightmare constellations at the top end of the variance that can definitely feel cheap. Some of the more impactful treacheries also NEED to be handled and they need to be handled quick, which can further stack up with that variance for some feel-bad moments.
Yapping: I’ve been ragging on TCU a lot, but I just simply like this one! A lot! It’s a scenario where i get the impression that the community at large isn’t much of a fan, with most talk about it trending fairly negative. But i’ve just always had a good time here and honestly, it’s my highlight of the whole campaign.

Before the Black Throne

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: Some proper out-of-world vibes in this one, as we are once more visiting another realm for the finale. There’s some cool enemies around, especially the Mindless Dancers make sure that you properly feel challenged. Add the Piper of Azathoth and of course the Blind Idiot God itself and you got some opposition against you that feels epic enough for the conclusion of the campaign.
Low points: The scenario is however marred by some heavy variance coming at the players from two angles. For one, the map is setup randomly with face-down locations and no actual way of interacting with them to determine the right way. You either get it or you don’t, it’s completely random. And then there is a hefty dose of doom mechanics keeping you down and again there is some nasty randomization to it that can easily spill a bunch of doom from enemies over to the agenda permanently and screw you over. Success and failure in Before the Black Throne often doesn’t hinge on the player actions, but on pure luck of how these variances play out for you.
Yapping: The Circle Undone is a campaign that heavily invokes themes of fate, tarot, horoscopes, free will and whether or not our destiny is already written. It is strangely appropriate then that the finale makes your actions count for so little… but while that can be appreciated from an artsy point of view, it does however not make for a fun session of a card game. That being said, I am more tolerant of this sort of thing in a finale than I’d be in a mid-campaign mission. And there is enough in this scenario to like that i don’t want to push this down all the way to Tier 4 or 5. Finally, i should at least mention that the Return to TCU does help here a bit, most of all through giving access to the Nightgaunt Steed which heavily mitigates the potential bad luck from the random locations. I’d rank this scenario up to a solid Tier 3 with Return To modifications.

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 3 as originally released, Tier 2+ with Return To
Scenarios: Average out at a Tier 3, with quite some variance in either direction. TFA is difficult and mechanically dense, which works both in its favor and against it. Challenge is a good thing, frustration isn’t. TFA walks that line and where it falls, is going to depend a lot on the players as well. I don’t think the scenarios themselves are outstanding (with exception of Threads of Fate and Depths of Yoth), but are mostly carried by the campaign wide mechanics like Explore.
Campaign structure: Linear, with the slightest of an exception being the possibility to “Turn Back Time” and replay scenario 2 at the end of the campaign with a few differences. But what really makes TFA shine for me and give it a lot of its replayability is all the meaningful decisions you make between scenarios. The Choice of supplies and whether to favor Alejandro or Ichtaca or forge your own path are impactful and can change your playthrough in meaningful ways, even more than Doubt/Conviction can do for Path to Carcosa.
Campaign mechanics: Poison is a status you can gain from various sources, most notably snakes and treacheries. It persists through scenarios and will give you trauma and make the chaos bag harder for you. Thankfully, the supplies include an antidote, so planning for the eventuality of getting poisoned is something you are able to do and need to do.
On that note, supplies are picked at campaign start and at a resupply point after Threads of Fate. The points you get to spend there are limited, the supplies are varied in their effects and you likely are going to need to make some tradeoffs here. On a blind play, their use isn’t well communicated which caused some grief, but once you are in the know it’s a neat system to interact with.
Explore drives many of the location layouts in scenarios. The location grid is still predetermined, but the order in which the locations are revealed is randomized. It’s a very good mechanic, but not without flaws. The biggest flaw is related to the circumstance that exploration attempts may run into a treachery instead. A couple of those are shuffled into the explore deck at the start and removed after drawing them, leading to a situation where somehow the jungle is most dangerous near the base camp, then gets more predictable as you make your way inwards. We’d logically expect this to work the other way round and indeed the Return To inverts this dynamic to great effect
The Return To: The Return to Forgotten Age is the biggest gamechanger among the Return To boxes by far. It revamps the Explore rules to make more sense, play better and allows the explore deck to also have enemies in it. It smoothes out many of the more difficult scenarios to be less frustrating. It overhauls both Doom of Eztli and Boundary Beyond to be a lot better, removing frustration points that previously put a huge dampener on my desire to replay this campaign. With the Return To, the scenario rankings improve in a very noticable way, to the point where i put Return to Forgotten Age even ahead of Carcosa. Without the Return, it ranks third behind Carcosa and Innsmouth because as much as i like the decision points between the scenarios that whole stretch in the middle from Boundary to City of Archives can just be a bit of a slog.
More Yapping: Much is made of Forgotten Age’s almost unique way of handing out lots and lots of experience. With some even claiming that it’s too much – a take i wholeheartedly disagree with. The important thing about XP in TFA is that it’s earned. You don’t just get it for showing up, the scenarios are hard, easy to fail and till the end you run into a consistent challenge. That’s something can’t be said about most other campaigns that came after it, that end up with flat and/or boring finales in spite of barely giving enough XP to do a cool thing and actually play with it.

Untamed Wilds

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: I have a very soft spot for the initial Ichtaca confrontation. It illustrates how we should be able to interact with story relevant NPCs while still acting within the gameplay. Ichtaca can either be parleyed or defeated and either task is not trivial at all. The investigators need to actually have the skills to pull either option off, meaning that your party composition and cards in hand might even influence what option your are going for here. It’s peak integration of story choice into gameplay and no amount of text in extensive story passages will ever be able to match it.
The other thing about Untamed Wilds that i really like is how it prepares everyone for the campaign to come. It introduces all relevant campaign mechanics (Supply, Poison, Explore, Vengeance) and spins them into a short but brutal scenario that doesn’t pull its punches. Forgotten Age is not an easy campaign and it is not pretending to be at any point.
Low points: Untamed Wilds is famously the scenario that gives Ancient Evils its (way overblown) bad reputation. It’s here in an encounter deck of effectively 20 cards that reshuffles often, leading to extremely high variance in how many turns get lost to the extra doom from Evils. Plays of Wilds can stand or fall just purely on how many Ancient Evils get pulled in the first stretch of the scenario, before the encounter deck reshuffles for the first time.
Yapping: The other thing that Untamed Wilds is notable for is that willpower test on the agenda flip. Everyone tests willpower and whoever fails gets poisoned. I am still not sure if that’s incredibly cheap or actually a solid way to teach players about poison right from the start – after all, the campaign gives you the tools to handle the poison very well through supplies, so it’s just something to plan around. But yeah, definitely a divisive thing that can push anyone who is already frustrated by Untamed Wild’s base difficulty over the edge.
Personally, i enjoy Untamed Wilds a lot. I welcome the challenge and i appreciate that TFA asks you to give everything right from the start and it does so using the core mechanics of the campaign. As a result, it gives you an immediate thing to measure yourself against so the trickier parts of the upcoming campaign won’t sneak up on you too much.

The Doom of Eztli

Rating: Tier 5+
Highlights: Doom of Eztli introduces the Harbinger of Valusia, a recurring enemy whose life total we have to track across scenarios. She’s a cool boss enemy that has a knack for turning up at the most inconvenient times and with an imposing Vengeance number on her that points us towards evasion as a real alternative to handle her.
The scenario ends on a bit of a gimmick, as the locations get rearranged into a straight line once the investigators pick up the relic. They need to make it past all of the locations to the resign at the entry in time.
Low points: This scenario’s central mechanic is that doom gets placed on locations where it doesn’t get removed when the agenda advances. That makes Doom of Eztli snowball super hard, as early doom placed this way can completely ruin your chances to make it in time. To me personally it feels more frustrating than Ancient Evils in Untamed Wilds does.
The scenario is light on enemies which together with the doom mechanics make for a very non-interactive race against the clock while being pelted by treacheries.
Return To: In what is a difference of night and day, the Return To completely overhauls this scenario, swapping out the locations to almost completely remove the location doom. At the same time, the encounter set adds enemies to the encounter deck that are not trivial to overcome, most of all the Vengeful Serpents. I’d rank the Return to Doom of Etzli a Tier 3-, which is not a super high mark either, but of course a very significant improvement.
Yapping: I find the original version of this scenario very annoying and frustrating to play because it leaves so little room for interaction, so much so that i would put this into the bottom tier of scenarios i dread setting up. Luckily the Return To came to the rescue to redesign this scenario into something where i actually feel like my actions matter. The scenario after the Return To is barely recognizable, but in this case that might just be a good thing.
There is one other oddity with Doom of Eztli, which is that you get to retry the scenario if you fail. Or you can dynamite the place to move on, taking on a massive Vengeance penalty for doing so. I have very mixed feelings on this, i feel like this is mostly a trap, that Vengeance is going to catch up to you later and replaying is going to be almost always the preferrable option. But then of course you are being made to replay a scenario that isn’t exactly a banger, so that doesn’t feel great either. I’m not sure that having an option to replay here really adds anything, i feel like the resolution on fail should have just gone with the “blow up the temple” result without an awkward option to replay a failed scenario.

Threads of Fate

Rating: Tier 1
Highlights: This scenario takes us back to the style of scenario pioneered by Midnight Masks, where we have only a limited amount of time and have to do as much as possible. Masks is a very well loved scenario, but Threads arguably improves on it in several ways. With multiple parallel acts that can be advanced independently from each other, the progress that is being made (as well as the still open plot lines) is communicated extremely well. All of these threads exist in multiple variants, both for replayability and as a way to enhance the scenario itself as you will likely need to adapt to however the acts develop. The encounter deck is almost straight up the same one as the one in Midnight Masks, for a crass contrast with the jungle parts of the campaign. They do however add some new cultists that are no joke and complement the Nightgaunts to make this an often very fighty ordeal.
Low points: None. Well, i suppose the Nightgaunts are still just as random as they were in Midnight Masks. The setup can be a bit involved with all the different versions of the acts to figure out, but the ordeal is very much worth it in this case.
Return To: Somehow makes this already amazing scenario even better, through adding a fourth thread and the potential for the Harbinger of Valusia to show up. Return to Threads is Tier 1+ in my book and a Top 5 scenario.
Yapping: Threads of Fate’s existence is one of the main reasons why i don’t really look at the Night of the Zealot anymore, after all it replicates and improves on NotZ’s best scenario. As well crafted as the whole thing is, what really elevates Threads of Fate to the top of the heap is how it’s also extremely well integrated into the campaign, with the results of Untamed Wilds/Doom of Eztli mattering for how you start into the scenario and the results of Threads consequently also echoing down the rest of the campaign. This is that “making choices in the gameplay, not in the book” thing where I am so often complaining about that it somehow got lost in the more modern campaigns.

The Boundary Beyond

Rating: Tier 4-
Highlights: There’s some really cool enemies in this one. I like both Padma and the Serpent of Tenochtitlan, who make a terrifying couple of boss enemies. The Harbinger makes an appearance again as well. To add to these chunky enemies, there is also a couple of impactful cultist type enemies around that can’t be ignored.
Low points: Oh god, the location connections. I would be surprised if in the history of the game there was ever a game of Boundary Beyond being played where every move of an investigator or enemy was according to the rules. The issue is that the locations here can be swapped between the Present and Future versions … and with that they change where they connect to. As a result there’s one-way connections and all sorts of weirdness. While conceptually super cool and fitting, it’s a major pain to keep up with them on the table and then also need to be double and triple checked with every movement. Considering that there are a couple relevant Hunters around, this gets taxing quick.
The conditions that the investigators need to fulfill to be able to interact with the locations are sometimes quite hard and random. What’s worse is that they can fail due to the explore mechanics which means you may have to end up lining whatever condition is required again. This feels very, very bad and will randomly bite the players without much they can do about it.
The other thing is that this scenario is just really difficult in general. Big enemies, many hunters, asset hate, doom mechanics, difficult tests… it’s a lot. You are asked to stabilize up to six locations, but often you can be happy if you can limp through the exit with two of them done. Open-ended goals are good, however this is also a major turning point for your progression with Ichtaca, so if you were planning on buddying up with her, then Boundary Beyond can just stonewall you hard.
Return To: Like Doom of Eztli, this scenario gets a pile of changes to the better from the Return To Forgotten Age. The biggest change is that the swap of the locations can (for the most part) not fail randomly from Explore anymore, so if you are able to meet the conditions, you can be certain that it will go through. The explore changes also contribute to just lowering the difficulty a bit in general. This turns Boundary Beyond into a scenario that is still quite hard, but much fairer than before as it now gives you a chance to establish a foothold while the explore deck ramps up its threats in sync with your progress. I’d call Return to Boundary Beyond a clean Tier 3, held back from rating even better than that by how much of a logistical pain the locations on the board are to manage.
Yapping: Getting all six paths in Boundary Beyond is among the couple of strech goals that players can point to as genuine achievements, things that are hard to do even for seasoned players. I’ve done it in Return to Boundary Beyond more than once, but in the unmodified scenario it’s almost unthinkable to me. It’s a bit unfortunate how the base scenario only really improves once you stop going for the best result and just focus on getting two or three paths done, then surviving.

Heart of the Elders, part I

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: This scenario puts the players back into the jungle, in a very small and constricted map alongside a smattering of dangerous Hunter enemies. It is a short and tight scenario that does one thing and does it actually quite well.
Low points: There’s just not a whole lot to it beyond “small map, Hunters, run”. If you made it here, there’s nothing terribly challenging about HotE I, and while the scenario does use its cards in a way that is notably different, there is a level of repetition from re-using a lot of the same locations and encounter cards as Untamed Wilds.
Yapping: This scenario also comes with the ability to be repeated until you finally get all paths together. I have to be straight with you, this never was a factor for me. Never had to do a repeat, never was bothered by it, it’s a complete non-entity in my book. I’ve read some hand-wringing about the repeatable nature of the scenario being exploitable, but … i mean, just don’t exploit it?
Overall, not really a scenario that stands out in any way. I like it as a short and quick stint through the wilderness, with some credible threats on my heels. But for better or worse, it’s nothing special at all.

Heart of the Elders, part II

Rating: Tier 4
Highlights: None.
Low points: None.
Yapping: This might just be the most superfluous scenario in Arkham Horror history, it does nothing interesting at all. It’s not even bad enough to really be mad about it, it’s just kinda there and you do it because that’s what the campaign book says. While part I at least has an interesting angle with the many Hunter enemies you need to dodge, part II is just the core mechanics of the campaign executed in the most basic manner. Part I is often compared to Untamed Wilds due to the similarity in the cards being used, but i feel like Part II is the one that is actually most like it due to just being a stripped down version mechanically. This would be fine near the start of a campaign, but for a scenario 6 (or 5b if you insist), this is a letdown. Carcosa’s Echoes of the Past at least tried to do something new.

The City of Archives

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: Making up for how bland the previous scenario is, City of Archive makes some bold and daring choices. I wish they had been made in a standalone scenario instead of being shoehorned into this campaign, but it can’t be denied that this scenario has some ambition behind it. It swaps out the investigator cards, does away with any and all campaign mechanics, uses none of the TFA encounter sets and just unapologetically gets weird. Instead of doing things with exploration or evasion, we now have to care about hand size as a central mechanic, something that didn’t come up before at all.
Low points: The same, really. How weird and different this scenario is works as much as a strike against it as it is in its favor.
Yapping: City of Archives is very divisive. I think i do like it enough as a scenario to still group it in Tier 3, but as a part of Forgotten Age i have some serious issues with it which is why i will put it on the brink to Tier 4. Taking the investigator cards from players and potentially turning their decks into near-blanks is just straight up not okay. It’s unfair and i wouldn’t fault anyone who, after their Forgotten Age run is ended by this scenario, to be bitter about it. The possibility to have this extend to the final scenarios of the campaign is downright insulting.
Once you know this scenario is coming up later, it still commands the player to care about it more during deck construction and upgrading than a single scenario should arguably be able to influence you just for its own sake. Some decks are just completely disabled here to the point where suiciding into the nearest Yith enemy is your best option for continuing the campaign.
All this baggage sadly overshadows the good parts of the scenario. City of Archives has some genuinely interesting treachery design and is mechanically dense. Figuring out its puzzle is enjoyable if your deck ends up being able to perform.
But maaan, this really should have been a standalone.

The Depths of Yoth

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: This scenario is the explore mechanic at its best. As we go down the Depths one by one, the board and the explore deck resets regularly and makes us go deeper yet another set of randomized locations. Since the contents of the explore deck also change, these depths are different from each other that it doesn’t just feel like repeating the same thing five times over. Basically, it’s everything that Heart of the Elders II failed to be.
Low points: There are two things that keep me from grouping Depths of Yoth with the best of the best. The first one is the pursuit zone. It works well enough to not be a burden, but it’s a bit of weirdness that exists to preserve enemies in play from one depth to the next. It’s not a bad mechanic as such, but i find it just unsatisfying enough to bother me a bit. The other thing is how the scenario scales with Vengeance. This is the scenario where all that accumulated Yig’s Fury comes back to haunt us, as we have to discard agendas from play at setup – thus giving us less time to get down the five levels while also making it so the Harbinger and Yig appear earlier. In the average play of Forgotten Age (especially once you know what sort of number of Vengeance is acceptable) this works out just fine. But in plays where you managed to get very little Vengeance, Depths is merely a stroll through the caves with little pressure as you have plenty of time and are able to finish before even meeting Yig. At the same time, too much Vengeance can mean that the scenario is almost unwinnable as you have only precious few turns while having the big enemies spawn right on top of you in the first couple rounds.
Yapping: After a bit of a mediocre stretch of scenarios in the middle of TFA, Depths of Yoth is something to look forward to. It’s a scenario that at first appears to be quite involved and complicated with its definition of Depth levels, pursuit zone and a repeatable nature involving multiple mid-scenario setups… but to its credit, it plays out very smooth and is usually just a really good time as you stumble through the caves, pick up clues and evade hunters.

Shattered Aeons

Rating: Tier 3+
Highlights: This is another finale that doesn’t shy away from throwing a challenge at us. There’s some terrifying enemies in here, including a bunch of meaty Elites. I appreciate this, as Forgotten Age is notably the campaign where the most experience is handed out over the course of the campaign, so player decks are going to be very powerful here. That Aeons still manages to be rough even when players show up with 60-70xp in their decks is a genuine achievement.
Low points: Some of the scenario mechanics, especially the ones around getting horror and/or damage for moving around under certain conditions, break up the player group in a way that was not really telegraphed at all during the campaign. As a result, a fighter might find themselves in a situation where they need to be able to clear a location from clues or be severely punished for that. Shattered Aeons favors flex investigators over specialised ones a lot, and while a bit of that is definitely not bad, this is bordering on being too much.
Yapping: I have read a lot of damning reviews for Shattered Aeons, leaving me in the belief that i like this scenario more than most do. It can certainly be a bit of a frustrating affair like many things in Forgotten Age, if you are unprepared for it. But in terms of being the finale to a campaign that weighs difficulty against generous rewards for facing it, this is appropriate enough. It does repeat some of the beats of the Dunwich finale (different dimension, locations come semi-randomly, make your way to the final location, there’s fixed safe spots along the way from which to continue, you can get reset to the start location where a big monster waits for you…) but just different enough that it doesn’t feel like a rehash.

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 2+
Scenarios: Averaging out at a clean Tier 2+, Carcosa’s most notable feature is how consistently good its scenarios are. The only slight misstep is Echoes of the Past and the worst thing i can say about it is that it’s a bit boring. It’s still … okay. And over quick enough that you can get past it without having it spoil how good everything surrounding it is. The final two scenarios fall off slightly, but again that is mostly due to the comparison to the rest of the campaign, not due to themselves being bad. The Carcosa scenarios are simply excellent, with three out of the eight making it into the highest tier.
Campaign structure: Linear, but the Doubt/Conviction split is leveraged into some well executed branching as a couple scenarios change significantly. The choices around the cast and crew you meet in Last King also have a solid impact on the proceedings, as do a couple of minor choices here and there. Carcosa gets a lot out of its strictly linear structure.
Campaign mechanics: Doubt and Conviction are two values that are tracked depending on your choices and they add a good deal of replayability to the campaign. It’s quite well done, my only gripe with it is how getting to the third Dim Carcosa version requires very specific steps, including losing certain scenarios. It means that you are very very unlikely to discover it naturally, without heavy planning and metagaming on your part (or consulting a step-by-step guide).
I do not like Hidden cards. Hidden cards are treacheries that are added to a player’s hand secretly. The idea is that they influence how the player acts because they restrict them somehow, leaving the other players at the table confused why their teammate is acting weird. It… just doesn’t work that way. There’s too few of the Hidden cards around, even in a blind play you quickly know them. It’s also obvious when a player has to add an encounter card to their hand, so everyone’s just aware who has what even when unable to technically talk about it. Finally, many of them are designed in a way that just makes them action taxes, with discard abilities that take up two actions and nothing else. Dream-Eaters will return to the idea of Hidden cards and does it slightly better… but even there i’d only really call Where Gods Dwell a good execution of Hidden because it makes them a central mechanic which allows the scenario to commit to the bit.
Return To: The Return to Carcosa has not been mentioned anywhere so far on this page, and that’s an indication of how little it adds. The box completely fails to improve the parts of the campaign that are lacking, leaving little to no lasting impression overall.
More Yapping: One of the neat things of the Carcosa campaign is that its scenarios are not only good, but also have lots of variety. It holds up very well too, despite being only the second campaign to come out and also being quite daring in what it attempts to do. It is mechanically very sound, so it doesn’t require some squinting at the rules or application of errata to make everything work as intended. Some of its ideas are revisited in later campaigns, but aside from Dim Carcosa being outdone by Dream-Eaters nothing gets too badly overshadowed by newer alternatives in the same way that happened to Dunwich Legacy.

Curtain Call

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: An agenda that potentially resets itself means that there’s not a hard and fast end to the scenario due to doom, but instead offers the players a way to extend the scenario until they can finally get out. This doesn’t come for free of course, the boss enemy that needs to be defeated for the reset to happen is quite dangerous and does of course also reappear over and over.
One other thing that i appreciate about Curtain Call is that it gives Seekers more to do than just pick up clues. Intellect is used for a variety of things here, from the usual clue finding over defeating Poltergeists and defusing Spires of Carcosa to handling the Man in the Pallid Mask.
Low points: Curtain Call does ask some things of the players that they can potentially be very unprepared for on a blind play. Examples include the Poltergeist (which can only be defeated using intellect instead of combat) and the randomized effect that spreads across the theater which can make movement very painful if you can’t pass specific skill tests.
Yapping: The Carcosa campaign starts on a scenario that is surprisingly brutal. There’s some really dangerous enemies around, shroud values on locations are challenging and the scenario mechanics themselves are also impactful. In the community, Untamed Wilds from the Forgotten Age usually gets all the credit for being the most difficult first scenario, but at least in my experience, Curtain Call has it beat. It actually might be the scenario out of all of the game that i failed most often. That is not even due to one specific thing, but just a consistently high level of challenge for everything makes it likely that you fail *something* important eventually. And then you suddenly find yourself Frozen in Fear, unable to pass a skill check for the burning theater, spending 3 actions to move while an Agent of the King gets revealed in the Mythos phase and the Royal Emissary respawns.
This is not to say that i dislike Curtain Call. The opposite in fact, i enjoy this level of challenge from a scenario 1 – after all it’s the easiest one to just retry after failing until you get it right. And if you do, that’s satisfying and gives you a good indication that you are ready to take on the rest of Path to Carcosa.

The Last King

Rating: Tier 1
Highlights: This whole thing is a highlight. The six members of the crew that you get to interact with are delightful. The way the scenario starts relatively mellow, then cranks up dramatically every couple turns is very well done. The scenario specific cards ooze with flavor, both the ones in the encounter deck as the ones that are used to drive the scenario mechanics.
Low points: The encounter deck is small and a bit explosive, with Ancient Evils sometimes accelerating the descent into madness a bit too much where it becomes too difficult too handle. This combined with the random reveal of which guest transforms next can put a bit too much weight on the randomness, with the scenario outcome sometimes hinging on whether or not a transformation happens right under an investigators nose or if they get to finish their questioning first.
Yapping: The standard game mechanics take a bit of a backseat for most of this scenario, as clues are for the most part not gathered with investigate actions, but by parleying the story characters. There is enough variety in the conditions for these parleys that most investigators will be able to meaningfully contribute here although there’s definitely a possibility that someone gets left out. Fighters are in a bit of a weird spot here. While there’s not much in the form of common enemies here (just a couple cockroach thingies in the encounter deck), there are the monstrous forms of the guests. But since this is only scenario 2, your fighter might not even be well set up to handle enemies this powerful yet.
This dynamic changes a lot once you have played Carcosa a couple of times and know what is coming. Something i like a lot about Last King is that there are different ways to approach it. You can either try to parley the people as quick as possible, then make a run for it once the heat becomes too much. Or you can go in armed to the teeth and take the presence of half a dozen tough Elites as a challenge. Just as a point of reference, one of my favorite plays of Last King heavily featured Stella and a chainsaw…
In any case, this scenario is one of the most memorable ones in the game’s history on the back of how it weaves the story bits into gameplay and presents all of it in a gruesome and fun and (this is crucial!) interactive way. Hot stuff, one of the all time greats.

Echoes of the Past

Rating: Tier 4
Highlights: This scenario does something interesting with the doom counter. It doesn’t progress automatically every round, but instead will only get more doom on it if the cultists manage to gain clues before we do on the board. In theory, this is a recipe for a neat race against the new game mechanics that significantly changes the pacing of the scenario…
Low points: …however this change to the doom counter has the unwelcome side effect of slowing the scenario down to a crawl. Since (nearly) all doom progression can be effectively prevented by beating cultists down as fast as they appear, the investigators are usually going to play it safe and do exactly that. While playing cat and mouse with the cultists, they make slow progress on the clue effort themselves. As it turns out, the game needs the pressure from the advancing doom clock to have tension and Echoes of the Past almost completely removes that tension. The result is a fairly boring scenario that can sometimes take forever, especially if you can’t devote one investigator completely to picking locations clean.
Yapping: Echoes of the Past is in a somewhat similar situation to Miskatonic Museum, where i do appreciate the attempt to break up the standard formula of “Good old Arkham” and change the dynamics with a twist. A race for clues with enemies is a good idea for sure… but completely switching off the doom clock isn’t. Unlike Museum, where the scenario mechanics at least have a possibility of coming together for a satisfying overall experience, this happens with Echoes only very rarely.
Even the encounter deck is non-interactive. With almost no test anywhere or decisions to make, things just happen, you do the obvious thing to counteract it on auto-pilot and move on. It’s just straight up boring most of the time.

The Unspeakable Oath

Rating: Tier 1+
Highlights: That tension i just talked about missing from Echoes of the Past? Oath makes up for it threefold, as this scenario puts you on several clocks at the same time. You have your usual doom clock ticking. You have plenty of horror sources chipping away at your investigators sanity. You constantly have to shuffle cards from a set aside monster deck into the encounter deck, threatening further escalation. This is a scenario that throws down the gauntlet and doesn’t pull any punches. On repeat plays, you will also be aware of the consequences of failing: Losing your investigator as they will go insane. So the stakes are high from the start as you do work your way through the asylum.
Low points: None. Oath is perfect.
Yapping: Unspeakable Oath is a perfect storm of great mechanics, awesome theme, challenging difficulty that is satisfying to overcome and good integration into the campaign as a whole, both with payoffs for what happened before and setup for what is to come. In the community it’s often thought as one of the best AHLCG scenarios ever made and i definitely have to agree with that. It even might be the actual best. The neat thing about that is that Oath is at its core still just regular Arkham gameplay without any major changes… there’s a grid of locations, you are looking for a specific one, you need to pick up clues along the way and there’s monsters about. But the execution is pretty much flawless.

A Phantom of Truth

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: I very much like the locations that make up the streets of Paris in this one. It’s a large web of varied places to explore and gather your clues from.
The Organist is suitably spooky. And there’s a couple really neat encounter cards in the deck, from Torturous Chords to the various Byakhee enemies.
Low points: Phantom of Truth is really two scenarios in a trench coat, and one of them is a lot more interesting than the other. In one version, your goal is following the Organist around and trying to place clues on him which requires a combination of combat skills and the ability to pick up the clues in the first place. The other however, has you run away from the Organist for a set amount of time while picking up clues. The latter version is a lot less intriguing and this is another scenario that can take a long time to finally be over while you wait out turns.
Yapping: I can’t help but feel like this scenario could have been a lot better if it focused on just the good half instead of having to devote cards towards two versions. Phantom of Truth is not a bad scenario as such, but given the company of so many great scenarios in the same campaign, it just falls short of expectations. I’d rate the one version of this scenario a solid Tier 3+, the other a Tier 4 which i am going to average out and slightly mark down to a total of Tier 3-, putting near the bottom of what i’d still consider a solid, average experience.

The Pallid Mask

Rating: Tier 1-
Highlights: I love love love the Catacomb deck. It’s just straight up the best. In general, i do enjoy location mechanics that make them come out in a non-linear way, that have then not being put on the table all at once during setup. And there’s been a couple variants of how that’s been done, but none of them does it as well as the Catacomb deck does in my opinion. What separates similar mechanics like TFA’s Explore or even the Dunwich finale from Pallid Mask is that those still follow location connections. So in the end, your board at the end of a a play of Untamed Wilds or whatever will still look the same. Innsmouth does away with some of that, but still constrains the locations to certain patterns that the locations are laid out in. Pallid Mask trashes all of that. Locations can come out in any order and snake around the table in ways that are different from one play to the next. You can even influence the way the catacombs go with your decisions, making for an excellent play experience that has more to offer than just clues, locations and enemies.
The scenario then also puts a focus on Hunter enemies to make your catacomb layout matter beyond just establishing the connections between places.
Low points: The whole Corpse Dweller gimmick is a bit of a crapshoot if it works or not. But that’s a minor strike, the encounter deck still has plenty of cool things to offer even when that aspect doesn’t come out in the order the designers hoped for.
Yapping: This used to be my favorite scenario in the game. It still ranks very highly, of course. Near the top of the charts. But while i do think that the Catacombs deck is still the best location mechanic, i can’t deny that other recent great efforts (most of all the Innsmouth campaign) have made it slightly less special than it used to be.

Black Stars Rise

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: The scenario escalates nicely, as based on the progression of the two agenda decks more enemies and treacheries are added to the encounter deck. The whole general conceit of having two agendas is interesting in the first place, of course.
Low points: The concepts are a bit let down by having to execute them physically. Shuffling two packs of cards that can’t get separated against each other is annoying to do. And on repeat plays revealing the locations that belong to one of those packs give away the correct locations to seek out. I feel like this scenario tries to do a bit more than the medium of cards allows for, something that would be perfectly suited for Mansions of Madness where the app takes over the awkward parts, but doesn’t quite convince here.
Yapping: While the handling of the two sets that are shuffled against each other is a bit meh, the scenario itself has plenty to like. There is a decent challenge here thanks to some chunky enemies and impactful treacheries. The doom clock is fairly tight as well, at least if you can not game the scenario yet. Overall still very solid, this is not a scenario i mind playing at all.

Dim Carcosa

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: I quite like how different the finale to the campaign is depending on your choices during the campaign. There are three versions of Dim Carcosa (although one of them is very very unlikely to get unless you specifically plan to) and they all do very different things for the final confrontation with Hastur.
The scenario is also difficult in a very deceptive way. While there is no single thing to point at as particularly challenging, it’s a scenario that simply brings some consistent levels to what it asks of the players. For example, the enemies in this one hit hard and are plentiful. I’ve had several plays of Dim Carcosa where back to back to back enemy draws were simply able to overwhelm what my fighter was able to handle. Meanwhile, you still need to grab a lot of clues from all over the place and the doom clock is not super generous, so you need to always be working on making progress and can’t get bogged down by the roadblocks either. I find this very appropriate for a finale.
Low points: I have a bit of a twisted view on Dim Carcosa because i played the campaigns in a different order than the release order. I am sure that when the Carcosa campaign originally released its final scenario, the mechanic where you look under locations you have cleared and find story text to execute was novel and exciting. However, when i played Dim Carcosa for the first time, i already had seen that exact thing multiple times in the Dream-Eaters campaign. And to be honest, Dream-Eaters does more interesting things with it. It’s still fine here of course, but at least to me that’s a core mechanic of the finale feeling a bit lackluster. I have to assume that even if you played Dim Carcosa blind back at its original release point, the mechanic doesn’t really hold up well to replays either.
Yapping: I’ll put Dim Carcosa in the middle of Tier 3 because while it’s a good finale I can’t really put it in with the ones that i think are remarkably great. Arkham has a bit of a problem with campaign finales not managing to stick the landing and among those finales, Dim Carcosa is definitely one of the better ones though. But compared to the rest of the Carcosa campaign, it’s one of the things i am not terribly excited about when i replay the whole thing.

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 4+
Scenarios: Average out at around Tier 3. That seems like a solid representation of the whole thing. The finale is really the only scenario that still sticks out to me as special when looking back and comparing Dunwich to what came after it. Essex Express is an important milestone for the game that provided a significant template for later scenarios, but again it’s not really something that i ache to replay. Undimensioned and Unseen is junk. The rest of the scenarios are just various shades of “fine”.
Campaign structure: Not particularly noteworthy either. A linear campaign, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s also not much in the way of interesting decisions to make along the way. There is a cool choice around the Necronomicon, but it’s let down by its impact being minor and Essex Express being somewhat likely to just undo the choice anyway.
Campaign mechanics: Things happen when the player deck runs empty, things scale based on cards in player’s discard piles. So there’s a major theme in the encounter cards about discarding cards from the player decks into the discard, then doing things with that. This worked quite well when the Dunwich box was first released, but i feel like the mechanic didn’t age very well. With the range of investigators we have now, many of them are punished quite harshly by this, in particular anyone built around drawing a lot of cards by themselves already. While i do think that card draw is too powerful and could use a dampener, the way that Dunwich went about it (10 damage if your deck is empty being the prime offender, of course) is too binary and restrictive from today’s point of view. A theme of deck decay has some promise, but i feel like the way it’s been done in Dunwich doesn’t really hit the mark anymore.
The Return To: Doesn’t significantly change my opinion on the campaign. It fixes some bugs and mechanical weirdness, but the additions to the content itself don’t really turn any weak parts around. The most significant change probably happens to the Museum scenario, where the Hunting Horror does become much more likely to end up a credible threat.
More Yapping: The campaign rating there isn’t meant to say that this is an unenjoyable campaign to play through or anything. I mean… it’s fine, right? It’s the first campaign to the game and as such, it would be unfair to expect it to measure up with what the designers released later with years of experience under their belts. It does a good job of being the first campaign, pioneering ideas and establishing important templates for later. I applaud the designers for not playing it totally safe with the campaign either and instead trying out different things. But i also can’t deny that i don’t really see much reason to replay this one today either, newer campaigns just have more to offer in terms of replayability and how they engage or challenge me.

Extracurricular Activity

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: To this day this is the scenario that best executed player choice for objectives, giving them multiple angles to pursue right on the cards instead of having them go through yapping paragraphs of story text. The monster is scary and especially on the card pool of the time very difficult to defeat. The locations are varied and interesting, in many ways i like the MU Campus even more than the classic Arkham layout from Midnight Masks.
Low points: Like the Core Set, the first two scenarios of old campaigns suffered a bit from feeling obligated to use all (or close to all) of the encounter sets in the Deluxe Box they were released in. Extracurricular Activity maybe suffers from this the most, with its encounter cards being a pretty wild mix of things and often quite swingy.
Yapping: The relative simplicity of this scenario coupled with its stellar way of presenting the options that players are able to pursue make this one of the best introductions to the game in my opinion. I also like the range of enemies showcased in this one, including not just basic Thralls, but also chunkier enemies. And the brilliant Whippoorwills. While Gathering is excellent for how it does a tutorial when everyone at the table is still learning the rules, Extracurricular Activity arguably beats it as a way to introduce new players as long as one or two experienced players are at the table to guide the newbies as there is just so much on display here.

The House Always Wins

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: The use of Aloof for the gangsters during the first couple rounds is really neat. The gambling mechanics on the locations are as well and give all of this scenario a rather unique touch.
Low points: The usual gameplay of AHLCG takes a bit of a backseat for most of the scenario as clues can’t be found the regular way and combat is discouraged. The encounter deck is basically Striking Fear and a stack of blanks thanks to the low impact of the gangsters, rats and Bad Luck cards in it.
Yapping: The House Always Wins is a very strong first, second and maybe even third play that does a great job of using the game’s mechanical frame to do some creative story telling. The mid-scenario twist of having the monsters spawn and fight the gang members is great – the gambling stuff is less so, but it’s at least unique. But i do find that House Always Wins relies a lot on the novelty of its gimmicks. On replays, there’s just not much here to interact with meaningfully. You try to do the stretch goal of rescuing Peter Clover once or twice and that’s kind of it. I don’t want to call this scenario overall boring, that would be a disservice to how good the first few plays of it are. But the lack of staying power makes me sort this to the lower end of what I’d still consider an average scenario.

The Miskatonic Museum

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: The conceit of having only one enemy all scenario, but it returns repeatedly and gets stronger every time is a bold choice and very intriguing. I also like a lot that we actually do get our hands on the Necronomicon here (or at least a notable version of it) and get to keep it. Or burn it. Our choice. Good stuff.
Low points: This is one of the weaker scenarios in the game mechanically. Some of the things don’t strictly work correctly as written and require some fuzzy reading to fit together. Others are too easy to bypass or exploit from the player’s side. As a result, this scenario can leave fighters without much to do when the Hunting Shadow fails to become the threat it is intended to be.
Return To: The Return To patches some of the mechanical holes (like the front side of the agenda not being in play while it advances and spawns the Horror) and adds a couple extra venues for the thing to appear, re-appear and grow. This is a rather big step towards making this one go as intended most of the time.
Yapping: I like this scenario more than most in the community do. While the Horror’s mechanics are easy enough to exploit using evasion and similar strategies to keep the thing on the board, if you don’t do a concerted effort towards that the scenario will for the most part work as intended. And i find the Horror once it’s grown a bit quite formidable and threatening enough to carry the scenario. It’s a good hook to spin a scenario around and when it works, it works really well and has always given me an enjoyable experience. Going with a ranking right in the middle of the pack seems fair to me.

The Essex County Express

Rating: Tier 3+
Highlights: It’s pure adrenaline with no downtime, as every action counts. This scenario teaches about the folly of taking long setup turns and not being able to shift into high gear from the start. It’s simple and it’s effective, the Essex lesson is one that most players that went through it early in their Arkham gaming still vividly remember.
Low points: That being said, it is way too binary. Failing Essex is all too easy due to the harsh encounter cards and the very tight timer. And the penalty for it is losing much of the progress you made so far. The Necronomicon? Gone. Rescued story allies? Captured. Experience? Actually, you barely get any no matter if you fail or not.
Yapping: Like Midnight Masks, this scenario provides a template that has been iterated on many times throughout the years in other campaigns. And for good reason, the linear race against the clock provides a notably different experience from the free exploration that most Arkham maps allow for. Essex Express is a very memorable scenario for many, but if we put aside the rose-tinted glasses for just a second, there is certainly a thick layer of unfair junk that weighs it down. Bad draws that root your investigator in place in back to back turns can screw you over just as much as a glut of doom acceleration from the encounter deck can. Or just a Wizard of the Order spawning in a hard to reach place. Later executions on the concept may be less memorable than Essex, but they also tend to be a lot more fair and mechanically sound.

Blood on the Altar

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: The location we are looking for can be anywhere in the town, and its position is randomized. The boss fight in the end can be handled in different ways and is one of the major branching outcomes of the Dunwich campaign.
The Kidnapped! treachery and the threat of losing story allies or even unique player allies for the rest of the campaign gives this scenario a lot of weight, way more than the otherwise fairly generous doom counter would suggest.
Low points: Very few, this is an all around solid scenario. The randomization can lead to a bit of an annoying variance, with the investigation either being over before it really started or taking very long (and thus leading to a sacrifice or two) just because of random chance.
Yapping: When i think of “good old Arkham” as a scenario description, this is one of the first scenarios i think of. We are given a grid of locations, we need to find clues, enemies are around. Standard fare, but elevated through the always looming threat of the story allies being in peril if we take too long and the Silas encounter.

Undimensioned and Unseen

Rating: Tier 5
Highlights: As has been the case for all of this campaign, there are some really interesting locations in this one with abilities that tell stories and are worth interacting with. I also like parts of the encounter deck, especially the presence of both the Whippoorwills and the Beast Thralls.
Low points: Almost everything else is profoundly cursed. The random movement of the Broods is often frustrating, the location effects that can get around it do help but aren’t quite enough to make this part interactive enough. The Broods can’t be fought with conventional means, instead rely purely on the willpower skill – which depending on the investigators present can mean that the Broods are almost untouchable. The Broods aren’t the only thing hungry for willpower, as the encounter deck also focuses on it way more than the rest of the campaign, only amplifying the issue.
Even encountering the Broods in the first place requires drawing the right cards from the encounter deck or having enough time pass, which can lead to long pauses in gameplay where everyone is just spinning their wheels. The scenario also takes forever, if you want to commit to defeating all of the Broods.
Yapping: Genuinely one of the low points of the game in my opinion. Sure, you can tech for it and if you do, it’s not even particularly difficult. But even then it’s just not particularly fun to follow randomly moving thingies around. This is one of only two scenarios in the game where i consider the first turn resign on the starting location (and effectively not even care to set the thing up on the table).

Where Doom Awaits

Rating: Tier 4+
Highlights: Regrettably, this scenario doesn’t really do something specific better than the other scenarios around it, making it hard for me to point at something here.
Low points: Arguably a bug in the location/scenario design, Where Doom Awaits is notoriously hard to progress if you aren’t able to pass unassisted intellect tests. So groups that had their clue getting solved by for example a Mystic with spell assets or Ashcan Pete with Duke can suddenly find themselves in front of a campaign-ending wall.
More generally speaking, this scenario lacks focus. It has a huge encounter deck filled with random effects that barely support each other, leading to high variance and more often than not, a lack of interesting challenges.
Yapping: That i don’t really have any highlights to point towards doesn’t mean that everything is bad, it’s just that large swaths of the scenario are just … unremarkable. If the encounter deck swings the wrong way, it can be downright boring. Which is not where you want your penultimate scenario of the campaign to be.
It’s not a scenario that i dread playing, it’s still a member of the “good old Arkham” group, just not a particularly remarkable one. When also considering that this campaign has done the sort of generic romp through locations for clues twice already (Extracurricular Activities and Blood on the Altar) and better both times… Where Doom Awaits is just lingering there as another thing to go past before finally being able to play the real finale.

Lost in Time and Space

Rating: Tier 1
Highlights: The big flashy focal point of LiTaS is of course the fact that locations are shuffled into the encounter deck at the start of the game and we have to reveal them from there to make our path towards key locations that allow us to progress. Location connections are unclear, paths open up and close down as locations get revealed and discarded again. It’s all very different and manages to perfectly communicate the idea that we are in another dimension where things work in weird ways.
The scenario is also quite tough, with some very rough enemies around and the Beyond the Veil treachery constantly looming over our heads.
Low points: Technically, we can beat up Yog-Sothoth with a baseball bat. It’s not super easy to do, but that one of the big players in the pantheon of Great Old Ones appears here with regular stats and health is a bit of weirdness that later campaigns would not repeat (at least not this blatantly).
Yapping: This still is the best finale to a campaign. I attribute this to a suitably high level of challenge (but in a fair and interactive way) coupled with how well the location mechanics bring theme and gameplay together. Lost in Time and Space not only plays well, it also feels right. It’s epic and it’s special. It takes the mechanics and monsters we fought all campaign and puts their greatest hits together to ask the players to perform at their peak for one last time before the campaign ends in either well-earned triumph or world-shattering defeat.
The designers returned to the idea of sending the players to another dimension for the finale a couple more times, with different mechanics that attempt to make things work different and weird. Some of those were definitely good efforts, but i’d argue that none of them come close to how well LiTaS does it. And LiTaS does it without having to employ vast paragraphs of extra rules or diagrams outlining how to set things up.

(Click here to get back to the compendium’s hub page)

Campaign Rating: Tier 3, kinda but also kinda not
Since this is just a three-part mini-campaign instead of a full thing, this is hard or even impossible to rate against the others. Am i likely to return to playing this as a campaign anytime soon? No, not at all. And no, the Return To doesn’t change anything about that either. That being said, i can’t just slap a Tier 5 on there because of that either, i feel like that’s unfair towards how good Gathering and Masks are.
So, I’ll just put a Tier 3 on there. That’s somewhat of a mix of rating is for its scenarios, as a campaign and as an introduction to the game.
I don’t have much more to say about Night of the Zealot, to be honest. For my gaming experience with Arkham today, it’s a non-entity.

The Gathering

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: A terrifying final boss and surprisingly tough Elite enemies make combat a lot more deadly than it often is in the rest of the game. Lita Chantler is a great introduction to story allies.
Low points: It starts basic and slow… but come on, it’s the tutorial. Hard to fault it for that.
Yapping: Simply a very well made scenario with high stakes and only little hand holding. The notoriously brutal encounter sets from the Core make sure this scenario is challenging even on replays. It’s a cool self-contained story the likes you’d expect to see at the start of a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Some weirdness in the story about disappearing doors and force fields that i don’t really vibe with, but overall The Gathering is just very well done. And with the Return, it even has enough to offer to hold a veteran player’s interest.

The Midnight Masks

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: Introduction of the “do as much as you can” style of objective. Of how doom on enemies works. And of the concept that there’s a surprise on the back of an agenda or act. A focused encounter deck that specializes in stalling and delaying the players while trying to accelerate the doom clock. A variety of location effects as the players move around Arkham. An extra side deck with the cultists. Actually, there’s a lot going on here.
Low points: Barely any. There’s a reason it’s the template for many other scenarios down the product line.
Yapping: Realistically, the only thing stopping Midnight Masks from breaking into Tier 1 is the existence of other scenarios that follow the same template. Also, it’s let down slightly by being tied to the generic Core encounter sets, leading to things like random Nightgaunts being around. Make no mistake though, this is the best scenario in the Core campaign and for good reason the one that many people still replay a lot to test and benchmark decks.

The Devourer Below

Rating: Tier 5+
Highlights: Suitably spooky vibes and a very dangerous campaign boss that you will be unlikely to avoid. Having the option to yeet Lita at the Old One for an alternate ending is excellent.
Low points: This scenario is let down by two things for the most part. One, difficulty. Not of the kind that challenges you, but of the kind that just feels non-interactive and unfun. Failing a test is something you have to live with in this game, but here there are many situations where it can wreck you with little recourse and it just feels cheap when it happens. The other thing is that most of the encounter cards feel very disconnected. This is the scenario that most suffers from having little in terms of scenario specific cards available and having to make due with what can be cobbled together from the Core encounters. It tries to lean into this fact by randomizing the different “Agents of…” sets, but considering that we have a ghoul cult summoning Umôrdhoth here, the token appearance of a Deep One or Dark Young only feels even more random than the Nightgaunts in Midnight Masks.
Yapping: A disappointing third part to the Core campaign. I understand that much of what happened here was born out of necessity. Having encounter sets end up completely unused during the Core campaign would have been unsatisfying. And it does make some sense to make Umôrdhoth difficult to defeat, to steer players towards the Lita sacrifice as the most likely ending to their first campaign and make a point about things not always having a happy ending in a Lovecraft-inspired world. But at the end of the day, this scenario is just not fun to play. It’s a grueling slog, especially on the Core Set card pool, and all too often finds its end at the hand of some encounter card or another that wipes out a hand of cards or deals oodles of damage/horror at the drop of a hat.
I’ve rated this scenario a Tier 5 in the past and I’ll do so again. That lowest tier is reserved for the few scenarios that i am actively dreading to play. Not a lot of those around, but Devourer makes that list.

Intro

With ArkhamLCG opening up a new chapter, i feel like it’s time to take one final big look at the chapter 1 campaigns and scenarios and see where they ended up for me in the grand picture, make one big ranking and a tierlist and all that fancy stuff. I’ve considered doing an update to the scenario reviews similar to the one i did after Scarlet Keys, but then i am updating the update to an article from three and a half years ago and … meh. Let’s do this in a way that is more future proof. I am also in the mood for something indulgent and overproduced. So let me just take a page out of that way overblown Comprehensive Investigator Review i did and turn this into a big ramble about Arkham scenarios. Actually, I’ll also rank the campaigns as a whole while at it. Oh, and let me also slap a pretentious title like “Comprehensive Campaign Compendium” on it.

I’ll do single pages for each campaign, for easier reference. This right here is the hub page, you can find the links just a bit below.

Oh right. Spoilers, btw.
All of them.

Definition of Tiers

My previous scenario reviews were putting all scenarios in one of five tiers that years ago i defined as such:

This is a system i like well enough to keep. Additionally, i might add a “+” or “-” to note that a scenario lives on the upper or lower range of that tier. So for example, if i say that a scenario is “Tier 2+“, it barely missed the cut to Tier 1. While a “Tier 3-” I’d find somewhat mediocre, but not bad enough to put it in Tier 4.

I’ll try to add enough explanation of why i rank it the way i do, which is hopefully more helpful than the rank itself anyway.

The “Return To” boxes

In the past, i have evaluated scenarios by their Return To version, because that is the one i am most familiar with by now. Due to how difficult they are to get these days, i am going to try and stick to the regular scenarios as originally released for the main score this time around.

That being said, when i feel it is particularly relevant, i will add a note about the Return To changes and how they change my view on the scenario ranking. For most, the ranking doesn’t significantly change, but i can at least think of a couple Forgotten Age scenarios where i feel like i need to talk about both incarnations of them.

Final Rankings

• Tierlists, Wrap-Up and a Word on Chapter 2

Campaign Index

• Night of the Zealot

• The Dunwich Legacy

• The Path to Carcosa

• The Forgotten Age

• The Circle Undone

• The Dream-Eaters

• The Innsmouth Conspiracy

• Edge of the Earth

• The Scarlet Keys

• The Feast of Hemlock Vale

• The Drowned City

Spreading Flames

Campaign Sets used: Spreading Flames, Ashen Pilgrims, Bystanders, Cosmic Evils, Eldritch Lore, Fire!, Hallucinations, Mad Science

Available experience: 2 (locations) + 2 (Servant of Flame) + 3 (Resolution 1) + 1 (fight the fire) = 8XP

Smoke and Mirrors

Campaign sets used: Smoke and Mirrors, Arcane Lock, Bad Weather, Dead Ends, Flying Terrors, Gangs of Arkham, Whippoorwills

Available experience: 4 (locations) + 5 (People of Arkham) + 1 (Servant of Flame) = 10XP

Queen of Ash

Campaign Sets Used: Queen of Ash, Ashen Pilgrims, Cosmic Evils, Cultists, Fire!, Hallucinations, Reeking Decay, Torment

Available experience: 2 (locations) + 1 (Dark Magician) + 4 (Servant, Herald, Knight) + 5 (Elokoss) = 12XP

River of Blood

Campaign Sets used: River of Blood, Blood Blight, Blood Moon, Children of Blood, Hunted, Misinformation, Preyed Upon, Vermin, optionally: Agents of Zburamoarte, Mongrels, Afflicted
Core Sets used: Dead Ends, Flying Terrors
Available experience: 6 (3 Lairs, 2 XP each) + 2 (Julia) = 8XP
Note: On Hard and Expert, the Agents of Zburamoarte set also has three Victory enemies that can be caught here. They only can appear through the Burning Daylight treachery however and it is random if you get them or a civilian. In theory this can be worth another 3XP however.

New Horizons

Campaign sets used: New Horizons, Afflicted, Sanguine Secrets
Core sets used: Flying Terrors
only in v1 (Day): Blood Blight, Bloodthirst, Hunted, Vermin
only in v2 (Night): Children of Blood, Preyed Upon, Stalked, Reeking Decay

Available experience: 6 (locations) + 2 (Zburamoarte) + 2 (Javier/Watchman) = 10XP
Note: The Interlude that follows New Horizons can afford another 2XP on top of these 10 if you pass on asking for the mayor’s help.

Blood Money

Campaign Sets Used: Blood Money, Agents of Zburamoarte, Blood Blight, Bloodthirst, Children of Blood, Hunted, Sanguine Secrets, optionally: Afflicted
Core Sets Used: Arcane Lock

Available experience: 4 (locations, including Balcony) + 2 (Wilkes) + 2 (Julia) + 2 (Spawn of Zburamoarte + 6 (saved civilians) = 16XP
Notes: Up to two Spawns enter through Sanguine Rebirth. The third is only used when Julia is not and will result in 1 fewer max XP. The Balcony is not used in Hard and Expert which would also reduce the available XP by 1.

Intro

I finally got around to play the Children of Blood campaign. Only once so far, so the verdict on how much changes based on choices and difficulty is still out. But i figured i should write up some quick notes on the scenarios. And also on the two investigators i played, seeing how right now at the start of chapter 2 I am also still collecting experiences with those.
Spoiler warning for the Children of Blood campaign, obviously.
I played on Standard difficulty, two-handed solo with Tommy and Marie. Chapter 2 decks only.

River of Blood

So, i had the weirdest experience with this scenario that caused me to immediately replay it. Did you ever have that experience where you start a scenario and get immediately clobbered by being on the wrong end of variance, like your 5 sanity investigator getting hit for 3 horror in each of the first two Mythos phases and just keeling over? I had the polar opposite of that.
I arrived to the scenario, spent the first agenda collecting clues, Julia came out during the night, i attacked her a bunch, hit all my attacks and won with two agendas left in the game. While the encounter deck made me fight a 2 health vampire at some point, otherwise just had some tests for me or did random things that didn’t impact me. Easiest scenario 1 ever.
But nah, of course it isn’t. The scenario is actually somewhat difficult if it plays out in a normal way, i just got handed one extreme end of the variance. I wouldn’t judge a scenario on getting the double Grasping Hands draw on Daisy, so i wasn’t going to judge this one on the other end of the spectrum either. Time for a replay.

And this time, things were a lot more interesting. There was a lot of horror around, enemies were plentiful and all that Elusive and Retaliate made Tommy sweat a lot as he was testing 6 vs 4 all night long. While Marie ran interference, used Shadowmeld to lock down those enemy keywords, her willpower to keep the civilians out of the way and provided the lion’s share of the clues i needed to snare Julia. I did win again, but this time during the final agenda and with both Tommy and Marie one horror away from going insane. Actions were very precious, decisions were tight and a few times it came down to Shadowmeld’s bonus action being the only thing that stopped me from being unable to prevent a painful enemy phase. The blood tokens did their thing, messed up a bunch of tests and by the end of all, i had two blood tokens sealed on both of the investigators, making both of them “earn” the Blood Blight weakness. [Note: Reviewing the campaign book now, something doesn’t add up. You only get the Blood Blight with three blood sealed on you. I may have misread that or i might be misremembering what i had sealed on me at the end of the game. Either way, i had the weakness on me for both Tommy and Marie going into scenario 2.]

So the campaign starts off with a chunky boss fight, that’s unusual at least! Structurally, this did feel more like a campaign final than a beginning but that does make a lot of sense for a three-part campaign of course. If you have to cut off a part of the narrative that is represented in the scenarios, you do cut off the slow start and get right into the middle of things. And that’s what Children of Blood did here. This is not an intro scenario in the same line as an Untamed Wilds or Riddles and Rain that introduces the campaign mechanics to you, this is a full on shove into the cold water asking you to swim or drown. I liked this one quite a bit and its parts all mattered, with the enemies and treacheries being suitably relevant and the boss being quite chunky. Test difficulty was relatively high for a first scenario, fighting Julia and her minions involved having to reliably beat 4 combat which isn’t trivial, especially not with the extra -1s from the blood tokens in the mix.
The one thing that i thought would matter more than it ended up doing is the Lairs and being able to seal them away in the victory display. It made it easier to find Julia and disturb her during day 2, so it’s not like it didn’t matter at all. But it just presented itself as a bit more than that. Not a huge complaint, just something that i wondered about while playing.
The other thing i was wondering, but i will leave to people that actually play that way to fully comment on: Putting down snares on Julia causes attacks of opportunity. Which causes Elusive to trigger. How is anyone playing solo managing this? That must be an insane action tax. In two-handed i had Tommy stay on Julia and just keep attacking while Marie was getting clues and putting down the snares. But solo? Oof, i can’t imagine.

But overall, i am very happy with this scenario. I am interested in figuring out how easy that first experience i had is to replicate. Defeating Julia in night one is a lot easier than in night two due to there not being so many blood tokens around and skulls only being -2 instead of -4. You only need to make sure you can supply the necessary clues to put down snares. But of course that’d also mean going into the next scenario with 2xp, so that’s probably not a great plan anyway.

New Horizons

I restarted and replayed this one as well. Twice, actually! Because i got absolutely slaughtered two times in a row. I could have just taken the trauma, the bad resolution and moved onto the final scenario, but that wouldn’t be much of an experience worth writing a first impression about, right?
To be fair, the scenario delivered exactly on what it promised in the campaign book. We are offered the choice of talking our way in or fighting our way in. I chose the fighty approach, after all that’s what we are here for: Fighting and slaying vampires. I got what i ordered!

The encounter deck for New Horizons, at least in the version that i played, is chock full of enemies. Not just strong ones, like the Bat Horror and the Night Feeder, but also just a lot of them by number. I was frequently juggling multiple enemies, unable to follow after Elusive threats because i also had some other minor enemy like a Child of Blood on me. Add to this the Night Watchman and that you are finishing this scenario on a boss fight with Zburamoarte and you have to just pull out all stops as far as combat goes to hold up against the onslaught. It was only on the third attempt of the scenario that i managed to get a foothold with my Tommy and Marie duo that allowed me to even get towards the later half of New Horizons and ultimately pull out the win against Zburamoarte.

That’s a good thing. Again, with three scenarios in the box, each one needs to have some punch behind it. New Horizons definitely has that punch. This reminded me a lot of the Marrakesh scenario from Scarlet Keys, the one with the ghouls everywhere and Amaranthe and her pet lion in the center of it. Just a very difficult combat scenario that you can throw your best fighters against without having to hold back. A rude awakening if you go into it not knowing what to expect, but a real good time if you are up for it.
Compared to that, if you don’t have a team that includes a top tier fighter, the book offers you to do the talky approach. I’m definitely super interested in how that one goes, what is different. From a glance over the setup instructions, the included encounter sets seem to be quite different. I’ve not looked too closely into it yet, though. I suspect that it will still involve a hefty dose of combat, but just dialing down the sheer number of foes would do wonders to mellow it down considerably.

I enjoyed running my head against this wall a few times and am looking forward to coming back a bit more prepared. Marrakesh is one of my highlights from TSK (possibly *the* highlight) and i can see New Horizons fulfill a similar role for giving a relentless combat experience. This probably stands up to a Legacy card pool as well, going against this with Tony, Nathaniel and the like should be a really fun time in the slaughterhouse.

Blood Money

This one i didn’t need to replay, i think i got a representative experience out of it straight away. And truth be told, after the first two scenarios being quite challenging, this one was a bit of a walk in the park. I did get a good mix of enemies and treacheries and mechanics were doing what they are supposed to, so i don’t think this is a similar case to my scenario 1 fluke at all. It’s just that this was not terribly challenging. The scenario tried to give me some enemies to worry about, but nothing ever reached anywhere near what New Horizons had on display. And this time i had shotguns, Stock Ammo Reloads for those shotguns and Cosmic Flame(5) to mop the floor with them. On the clue side, things weren’t super difficult either. Scene of the Crime was pretty much permanently active due to the Aloof civilians, Marie’s card draw was delivering her a steady stream of Will of the Cosmos and Augur of Elekoss. The “investigate at +3” story asset for Tommy filled in the rest.
There’s some chatter among other players that just straight up murdering Priscilla to bypass her requirements should probably not be an option because it bypasses the whole first part at the cost of just a doom, a take I am inclined to agree with. But i did go through the “canon” way of sealing the tokens on her and parleying and it wasn’t a huge ordeal either, so i am not sure it matters all that much in the big picture.
One weird thing that i noticed was that the civilians caused the locations to fill up with what are technically enemies rather quick, causing the cultists that spawn at an empty location to just fizzle and be discarded. That happened multiple times and felt decidedly meh.

Yeah, don’t know. It’s not a bad scenario as such, if this was scenario 3 or 4 of a longer campaign, i wouldn’t bat an eye and would consider it to be solidly average. But as a campaign closer, it didn’t really offer me anything terribly noteworthy after how good the first two scenarios were. One thing that especially didn’t really land with me is ending this finale on a boss fight with that Wilkes guy i don’t really care about and that the campaign never has given me a reason to care about. After already having ended the previous scenario on the real boss fight against the scary supernatural thing that caused all of this, Wilkes was just a lame echo of something i just did a moment before. I feel like we didn’t need boss fights in all three scenarios, like either Zbarumoarte should have been saved up for Blood Money or Blood Money should have ended in some other way. Or scenario 2 and 3 should have been switched. Something like that, not sure.

Big Standalone? Small Campaign?

One of the things that stuck with me when this was announced was that we should think of this as a small campaign rather than a big standalone. Seeing how i have generally little interest in Standalone scenarios, that was a particular bit that i was going to measure Children of Blood by. And yeah, this is a good deal more than a Standalone. Obviously 3 scenarios is not the same as 8 scenarios, but for what it is, this works well enough to be worth replaying and check out the different variants. Even if you aren’t interested in jacking up the chaos bag to the modifiers for the higher difficulties, nobody is really stopping you from just using the Hard/Expert setups with a Standard/Easy chaos bag.
There’s a solid amount of game in this box – more than a lot of people are giving it credit for, i think.

Blood Tokens

I have two specific remarks about Blood Tokens, but before we get to those, let me start that i thought this is overall a very good mechanic. I like them being relevant in the chaos bag and that they have a way of sealing on you for extra effects as well. I also like that they are persistent from one scenario to the other. The Edge of the Earth campaign had Frost tokens that in some ways are similar to Blood tokens and i always liked those a lot as well despite not being huge on EotE as a whole.
But this is also where my first remark comes into play. Persistent tokens that last through a campaign aren’t a mechanic for a three-parter. This REALLY needed the longer campaign to properly pay off. This is not a negative on the blood tokens themselves, in fact my complaint here is that we didn’t get more of it. Inventing a new token type, crafting new mechanics around them and having them pollute your investigators over time … that’s something that deserves more than what we get here.
My other remark concerns the weakness, Blood Blight. In theory, there could be an interesting push and pull between blood tokens in the bag and those on your investigator. In practice, that didn’t really happen much because Blood Blight would just always seal the blood tokens on my two investigators within few turns. And even if another symbol token had an effect that would release one of the blood tokens, Blood Blight would just re-seal it again at the end of the round. This meant that six of the ten blood tokens i had by the end of the campaign were near-permanently sealed away. Seems to me like having them float around more would have made this more interesting and impactful for tests. I’m not even sure that Blood Blight is a weakness, having those tokens sealed on me felt like a relief that i won’t just randomly pull them. And most effects that cared about sealed tokens only cared that at least one was sealed, not about how many. On my replay i will definitely try to avoid this weakness to see if the mechanic plays better without it.

Overall verdict on Blood Tokens: Bring them back. Having them only in this one box of three scenarios almost feels like a waste of a very promising mechanic. They deserve to be explored more.

Overall first impression of the campaign

All things considered… pretty good! Delivers on the premise of fighting vampires in Arkham and doesn’t hold back on the difficulty either. Many Arkham scenario and campaigns in the past have had their spotlight on the Seeker who does the progression and is the most important part of the team while the fighters are just there to protect them. Children of Blood does a good job of subverting that for the most part. While the usual “find 3 clues per investigator” gates are there, the combat is put very front and center and i think that’s a cool way to make this mini-campaign stand out. I’ll definitely replay this, and i see especially the first two scenarios as great benchmarks to test decks against, the way i would otherwise throw them into Innsmouth’s Pit of Despair to see how they fare when the game is actually making a conscious effort to kill and not just delay them.
Does this replace a “proper” campaign? No, not at all, that job is still on the five-parter next year. But it is more than just a standalone scenario like Rougarou or Excelsior. And while i am not particularly interested in for example Traces to Nowhere, i wouldn’t be opposed to check out another three-parter if we were to get one down the line in 2028 or whenever.

Marie Lambeau

Marie was quite impressive. I probably did undersell her quite a bit in my first impression tierlist from a few weeks ago. It’s not like I was really wrong about my criticisms of her, just about how much those mattered. Much of my evaluation was based on the perceived lack of ways to recover health, dismissing especially Infuse Life as too expensive to care about. But it turns out that somewhere between Offering Bowl, Ceremonial Robes and (later on) Jim Culver, she was just always flush with resources and easily able to pay for that sort of thing. The added card draw she has from her ability and Arcane Initiate made her cycle through her deck at least once every game, meaning she got to play those Infuse Life multiple times which was, combined with Cosmic Guidance, enough to sustain her recklessly seeking out damage every round. In turn, she always had the tools for her job and truckloads of willpower and wild icons to make sure she did that job well.
The other side of the coin is of course that she is a homing beacon for weaknesses and the way her investigator ability interacts with those is definitely something that is felt each time it happens: You draw two cards, have to discard one of them and since you can’t discard the weakness, you have to discard the good card. And then your weakness resolves. Marie’s personal weakness isn’t all that bad, but depending on your random basic weakness or any that the campaign hands out, this could be ugly. Like, if she had gotten that weakness that Isabelle had in my Ages Unwound play (Lethal Curiosity) or an Overzealous, then that could get ugly.
Her signature is as expected very good, especially in the first scenario it made sure i always had charges to spend for Second Sight, to keep the clues (and snares) coming.
I ran a full set of spell assets with her for investigation, combat and evasion and made good use of all of them. I also used some Hand-Crank flashlights to let her use her intellect and that came in handy, too. She did a real good allrounder job and while her combat capabilities didn’t peak as high as Tommy’s, she ended up carrying the team for long stretches of the campaign.
In the tierlist, i had this to say:
“Ranking her at B seems fair to me for now, she clearly is capable. If she ends up getting the health recovery she needs, she definitely has the means to climb into A, but there’s just too many open ends with her for now.”
I definitely underestimated the life recovery she has, so she deserves at least that A.

Tommy Muldoon

No such luck for Tommy, I’m afraid. I pretty much found confirmation for how i expected him to play. He’s at his best when he can play to his clue side as well as his combat side, but Children of Blood was pressuring him hard to the point where he would not have been able to keep up if it hadn’t been for Marie relieving some of that pressure. Tommy can manage very well if he has a single enemy to fight, even if it’s something notable like a Bat Horror. But throw something else on top when any miss gets punished and he is going to depend a lot on the luck of the chaos bag draw. The crucial piece that let him get anywhere in New Horizons was actually Police Dog. Getting +2 to the test instead of only +1 like Logan would give made a huge difference. You can only test 6 vs 4 against Retaliate and Elusive so often before it backfires, getting that up to 7 vs 4 was huge.
As a result, i am pretty sure that i wouldn’t have had my two defeats in New Horizon if Daniela had been my investigator instead of Tommy, as she’d not only get +1 to her combats, but also an ability that gives extra attacks to properly beat down on all those enemies that had me surrounded.
That being said, it did feel really good to start the final scenario by playing down the new Shotgun and just putting down 5 ammo on it right away. It’s not like Tommy is incapable, he’s just a bit of an allrounder that doesn’t excel at something. His ability to investigate with his intellect absolutely came up a few times, in places where Dani might have just stood around and drawn a card or two to pass the time. I think my initial evaluation in the tierlist holds up to my experience with him in Children of Blood.

Intro

I reached the end of my Ages Unwound play with chapter 2 decks. And you know what? While I didn’t quite cross the finish line in the end, getting beaten down and worn out as I headed into the final stretch, the two decks sold themselves well. A lot better than I expected, actually.
This is the first full campaign that i played with the new chapter 2 card pools, so i think it’s valuable to have a look back at the decks and the investigators. Did they perform as I expected them to when I made my “Hot Take Edition” reviews of the Core Set, of the Evergreen decks and my Investigator Tier List? Which cards were surprisingly good? Which ones failed to impress as much as i hoped?

Joe Diamond

Here’s the link to Joe’s deck: Joe Diamond Unwound. Note: In arkham.build, you can use the History tab to check out how the deck evolved, so you can get to the level 0 deck there as well as the one that entered the finale. Or any inbetween.

Joe was just super solid throughout. His innate card draw really came through big time and made sure that he not only found his stuff in time, but also that he usually was able to throw cards into tests when it made a difference. Reading over my evaluation of him in the tier list, that all reads still correct to me. I was certainly impressed by his ability to soak, the 7/7 split was doing a lot of work. His card draw was great, he was often discarding to hand size and i even cut my extra card draw that i originally included from his deck. The signature triggered its extra draw a few times, felt nice each time that happened. Overall, he definitely felt a good deal stronger than original Joe to me. I ranked him an A in the tier list, he is probably even hitting the upper bound of that range.

Some choice cards that overperformed are:
Bodyguard(2): Each time he showed up, he did excellent work. I was able to wring a lot of value out of this dude, using both his soak and his free 2 damage to good effect. I really liked him and will certainly play him more from now on.
Insidious Truths: I never really liked this sort of event that throws a bunch of cards away for just a single attack, but Insidious Truths really did shine a lot in these games. Joe Diamond is kind of the perfect investigator for Truths. It still uses combat to attack, not intellect and Joe has the best combat of any Seeker. It tosses your cards and Joe draws cards without even trying. Finally, the combination with Vicious Blow is nice, especially with the upgraded one where the massive bonus to the test from Truths makes sure that Vicious Blow gets its oversuccess. I think this card will prove to be A LOT worse if i were to put it into literally any other Seeker, but here it was very impressive and nuking that 5 health big boy in the final scenario in one action was an enjoyable moment.

Some choice underperformers:
Bounty: Dunno, didn’t really seem to do much for me all campaign. I think it’s likely a fluke, due to all the swarming enemies around that often only had 1 health individually. But i don’t think i ever got to play this for more than 2 resources and even getting 2 wasn’t always guaranteed.
Stock Ammo Reload: I mean, it did what it’s supposed to do, so i am not sure i can really call this “underperforming”. But i want to mention it here because only during one of the last scenarios i realized that this can’t put ammo on someone elses gun the way chapter 1’s Extra Ammunition can. I really wanted it to be able to refill Izzie’s Twins that one game and couldn’t.

The deck as a whole worked well. I think i went a bit too heavy on the combat upgrades. Thanks to Insidious Truths working as well as it did, i probably could have skipped the Stock Ammo Reloads and instead kept some extra horror healing in the deck. The second Psychoanalysis could have been nice or keeping the Psychology Student in the deck. I found myself with combat cards stacking up in my hand a few times when all i was looking for was some extra intellect icons to throw into investigations.

Isabelle Barnes

And here’s Izzie’s deck: Isabelle Barnes Unwound.

I got some raised eyebrows for putting Izzie into S-tier in my tier list. But i have to say, after this campaign, I stand by it. The amount of damage and horror she was able to take was exceptional and even when she was skirting death for a moment, she was able to recover from it very well. I even put Offering Bowls into her deck later on despite her 5 health because she was just shrugging off damage. She dunked on encounter tests left and right while also able to punch way above her weight in combat. I want to highlight her signature pistols which did A LOT of work in the first half of the campaign, dropping Myriad Men with little fuss. Her weakness was also quite manageable, turns out she is able to keep her horror minimal even though i was agressively using her ability and as a result the weakness usually only dealt a point of damage. The recycling part of her ability came up plenty of times as well, from having “Guts for Days” in early games to getting extra uses out of Timely Intervention(3) in later ones. The combo of using Arcane Initiate to keep fishing for Blood Curse and Soul Link in the deck after reshuffling them was also super neat.
Fantastic investigator, both fun and dynamic to play and super powerful. As easy for me to latch on to as Winifred was in chapter 1.

Some overperformers:
Aleksey Saburov: For Izzie, he’s better than either Jessica Hyde or Peter Sylvester would have been because she does indeed use both the horror and the damage healing parts of Aleksey very well. He’s been a key piece in making sure she survives and i should have played two copies from the start.
Offering Bowl: I only added these later on, but maybe Aleksey and Bandages can carry this from the start? Anyway, even if you treat this as a 1xp upgrade to only get once you also have Extra Rations, the effect an early Offering Bowl had on my setup was immense. Resources was the one weak spot of my deck, without drawing an ECache setting up with a weapon/spell, an ally and a support asset took some time or extra resource actions. Bowl instead made that super smooth. I didn’t expect to put this into a 5 health investigator, but this was great!
Timely Intervention(3): I knew this was a good card, but i didn’t expect it to be THIS good. Save one test, commit from the discard for 3 icons for the next test, shuffle back, do it again. Scrape By is probably better for other investigators, but for Izzie this card rules. The level 0 version is already good, but the level 3 is on a whole new level.

Some underperformers:
Longbow: This is just an awful campaign for Longbow. Like 95% of the enemies in this campaign fall into one of two camps: Swarmers. Or 4+ health. Only scenario 6 had some 3 health enemies (Sheldon’s Finest, Irregulars), but i didn’t draw Longbow in that game :D So yeah. Bad showing, highlighting the exact situations in which this card falters.

Something that performed just like i hoped it would was the Lucky Cigarette Case. Running LCC in Isabelle with Collector was a bit of a gimmick twist to the deck, but i think this worked well enough. The LCC did draw a handful of cards whenever it was in play and the deck size increase didn’t hurt. I feel like LCC helped with redrawing the skills that i shuffled back into the deck quite a bit, but it’s sort of hard to quantify that effect. That being said, a streamlined version without Collector and Relic Hunter that simply uses two copies of Canteen for the accessory slot would work perfectly fine, too.

In terms of upgrade strategy, I think I messed up a bit by removing the clue finding capabilities from her deck completely. I was hesitant of keeping the Second Sights once i had 4 cultists in the bag. That does make sense to me still, but in that case i should have at least kept the Will of the Cosmos around. That would have been super helpful in the final scenario for sure.

Moving on

That was it for this Ages Unwound playalong! Good times were had and i am happy that I both got to show off a cool custom campaign that i deeply enjoy and two good chapter 2 decks that were able to take on the increased challenge that comes from Ages Unwound being a bit of a bastard sometimes :D
Now i finally do have the time to check out Children of Blood. I won’t be documenting that in detail like i did this playthrough, but expect some sort of first impressions article in the near future. I’ll be playing that mini-campaign with Tommy and Marie, so hopefully I’ll be able to comment on their capabilities a bit as well once i am done.