Campaign Compendium: The Circle Undone

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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.