Campaign Compendium: The Dream-Eaters

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 4 for campaign A, Tier 3+ for campaign B, Tier 3- for the combined campaign
Scenarios: Very hit or miss. And considering that each of these campaigns has only four scenarios, each miss hits just that much harder.
Campaign structure: It was a novel experiment, but at least for my take, i think the expansion is worse off for being split down the middle into two mini-campaigns that can be played in isolation. If you do a full campaign, the interactions between the two campaigns aren’t nearly interesting enough to warrant all the extra upkeep involved with keeping two chaos bags and double the amount of decks with half the amount of sense of progression. And for playing only one half, campaign A simply isn’t good enough to motivate me to do that. Campaign B i actually do like somewhat and i have played it as its own thing a few times, but Thousand Shapes is a sore spot and it does make up one fourth of the campaign.
Both campaigns feature a tally where you keep track of something, the Evidence of Kadath on one side, the Steps of the Bridge on the other. Both are pretty much driven by a single source and don’t really provide any sort of replay value or impact the way that Doubt/Conviction or Vengeance had. Pretty forgettable overall.
In general, there isn’t a whole lot your write down in your campaign log that would influence later things. And the cross-campaign synergy is built up with some lengthy paragraphs of talking to a cat, but is mechanically paper thin and not really motivating me to engage with it again.
Campaign mechanics: Swarm is a mechanic that allows one encounter card to come into play with copies of itself that act as a unit. It’s pretty cool and a flavorful way to depict the spiders, rats and zoogs that use it in the campaigns. It has some oddities in its rules, but works well enough.
Hidden makes a return, a mechanic i didn’t particularly like in Carcosa, but that gets executed on better here. The Nyarlathothep “fight” is pretty much my platonic ideal of what Hidden can be. The keyword appears here and there in campaign A beforehand and it’s perfectly fine.
There’s one other thing that Dream-Eaters spun off of Carcosa and improved up and that’s Veiled. While Veiled wasn’t keyworded in Carcosa, it’s basically the gimmick of the Dim Carcosa final scenario and this way of using the back of location cards for exposition and some gameplay effects is used well here. There are some weird side-effects to locations all starting revealed in those scenarios, but overall it’s well done.
More Yapping: Dream-Eaters is a campaign that rides a lot on its narrative and novel setting. That makes it a genuinely great experience when you play it the first couple times, but on replays when the story parts are no longer new, the naked gameplay is what will need to convince and stand the test of time.
And no, i don’t like large parts of this box much when it comes to the gameplay. I will occasionally play the spider campaign on its own, but i am kind of over the other half of the box. If i were into playing standalone scenarios, I suppose Search for Kadath would be something to go for as well.

Beyond the Gates of Sleep

Rating: Tier 4
Highlights: It does a good job of introducing the vibes of the campaign and on the mechanical side, introducing the Swarm keyword with a couple neat encounter cards.
Low points: Aside from that, this scenario doesn’t really have a lot going on. The first third of the scenario has less gameplay than a Hemlock Vale interlude and is just a tedious thing you execute on replays. The last two thirds, the actual scenario, is some locations around a central one and you get some clues. Super basic, super boring.
Yapping: There’s just nothing here that would be even mildly stimulating on a replay. It lands for me in the same space as Heart of the Elders part II, where the thing isn’t offensively bad or unpleasant, it’s just … boring.

The Search for Kadath

Rating: Tier 2–
Highlights: The dreamlands are explored in different facets of their weirdness. You get a relatively open goal of “do as much as possible”, then are let loose on a small sandbox where you get agency of where to go first and check out the specific mini-challenges there. The Veiled texts on the backside of the locations does some heavy lifting to pull all of this together in a way that works for the most part. The challenges are varied and you probably won’t explore all of it in one go.
Low points: The scenario makes you go through mini setups between going from island to island in a way that could have been streamlined (especially with regards to having to change the encounter deck). It’s just a bit too much on the fiddly end. The islands are also not created equal, if you are after getting those Signs of the Gods collected, then some are considerably easier to get than others.
Yapping: Kadath is a scenario that i have warmed up on over time. There some cool monsters here, the locations have a lot of things going on, which combined with the ticking clock and an ideal outcome that is very hard to reach before that clock runs out makes it generally a good time. The mid-scenario setups are still a major downer, and Kadath is on the very low end of Tier 2, but after ranking it at the top of Tier 3 in previous rankings i decided to give it that push into the green this time around.

Dark Side of the Moon

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: Again, the dreamlands vibes are very strong here and the whole thing feels very alien in a cool way. We get some weird enemies and a unique mechanical hook in the Alarm levels.
Low points: That being said, i find the alarm mechanic a bit awkward and not really all that flavorful overall. The sudden reliance on agility in this scenario is also coming way out of left field and there are group compositions that get clobbered really hard here. This is also a very linear map in a way that feels very railroaded and non-interactive. You have to walk from set piece to set piece without a whole lot of agency behind how you approach them
Yapping: I’ve had some good plays of Dark Side and some very frustrating ones. I am not a fan of how the existence of this scenario makes me look at some investigators that i might have taken for this campaign and go “Nah, sorry Leo. Your 1 agility is going to fuck things up”. If this agility focus was a part of the overall campaign, i’d be much more fine with it, but as just a one-off in the A-side of the campaign it kind of bugs me in a similar way to City of Archives in TFA.

Where The Gods Dwell

Rating: Tier 4+
Highlights: The boss “fight” is a fantastic way to use Hidden, i like everything about it. The whole logistics behind getting the cards where they need to be is intense and different and memorable.
Low points: I just wish that would be all this scenario is, because the rest of it is … not good. The doom counter is super tight and at low player count requires near-perfect play to even get to the actual confrontation with Nyarlathotheps aspects with a chance of winning. That first half or so where you follow along some set pieces to shove a priest into a pit is just bizarrely out of place and adds nothing interesting at all.
Yapping: This scenario is so frustrating. The Nyarlathothep mechanics themselves are top notch and would easily carry the scenario into Tier 2, but the rest is pulling it down to the point where i’ve put this in Tier 4 before. I’ll was planning to go with a low Tier 3 this time around, because with the full chapter 1 card pool we have ways of dealing with this scenario now… but the fact that we basically need to include silver bullets to cheat our way around some of the mechanics is its own damning statement. Upper Tier 4 it is then. This scenario needed some more time in the cooker and merciless slicing away at unneeded chaff and it could’ve become one of the all-time greats instead of what’s likely going to be just dooming out in the finale due to randomness and variance not being on your side.

Waking Nightmare

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: The scenario does one thing, and that is spiders infesting a hospital. And it does it remarkably well. The flavor of everything is spot on, both from the scenario locations and the encounter deck. That last part is notably difficult to do for a scenario 1 that was part of what used to be the deluxe box, meaning the scenario has to mostly use the campaign wide encounter cards and very little scenario specific stuff. It perfectly introduces the themes and mechanics of this side of the campaign and sets an early signal that you better be able to fight well.
Low points: The infestation bag mechanic is notably fiddly and easy to forget in practice, leading to takebacks and backtracking. It’s a good mechanic overall, but it does incur some heavy admin tax on whoever is responsible at the table to manage it.
Yapping: God, I love the spiders in a hospital theme. The only other scenario that gets close for me in terms of Arkham mimicing the setting of traditional horror B-movies is Unspeakable Oath’s asylum. It helps that the scenario itself is also quite strong. I’ve had some plays where i got a handle on the infestation super early and the rest of the scenario is smooth sailing, but that’s rare and requires some very favorable draws from the infestation bag combined with an early securing of the key locations which doesn’t happen often. Most of the time, you are properly challenged here. Good one! Very enjoyable.

A Thousand Shapes of Horror

Rating: Tier 4
Highlights: The stair sequence has a fun idea behind it…
Low points: …but the rest of the scenario is a mess. The stairs alone don’t carry a scenario, so somehow, Thousand Shapes ended up becoming this dumping place for various other undercooked ideas. None of those are given enough space to do something interesting with or enough cards to actually work in the first place. There’s some undefeatable enemy that you need to evade and is otherwise not all that interactive. There’s ghouls amassing in a graveyard for whatever reason, but nothing that would relate to that. We are using Rats and giving them a swarming mechanic instead of just going with the Spider theme the rest of the mini-campaign has. There’s a sub-theme of punishing you for cards in your threat area, with barely any cards that go in your threat area. I suppose the idea is that you walk into the graveyard, engage three ghouls, don’t kill them, then draw that exact treachery in the upkeep that keys off of there being multiple cards in your threat area? Nah, rubbish. To top it all off, there’s an array of low threat enemies and ineffective treacheries. It’s just… unfocused, a jumble of ideas that each could have been fleshed out and spun off into a proper scenario but when taken together in one scenario just poof without achieving anything.
Yapping: This isn’t a scenario, this feels like a brain storming of ideas for several scenarios. In the past I’ve been ranking this as tier 3 for being somewhat inoffensive to play through, but i am feeling less charitable to it these days. In my opinion this scenario is just shoddily designed, it feels hurried and unfinished. I won’t put it all the way at the bottom where the scenarios go that actively put me off, but a Tier 4 is definitely warranted here.

Point of No Return

Rating: Tier 3+
Highlights: Veiled locations, a big open map and some classic Arkham gameplay where you just get to do the “walk around, gather clues, fight enemies” thing. The scenario also manages to put up a good fight, with some impactful treacheries and memorable enemies.
Low points: There isn’t one single thing that I find all that bad about Point of No Return, but it has its moments where it feels a bit … samey? For a campaign that is set in the dreamlands, a scenario that leans this heavily on Core Set encounters sort of sticks out. The scenario does try to do something a bit different with the Ghouls, but while i don’t mind the whole Pickman angle, it also never really did anything for me.
Yapping: I sort of flipped in my perception of Point of No Return and Search for Kadath. One line that i used a couple of times in the past is calling Point of No Return a better Search for Kadath, as they both do something similar of being long scenarios that have you do classic Arkham gameplay on a big map. I do rank Kadath higher these days, thanks to being open-ended and less reliant on the Core Set encounters it simply aged better on replays for me. Both scenarios are close in how i see them, but i feel like i want to draw the line between Tier 2 and Tier 3 right between them, with Kadath being at the bottom of T2 and No Return at the top of T3.

Weaver of the Cosmos

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: The rotating spider god is one of the most fun gimmicks this game has come up with. It’s a memorable boss fight and unlike with Where the Gods Dwell, the scenario has very little lead up to it. It just goes “here’s the boss, these are the mechanics, go” which is how something like this should work.
Low points: Sadly the scenario is very easy unless you end up on the far end of variance in the doom mechanics. There’s a good amount of player scaling here that makes me think that my experience with Weaver is likely heavily colored by me playing two-handed… and 2 might just be the easiest number of players for the Weaver fight.
Yapping: This whole scenario feels like a video game boss fight. Whether that’s good or bad, i am honestly not quite sure. Which is why i am mentioning it here instead of as a highlight or low point. Putting the Atlach-Nacha together from multiple cards makes for a great table presence of the scenario and the fight is mostly mechanically well done. The one issue i have with the fight is that the spider sometimes just refuses to move because of weird token pulls that determine how it acts. For how memorable and engaging it is, the scenario absolutely deserves to be in Tier 2, but due to being a bit of a one-trick pony and also painfully easy (at least in my experience, not everyone thinks so) i will put it near the bottom.