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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 2
Scenarios: Average out at Tier 2, this is the highest concentration of excellence i see in any campaign. The final two scenarios bring down the overall impression considerably and how you deal with that is up to you. Personally, i have started to just take Light in the Fog as my campaign finale which takes the whole experience to a straight Tier 1 for me.
Campaign structure: Innsmouth’s weakest part. While it does have excellent scenarios, it is strictly linear with very little decisions or branching depending on what happened. This is because of the flashback mechanics and how predictable the happenings needed to be for the narrative to hold up. This does clamp down on the replayability, thankfully the scenarios are individually often different enough from one playthrough to the other or this could have been a lot more disqualifying than it is now.
Campaign mechanics: Front and Center in terms of enemies are the Deep Ones, a group of enemies that are mechanically connected through having an engage effect, meaning they get to do something as soon as they are engaged by a player. This has tangible implications for how to handle them, as evading them becomes risky (yet at the same time some of them encourage evasion in other ways) and just the ability to impact the gamestate before the enemy phase gives them a little bit of extra push beyond the simple action tax that enemies often tend to be.
Flooding introduces a new type of tempo restraint besides the doom clock that forces players to move faster. Unlike the doom clock which has effects only in intervals (with the agenda advances), the flood tokens can make individual locations become more hostily immediately and act as area denial in addition to being just a clock.
Innsmouth scenarios often heavily feature randomized locations, making them innately more replayable. At the same time, it does have immediate benefits for the scenario as well and you often have to act with imperfect information, giving movement a higher priority throughout most of the campaign.
Keys and Flashbacks are two mechanics that facilitate bonus goals. In many cases, just reaching the finish line is easy enough, but if you want to pick up every key and get every flashback, then you will need to put more effort in. This creates a dynamic where win/loss for a scenario isn’t always binary but can have various shades of success or failure.
More Yapping: There are some low points to the Innsmouth Conspiracy, but when it is good, it is incredible. And thankfully, it is good a whole lot of times. This campaign caters very much to my personal tastes. I enjoy meaningful enemies that are more than just action taxes. And part of why i latched onto Arkham in the first place is how it uses locations to bridge the gap to a board game with all the advantages this gives. I love a good location mechanic and Innsmouth (like Forgotten Age, my other darling) has those in spades.
The Pit of Despair
Rating: Tier 1
Highlights: Pit of Despair is my favorite opening scenario. It hits all the same high marks that Untamed Wilds does, with some tense difficulty and excellent introduction to its themes and mechanics. Pit is a great gauntlet that immediately tells you whether the investigators/decks you brought are going to cut it in the campaign.
Low points: Almost none, the scenario is pretty much perfect. If i had to point at something, then it’s how the Flashbacks aren’t actually all that optional. Finishing Pit without removing those tokens from your bag through finding the flashbacks will put you at a massive disadvantage throughout the rest of the campaign.
Yapping: From how locations work in this campaign over how much damage and horror you get, from flood levels restricting your movement to the possibility of just drawing Deep One Bull off the top at any point: Pit of Despair does a great job of putting everything you need to know front and center right away so you don’t get blindsided by it later on. This whole scenario is just incredibly engaging and tense and it always gets me hyped up for what comes after. Since i use this scenario as my primary testing grounds if i want to see how a deck performs, i have played Pit of Despair more than any other scenario.
The Vanishing of Elina Harper
Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: The leads deck drives the scenario and gives it a cool focal point that feels novel and unique. There is plenty opportunity to feel clever about interacting with it and about how to spend your clues. The map is not huge at start, but just big enough initially that you can go about your investigation in different ways, possibly even split up for good effect. The presence of some extra strong enemies like the Winged One and of course the Angry Mod alongside the usual Nightgaunts gives the whole thing the Innsmouth touch, even just the presence of the Innsmouth Troublemakers makes sure this is a good deal more fighty than even Threads of Fate. At the same time, the encounter deck does manage to stall out clue acquisition very well. It’s a well made encounter deck.
Low points: The randomness behind the lead deck can sometimes take over however. In spite of some safeguards being in place, too often the final call out of who is the culprit and where do they hang out comes down to a 50/50 coin flip. That can feel unsatisfying even when you do get it right.
Yapping: This scenario is another decendant of Midnight Masks, with its own spin on the formula. In the end, everything comes down to the accusation and how correct you are with it, which removes the “open-ended goals, do as much as you can” aspect from Vanishing compared to other city-wide investigation scenarios.
In Too Deep
Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: One of Innsmouth’s central gimmicks is that reaching a positive resolution to a scenario isn’t actually all that difficult… but due to the flashbacks there are extra goals and getting those requires some effort. In Too Deep is a scenario that does this better than any of the others. You have plenty of time if you just want to reach the final location and get out, but more likely you will want to get the keys along the way and unlock the flashbacks and story assets you can get here. In a way, In Too Deep does provide the open-endedness to its goals that Vanishing was missing. Finishing In Too Deep with all keys and flashbacks acquired is one of those hallmark achievements, alongside such things as getting all cultists in Midnight Masks or all paths in Boundary Beyond that is difficult to do even for seasoned players.
This is also one of the few scenarios that makes the enemies actually scary. That murder ball of Deep Ones that is sooner or later following you around as you make your way across the large map is sure something you don’t want to get entangled in.
Low points: Despite the scenario featuring one of the highest location counts as it presents you with a large 5 x 3 map of Innsmouth, plays of In Too Deep tend to go usually go the same way as you are very much incentivized to snake your way around the locations, hitting all of them. This isn’t a huge strike against the scenario, but it does defy the initial idea you get when seeing this large layout. Setting it up with all the barriers is also a bit of a pain, but at least this is worth it.
I also have some issues with the encounter deck of this one. It’s a big clump of almost 40 cards which means that it’s very high variance and sometimes you simply don’t get the cool Deep One Bull or Deep One Invasion moments.
Yapping: I’ve been bouncing between Tier 1 and Tier 2 for this scenario between reviews and i am going to settle on a high Tier 2 this time. It is a really good one and it also doesn’t get old on replays. But i do feel like putting it behind the three scenarios of this campaign (Pit, Reef, Lighthouse) that do their thing on a randomized map and with a tighter encounter deck.
Devil Reef
Rating: Tier 1
Highlights: A multi-layered setup that groups locations randomly into islands makes for a significantly different landscape from play to play. There is a lot to do here and a lot of ground to cover and thankfully the scenario provides a boat which can be used in clever ways to save on movement actions. The scenario also features a large boss enemy that can either be fought head-on or mostly avoided.
I enjoy how the boat works in this scenario, the way you can leverage it into massive action advantage when traversing the huge map is very neat and makes me feel just a little bit clever.
Low points: None from my end. I understand that true solo players have a bone to pick with the action economy in this scenario, but at two players (which is what i play) that already seems to be well handled with the boat acting as a souped up Safeguard. I simply think that Devil Reef is excellent through and through.
Yapping: Devil Reef isn’t as highly regarded in the community as it is by me, but I happen to think of Devil Reef as one of the best the game has to offer! It’s delivering a pure version of the core gameplay loop of ArkhamLCG that is challenging on every end. I enjoy the enemy density, all the movement based decision making, the vehicle throwing in a new angle, the cool boss enemy. There is a feel of exploration and variety due to the double-layered location setup that keeps the whole thing from becoming stale even after many many plays. This is all just top notch.
Horror in High Gear
Rating: Tier 3–
Highlights: Horror in High Gear compresses a lot of action into a short time frame. It flips the script on many game dynamics, suddenly clue gathering is something that is under the same amount of pressure that enemy management usually is. While enemies spawn away from the players, ending up a much less immediate concern than usual. That makes it quite an interesting scenario that is notably different from everything around it.
Low points: There are two major strikes against Horror in High Gear however. The first is that it trends to sort of “play itself”. It strongly dictates what you need to do in each given turn and taking almost all movement related decisions out of the game makes for a scenario that comes down to just doing tests with vastly reduced agency behind your plans of attacking the whole thing.
The other problem is that this is probably the scenario that is most likely to break in some way. Any card that attaches to a location, an evader, Luke shenanigans, Barricade, or simply someone getting out of the car… there are so many ways to have the scenario mechanics break down that you almost have to make a conscious decision to engage with it only in the ways that uphold the fragile structure of what’s happening here.
Yapping: Horror in High Gear is over fairly quickly, which genuinely works in its favor. It’s a fast-paced affair that finishes just before it would overstay its welcome. I can’t really rate this super highly, it’s mostly a bit of a breather between the highly engaging open maps of Devil Reef and Light in the Fog. It’d be an upper Tier 3 if it was mechanically more sound, but all its structural problems push it to the lower end of that range for me.
A Light in the Fog
Rating: Tier 1+
Highlights: So, so many. The layout uses the Tidal Tunnels in addition to a bunch of unique locations and the randomization behind it has real impactful consequences on how parts of the scenario play out. Despite the layout featuring a lot of locations, the unique way that they are connecting means that everything is close by from any given point, which makes it feel cramped in spite of the large map. There’s an imposing boss that is genuinely threatening and that is very hard to run away from, as a result of the map being so interconnected. The encounter deck features cards that interlock and play off each other, the most important bit of course being the Hatchlings and Nurses. Deep One Assault, a card that has been striking fear into investigators all campaign, never has been scarier than here. And on top of all that, high stakes are introduced with a rising water level that threatens to drown the investigators and cause a premature end to the campaign.
Low points: I suppose all the things that have to do with the prison are a bit weaker than the rest of the scenario. But not weak enough that i’d downrank Light in the Fog for it.
Yapping: This is just Unspeakable Oath, but with fishpeople. And i mean that in all the best ways, this scenario is one of the best that Arkham has ever been. To me, it’s the best, i’ll even put it over Oath. This scenario is threatening, it has a well designed encounter deck, great location mechanics… and it’s still just the core ArkhamLCG gameplay loop without any too weird gimmicks. You get to play the game, you get to play your decks. This is just straight up the core game at its peak.
The Lair of Dagon
Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: Introducing Dagon before the final scenario is a neat touch, both in theme and gameplay that part works fairly well for me. I like how after the Innsmouth campaign mostly has threatened to end the investigators through defeat instead of having a clock run out, this scenario does have a more challenging doom clock for once. If you made it all the way here, the enemies and locations won’t pose a huge challenge to you, but the doom clock might very will trip you up.
I do also appreciate the design of the encounter deck here. This is a scenario that is fairly well focused on one mechanic, making it matter significantly…
Low points: …however that mechanic is Curses. While it has been executed decently well, I feel like that wasn’t a great decision on a fundamental level, as Curse is more of a player card thing and you now have the situation where certain investigators actually benefit from the curses this scenario throws out. I also don’t think this scenario does anything all that interesting with the curses either. Sure, it’ll make an extra test here or there fail, but aside from Dagon himself that’s a bit inconsequential overall, Lair of Dagon lacks the followthrough of impactful enemies or similar really putting you in a bind when those tests fail.
Yapping: Lair of Dagon has one huge disadvantage: It comes after a string of scenarios that can only be described as excellent. If this was in the middle of any other campaign, nobody would bat an eye – but for the penultimate scenario of a campaign that was mostly delivering different shades of greatness, this is a letdown. The Curses are hit or miss. The interaction with the Obstacles in this scenario is a bit random and either inconsequential again, or just annoying. The first half of the scenario before you go down into the caves is just a bit banal. There’s not enough here to heavily dislike that’d want me to put Lair of Dagon into Tier 4, but it does scrape the bottom of the Tier 3 barrel for just being so forgettable.
Into the Maelstrom
Rating: Tier 4+
Highlights: Two bosses! That’s neat. There’s also a whole lot of location based play in this scenario which is always a plus for me.
Low points: You do have to do a lot to get to the end, but none of it is all that spectacular. With the exception of Dagon and Hydra themselves, you’ve pretty much seen everything in this scenario before and you don’t get anything particularly new or innovative here the way you have done in previous scenarios.
I genuinely enjoy the Tidal Tunnels throughout the campaign, due to the locations working so differently from one scenario to another they never felt particularly stale to me. It is a shocker then how misused they are in the first part of Into the Maelstrom. That the finale of all places starts by just putting the Tunnels on the table in a circle, has you investigate them and nothing special happens at all with them is just uninspired and disappointing.
The best attempts at giving you something to do are the Aquatic Abomination miniboss and the doom mechanics, but eh… this mechanically reads like a scenario 4, not like a finale.
Yapping: Arkham rarely lands the landing with its campaigns, but this final pair of scenarios hurts a bit more than usual because the stuff that came before it was just so good.
Taken by itself it is a solid scenario that doesn’t do anything too wrong and i’d just settle that in the Tier 3 “Average” tier, but since it’s a finale i feel like applying a higher standard to it and putting it down in Tier 4, albeit at the top of it.