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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.