Category: Main Content

Intro

In another article, I showcased how a possible Agnes Baker in 2026 with full card pool could look like. To complement that murder machine, I got a certified clue hoover in store now. It’s a seeker deck that uses Versatile to play a Guardian card, so good times are pretty much guaranteed!

Daisy Walker

Daisy has been at the top my leaderboard for the Seeker class for a long while. Innate 5 intellect has her ready to roll without much of a setup and her extra tome action is trivial to enable, at which point her investigator ability hands her more value per round than pretty much any other investigator ability in the game does except for maybe Marion’s. Her offclass access to Mystic isn’t super relevant by quantity of cards that make her deck, but there are a few high value things there that absolutely make a difference. Like with the Agnes deck, I will be laser focusing this deck on one task and that task only. There’s no Existential Riddle, Transmogrify or similar in this, we are going to fully assume that Daisy can just clue, clue, clue while Agnes keeps everything off her back.
That being said, while the Agnes deck was super straightforward to build and play, this Daisy deck has some eccentric parts.

The Decklist

As before, let me lead with the decklist in all of its glory, then I will discuss it card by card.

(This deck on arkham.build)

Just like Agnes had her combat spells, Daisy has her investigation tomes.

• 2x Grim Memoir
• 2x Dreamer’s Chronicle
• (2x Scroll of the Pharaos) -> to become the “Words of Set” version

When Grim Memoir was released, it was sort of a big deal for Daisy because it was the first and only Tome that’d allow her to funnel her bonus action into an Investigate. As it turns out, that dam has now been broken and the chapter 2 cards actually do add two more such tomes, enough to fully build a deck on top of them! Well, the Scroll isn’t an investigation tome yet, but once researched we can turn it into one. Grim Memoir turns Daisy’s free action into a clue. Chronicle turns it into two clues. Scroll of Set can turn it into three clues. Hell yeah.

There’s three more tomes in this deck:

• Occult Records
• Scroll of Prophecies
• Book of War

And if I am mentioning Book of War, i also need to mention

• 2x Practice Makes Perfect

Chronicle and Scroll of Pharaos both deal horror on use. Daisy with her 9 sanity can take that for a while and she has some allies to help as well. Scroll of Pharaos can even deal its horror to anyone at the location… including Agnes for some cute potential synergy. But Occult Records is here as a safeguard just in case the horror gets too much. It has applications in healing Agnes as well, of course.
The traditional draw tome for Daisy is Old Book of Lore, but I went with Scroll of Prophecies instead. The reason is that this deck has a potential to gather some dead cards in hand, like an Astounding Revelations drawn in upkeep or extra tomes that can then be discarded to Scroll of Prophecies. At the same time, Scroll digs through the deck faster than OBoL, leading to a faster reshuffle which resets the deck for some of the shenanigans we are up to.
Those shenanigans? We are setting up Practice makes Perfect with Book of War and replaying our skills a ridiculous amount of times for extra clues, cards and secrets. There are 10 skills in our deck, all of which are Practiced and all of which can be committed to an investigate test for profit.

We get away with running only one of these special tomes because we have a virtual second copy in the deck. Here’s the allies:

• 2x Whitton Greene
• 1x Library Docent
• 1x Research Librarian

The Librarian can fetch up whatever we still need, then die for a good cause. Docent allows resetting one tome while playing another, in a way that would make Dexter Drake proud. And Whitton Greene finally is our intellect ally. Milan Christopher is a consideration of course, but i think the ability to dig through the deck to find more cards is quite helpful. We should be good on money without Milan. But a one and one split between the two seems perfectly good, too.

The only other asset aside from these allies and books is …

• Daisy’s Tote Bag

Often regarded purely as a commit, I am actually angling to play this. With four handslots, i can keep an investigation tome, a draw tome, Book of War and the Necronomicon in play at the same time which sounds worth doing. Without the Tote Bag, the Necronomicon becomes something i will want to discard from play because i want at least the investigation tome and Book of War in my hands. I considered Arcane Enlightenment for an extra handslot, but that seems silly if the Tote Bag is right there. Once i have Abigail in my deck, this solves itself anyway, of course.

So how do we pay for all of this stuff? This is my resource gain:

• 3x Astounding Revelation
• 2x Burning the Midnight Oil
• 2x Crack the Case

What’s important to me here is that none of this loses momentum. We aren’t stopping to spend actions exclusively on gaining resources. Shocked Rabbi and Crack the Case are both fast/free and Burning the Midnight Oil attaches the resources to an investigate, so we are always clueing. Revelation get hit by a lot of different cards in this deck and since we should be able to flip the deck fairly fast if we want to, the resources from it should keep coming.

To get the most out of the tomes, I want to be able to refill their secrets. To that end, i have:

• 1x Correlate All Its Contents
• 2x Enraptured
• 2x Literary Analysis

The two skills are of course both Practiced and boost investigation tests. Correlate is probably the weakest card in the deck, but it’s still a bonus secret (possibly two) that i can play without needing to stop investigating. It’s also another Insight to hit with Establish Motive. Once Enraptured(2) enters the picture and ramps up the output of extra secrets, Correlate becomes an easy cut.

The rest is card draw and the seeker signature Deduction.

• 2x Gather Intel
• 2x Establish Motive
• 2x Perception
• 2x Deduction

Again, we aren’t spending any actions on playing any of this. We are just investigating and moving, the rest just happens. Gather Intel and Establish Motive are two new additions from chapter 2 that do good work here to keep that momentum going. Motive has seven targets in the deck (Midnight Oil, Correlate, Crack the Case, Gather Intel) which is borderline, but even if we find no Insight but hit a Revelation instead, I am perfectly happy with this. Perception and Deduction are of course value machines with Practice makes Perfect and their level 2 upgrades are high on the ladder for things to get for our XP.

Let’s talk about Versatile and In the Thick of It

Alright, so… is the whole “Versatile for Book of War” thing necessary? No, probably not. This is me increasing the ceiling of the deck and giving it a cute extra angle that can put it over the top. You could easily take the decklist above and cut these cards:

• Book of War
• Library Docent
• 2x Gather Intel
• 1x Establish Motive
• Versatile
• In the Thick of It

That would end you up with a very powerful list that still does what I want it to, with three different investigation books to exploit and some Practice makes Perfect and secret generation to back it up. But honestly, just look at the cards that the Versatile/IttoI package is adding here: Gather Intel and Establish Motive are both card draw. Docent is a high synergy source of more secrets. I don’t think this 5 card increase to the deck is relevant at all here, we do only need to find one of our books and we are golden. Run an extra Research Librarian if you are really concerned, I guess.

The bigger cost however is the two trauma from Thick of It. As I am writing this, I am already a few scenarios into the campaign and the trauma has actually been uncomfortable. There’s a case to be made that the deck should not run Versatile at deck creation and instead only pick it up with the first 2xp earned after scenario 1. Since I am doing Scarlet Keys and that campaign is a bit stingy with xp, i opted to do Thick of It… especially since I also plan on upgrading two 4xp researchables as soon as possible and also get Abigail, another 4xp card. For any other campaign, putting the Versatile package aside for after scenario 1 is probably the better call, but I think i need the 3xp headstart here.

Playing the Deck

The gameplan is simple enough in principle: We get these books to the table and drain them. None of them exhaust on use, so we can go absolutely nuts on them with up to four actions per round. If a book is empty, we play the next one and/or add new secrets. Each secret is worth a clue, and chances are that the scenario will run out of clues before we run out of secrets.

The skill package and Practice Makes Perfect is set up to support this with more secrets, clues and of course additional skill levels. Before skills, Memoir tests at 7 skill and Scroll of Set tests at 8, add a skill on top and even the Scarlet Keys chaos bag becomes toothless. That also means that we should pretty much always have skills available to commit to tests with Dreamer’s Chronicle, so we can cash in on that extra +1 it can offer.

Due to the clue power in this deck, many scenarios can be blitzed and be over really quickly. For those that take longer, the Book of War combo comes in. While it doesn’t strictly speaking generate unlimited amounts of secrets and cards, it gets you more than enough of them to likely be able to throw skills into every intellect test you come across.

Resource tokens to pay for the cards aren’t a huge issue with this deck, you generate quite a few of them, enough to play out your tomes over the course of the game. There are two other types of resource however that need handling:
The first is your handslots. Without Daisy’s Tote Bag, your two hand slots are fully occupied if you play down an investigation tome and either of Book of War, Scroll of Prophecies or Occult Records. In that scenario, the Necronomicon will even knock one of them out of your hands. That makes Tote Bag an actually pretty great card for the first scenarios, until you can have Abigail hold a book for you.
The other is your sanity. Daisy might have 9 printed sanity, but especially if you took some trauma to start with In the Thick of It, then this is not as huge a buffer as one would think. The price for using the new chapter 2 investigation tomes is that you have to buy into the “horror for power” theme it has going on for Seeker. Thankfully, Occult Records does provide a great solution, but it’s likely that some extra upgrades might be helpful, like Psychoanalysis(3). Or maybe starting with Psychology Student in the deck after all.
The Necronomicon does play into this annoyingly as well. I’d really like to get rid of this thing to free up the hand slot, but the 3 horror were actually a huge issue, so I had to ride this out. Not a huge problem with Tote Bag, but can be super annoying without.

Upgrading

Daisy can’t cheat on upgrade costs in the same way that Agnes can. Well, that’s not fully true, she can run Rabbit Hole and that may actually work out. Personally I am not a fan and I’d rather keep my options open on adding something like a Psychoanalysis(3) down the line without being forced into the much less good level 0 to avoid the Rabbit tax.

Here’s things I am looking to get for my XP:

• Upgrading the Scroll of Pharaos to its Words of Set version. This is 4xp each, but for a card that can pick up 3 clues per action this seems perfectly fair. I want at least one of these very early, so i can get it with Research Librarian. The second one is lower priority, but still important of course.
• Abigail Foreman. Abigail is easily the best ally for any Tome deck. We are interested in the hand slot she provides and the extra activations that don’t even eat up secrets are awesome too. Abigail + Memoir has been a top notch combo for a while, of course. Worth pointing out that if you use her with Chronicle, it will eat into your sanity if you go all out. And if you use her with Scroll of Set, you “only” get the clue for the investigation, no bonus clues.
• Enraptured(2). The difference between Enraptured(0) and Enraptured(2) is insane. Hit Enraptured(2) with Practice makes Perfect and you just got secrets worth 6 clues, plus extra value. These both are a lot of bang for the buck.
• Perception(2) and Deduction(2). The other two high value Practiced skills that get a big boost from just 2xp each. This deck grabs so many clues that the Deduction upgrade isn’t even necessary until you got everything else, but Perception(2) should be a higher priority.
• Psychoanalysis(3). Something to take the edge off of the sanity situation and it’s also an Insight that can be found with Establish Motive, all the while replacing itself. And doing the same for another investigator at the location, something that is especially relevant when Agnes is your teammate. I think this beats Logical Reasoning(4) for all its extra bells and whistles, but LR(4) is absolutely a respectable pick here that does the job extremely well. A lower xp option would be Steady-Handed, although i am not sure how reliable that actually ends up being. Maybe just make room in the initial deck for a Psychology Student and a Logical Reasoning(0) is the better play.

My Own Campaign

As mentioned in the Agnes write-up, I am already in the middle of my Scarlet Keys campaign, so I can also share some notes from those games instead of completely theorycrafting.

Riddles and Rain: Horror management was the name of the game for Riddles and Rain. The actual challenge of picking up the clues from the locations wasn’t anything too troubling, but I did it off the back of a turn 1 Dreamer’s Chronicle. While this allowed me to just grab 2 clues per action (that this thing doesn’t exhaust is insane btw), it did chunk me for a lot of horror that just went on top of the trauma from In the Thick of It. I also needed to translate the Scroll of Pharaos, which costed another 4 horror… thankfully Agnes and her Initiate were able to take most of that in Daisy’s stead. But I did manage to do everything I wanted, so the 4xp that i gained for this scenario could go towards the first copy of Scroll of Set.

Dead Heat: My first turn was playing Memoir, moving once, then investigating twice. On the first investigate I played Practice makes Perfect which handed me Deductions for both tests. I ended the first turn with 4 clues collected from a shroud 4 location, a Memoir with 2 secrets left and still 5 cards in hand. Had i remembered where the Ritual Site was, i could have advanced the act right there and then. Instead I took the long trip round, finally advanced the act, saved a few civvies with the clues I still had left over. Meanwhile Agnes slapped Amaranth around and the whole affair was over before it had a chance to escalate. Easy 5xp earned, enough to upgrade one of the Enraptured and trade a Gather Intel for a Psychoanalysis(3).

Dogs of War: The way that Agnes dumped on Dead Heat’s combat, Daisy did dump on the clue requirements in Dogs of War. If anything, she was held back by there not being enough clues on the locations to make full use of her Scroll of Set. She simply went and picked everything clean while throwing those clues at the Key Locus objectives. Few locations required more than a single investigate, even the final 5 shroud one with 4 clues was done in just one test. Agnes was the one who went and put the Beast in Crimson in its place, but Daisy really did most of the work here. The scenario also went on long enough that Book of War came into play for the first time and as a result I did indeed play PmP once per turn for the last 6 rounds. The end result was 6xp, and that finally got my Abigail Foreman. And the second Enraptured(2).

Here’s the deck as it’s going into Istanbul:

(this deck on arkham.build)

The ally situation has me look at Charisma or Archeology Funding as another thing that could be well worth picking up. But the Perceptions and second Scroll of Set are definitely first. With two Enrapture(2) now on standby, i am also keen on replacing Correlate All Its Contents. Maybe another Psychoanalysis… or Unearth the Ancients(2) could be pretty special in this deck as well.

Wrapping Up

And that’s Daisy. This pair of articles was a fun little return to old classic investigators, with decks that each have a distinct lean into the newer options from more recent sets. I am particularly happy to see chapter 2 making such a strong impression on these decks, showing that anyone who claims that the new Core and the Evergreen investigators have nothing new to add to the card pool are either suffering from severe Skill Issue or not really trying in the first place.
Personally, I am probably going to oscillate between doing chapter 2 only decks and this sort of full cardpool stuff. There’s also some other investigators I have my eyes on to try with the new additions. Marion for example has a funky firearm centered build that heavily borrows from Tommy’s investigator deck. And I think some of those events in the André deck desperately want to be introduced to one Chuck Fergus… lot’s of stuff left to do.

Intro

After the look over all campaigns that I just completed I am actually in the mood to give The Scarlet Keys another go. And after having stuck exclusively to the chapter 2 player card pool for almost a year, it’s time for me to dust off my old cards again for the investigator decks. In fact, I thought that for this campaign I would return all the way back to the roots of the initial Core Set and play two investigators from ArkhamLCG’s first release: Agnes Baker and Daisy Walker. And see how a deck for them looks like in 2026, with all of chapter 1 and 2 behind it. It’s honestly been a long long while since I played either of these even before the chapter 2 break, instead opting for the newer investigators like Marion, Kohaku or George as they seemed more interesting to explore. As a result, even the more recent chapter 1 stuff from the likes of Hemlock Vale and forward are still somewhat fresh in context of the older investigators for me… so this should hopefully be interesting! I also expect these decks to be fairly high-powered, Agnes and Daisy are two top notch investigators and they can only have gotten stronger over time.

Agnes Baker

Agnes is one of the best combat mages in the game, with an impactful investigator ability and a superb extra deckbuilding access to Survivor that gives her some great options. Usually, Mystics tend to be a bit flexy, but especially with the added redundancy from the chapter 2 spell assets, I am going to go all-in on a fighter here. This is an Agnes that doesn’t play the usual investigation spells or even a pair of cheeky Look What I Founds, we’re just here to burn everything down. The benchmark here is that I want to be able to move into the Dead Heat scenario very early, possibly right after Riddles and Rain and have her be able to handle everything without Daisy having too much to add.

The Decklist

Let me just lead with the level 0 decklist and we’ll start the discussion off of that as i go over it card by card:

(This deck on arkham.build)

For spell assets I went with

• 2x Shrivelling
• 2x Cosmic Flame
• 1x Azure Flame

This is the core of our combat capabilities. Shrivelling wins out over Azure Flame because I’d rather take a random horror than a random damage with Agnes. The horror might even get weaponized. Cosmic Flame allows attacking with willpower without spending a charge which is super useful. Especially so in Scarlet Keys, to suss out concealed enemies. All of these attack for 2 damage. It’s basically as if you were able to throw five copies of M1911 into your Guardian deck! Add Arcane Initiate’s ability to search up more of these from your deck and you got something very consistent going on. If we need to deal three damage, Agnes does of course have a way to do that built into her investigator, but we got something to complement these combat spells in the events and skills as well.

• 2x Spectral Razor
• 1x Long Shot

That’s three cards that can provide a nice 3 damage bump or even combine with Agnes ability to deal 4. Razor + Long Shot + Agnes can even hit for 5 if the stars are right. This is a good package of extra damage potential in general, but particularly good for Scarlet Keys. Keys has multiple different three-health enemies with aloof, something that Razor just absolutely demolishes. And Long Shot is an additional damage source, meaning it can be tacked onto an attack or evasion to uncover a concealed card, if necessary. (Correction: Long Shot can not be used to reveal a concealed enemy, because the damage is specifically dealt to “that enemy”, the one that was attacked/evaded in the first place, not to any enemy at the location. Doesn’t really change the recommendation here, but if you are taking this to TSK like I did, then it’s good to be aware of!)

For allies, this deck uses

• 2x Arcane Initiate
• 1x Jim Culver
• 1x Peter Sylvestre

Jim’s good, but Arcane Initiate is in my opinion still the best Mystic ally around. That she costs only a single resource is just absolutely huge for those first rounds, leaving you with the resources to also play the spells she finds. This ally section is already set up for Charisma, something I’ll want to buy early on. This will allow for Initiate + Jim or Initiate + Peter. Or for Jim + Peter, in the later half of the scenario when you have your hand and board sorted out and are just looking for more power ceiling. Aside from the Charisma, the upgrade to Peter is something we want to keep in the back of our minds as an early upgrade as well. Jim Culver(4) would be massive for the deck, but it’d be a late upgrade simply due to its xp cost. Arcane Initiate can do much of his job without any investment.
Arcane Initiate in Agnes has the slight drawback that if you find her weakness with it and no other Spell, you are obligated to draw it. That being said, I don’t think that’s a huge issue. Card draw is still card draw, even if it draws a weakness. And there’s 14 Spell cards in the deck, so chances are solid that this doesn’t happen too often in the first place. When you exhaust Initiate, you can expect something good pretty much every round.

The accessory slot can hold either of these:

• 1x Heirloom of Hyperborea
• 1x Lucky Charm

Lucky Charm is yet another great chapter 2 addition to the deck and I do think it beats the classic Holy Rosary on utility here. The reason for that is that this deck runs so many willpower icons (44 of them across all cards, including the wilds!) that the +1 willpower isn’t crucial. But what Lucky Charm allows you is healing your direct damage by shuttling it off to an Initiate, to itself or to Jim (retriggering the card draw) or to Peter (where it can get healed away). Since Agnes will only trigger her ability if she takes the horror on herself, this is a fantastic way to keep using her ability. Lucky Charm first negates the two mental trauma we start with due to Arcane Research, then has two more charges to go and also the two horror soak once that is all used up. Just stellar. Once we got some spare XP, the Lucky Charm will likely become a Canteen, but until then the Charm will do excellent work.
As for the Heirloom… it’s fine. It might draw you a few cards over the course of the game, so if you get it really early it could be worth playing down if you also have one of the resource events in hand to compensate. Most of the time i expect it to be committed though. That being said, you could go for the Advanced version of Agnes’ signature and weakness. That version of the Heirloom adds a truckload of soak and that could very well be worth playing even later on! It does come at the cost of an upgraded weakness, but all that does is increase the cost of Dark Memory from 2 to 4 resources. This Agnes runs fairly light on resources, so she is probably able to afford that. Worth thinking about.

So how are we paying for our stuff then? Here’s the econ:

• 2x Forbidden Knowledge
• 1x Uncage the Soul
• 1x Voice of Ra

Honestly, this seems a bit light, but on the other hand, what do we really need? Initiate + spell is 4 resources, one of the above pays for another spell or ally. And everything else is either dirt cheap or a skill. Forbidden Knowledge doubles as a weapon and econ. Nobody else than Agnes ever wants this card, but for her it’s a classic for a reason. Uncage the Soul is better than Voice of Ra thanks to icons and not costing an action, but I did the split so I had at least one Spell traited econ card, to give Initiate the chance to find money for me.

Part of the econ in my eyes is a large skill package. Chapter 2 gives a huge injection of power again here.

• 2x Promise of Power
• 2x Guts
• 2x Blood Curse
• 2x Soul Link
• 1x Timely Intervention

Promise of Power and Guts are obviously above reproach, they are staples. That being said, Blood Curse and Soul Link are insane for this deck and might even beat those staples. We’ll skip that discussion and just play full sets of everything. That’s a truckload of extra wild icons. And what’s more, both of those new skills are Spell traited. Meaning that Initiate can find them. And that Arcane Research will discount upgrading those Blood Curses to their ridiculous level 3, something that I definitely plan on doing. And Soul Link triggers Agnes! It’s just fantastic from every angle.
Finally, a lone Timely Intervention can act as a backup safety net in your hand, allowing you to do some more dodgy tests when needed or simply ward off one of TSK’s nasty symbol tokens. It’s better than Lucky here imo, we aren’t testing anything else than willpower and agility with Agnes, so we might as well save the 1 resource cost here.

That leaves only a few more cards to mention:

• 1x Loner
• 1x Painkillers
• 1x Sparrow Mask
• 1x Ward of Protection
• 2x Arcane Research

Loner, Sparrow Mask and Painkillers are all slotless and cheap assets, meaning that they come with little opportunity cost beyond their deck slot. Triggering Sparrow Mask is going to be trivial for Agnes, so that’s just a source of endless +2s to her tests. Painkillers is a way to trigger her ability on demand, complementing Soul Link and Forbidden Knowledge in that purpose. And a way to heal her, of course. It also has synergy with both Peter and Jim. And with the Sparrow Mask. Hot stuff. Loner is just solid value. It’s the one card in the deck that doesn’t do anything super specific to Agnes, but is just generically good. It is very good though, so I think this is probably worth including but I could absolutely see Loner be just a second Sparrow Mask, Painkillers or Azure Flame instead. Especially a second Sparrow Mask sounds lovely and might very well be worth doing instead of either Loner, Ward or Timely Intervention.
Ward of Protection isn’t super important, I am not a huge believer in hiding behind Ward and generally think that the avalanche of wild icons and the Timely Intervention will do most of its job anyway. That being said, it’s another Spell traited card and with the potential use of the horror it deals to reveal a concealed card or ping an enemy I think this warrrants a single copy in the deck for the Initiates to scrounge up.

Playing the Deck

This doesn’t really need too much of an explanation. What I like here is that this is very much a basic bitch generic Agnes deck, the likes that we put together for her since the dawn of the game. Except … better. More focused, leaving all the flexy clue stuff that Mystics usually do aside to just do one thing and do it extremely well.

The initial hand needs to find a spell asset and/or an Initiate. If we can get those two things into play, we are golden and the rest will just fall into place automagically. Set up, kill whatever pops up. Initiates are our only card draw in the deck, so throwing a few actions towards drawing an extra card here and there is fine. Aside from that, this is all fairly obvious.

Upgrading

For our XP, there are a few options that are worth keeping in mind:

• Charisma. It allows us to play Jim or Peter without having to ditch the Initiate. This is important and a likely priority right after scenario 1.
• Canteen. An outrageously good healing card for any investigator that uses horror as a resource. You use one action on this and have your next six damage triggers handled. Incredible and you probably want one right away to replace the Lucky Charm. You might even want a second one as a late upgrade.
• Peter Sylvestre(2). Such a high value upgrade, giving more sanity soak and +1 willpower. I think this is very much worth doing and probably better than upgrading Jim?
• Spell assets. Thanks to Arcane Research, these are cheap to upgrade and you should just do one of these for -2xp after each scenario. I don’t think it’s worth spending more xp than necessary to get more than one spell per scenario upgraded, your skills and naturally high willpower should have you covered until you find your upgraded spells. Milk Arcane Research for all that it’s worth. There’s no level 3 Cosmic Flame that you can upgrade for just 1xp here, Cosmic Flame goes straight to level 5. My suggestion is to do the Cosmic Flame if you find yourself with the 3xp to spare, the other upgrades (including the Blood Curses) are all level 3 and the 1xp for those can be easily fit in anywhere later.
• Blood Curse(3). Your other use of Arcane Research discounts. Even more icons, even more damage output, these are insane and exactly what we want for our late game.

Five spell assets plus two Blood Curses is seven uses of Arcane Research, which has you covered for a regular 8-scenario campaign. Should your campaign have more than 8 scenarios (for example some routes of TSK), then those extra Arcane Research triggers can go towards Ward, Shrivelling(5) or even the Spectral Razor upgrade.

Since this is mostly upgrading cards that are already in the deck, you can also go for Down the Rabbit Hole and get those Guts, Ward and Razors upgraded along the way with very little cost. I don’t think that’s terribly valuable however and I want to keep my options open to maybe react to parts of the deck not working out exactly like i want. So I didn’t include Rabbit Hole. It also gives me the freedom to spend a glut of XP on something fun like Prophetic, Grotesque Statue or Enraptured(2) without having to cringe over the extra xp cost.
I also don’t use In the Thick of It here, I already have two trauma from the Researches, that’s enough.

If card draw is a concern, then I see two main ways to add a little bit extra into the deck: Upgrading Guts. Or including At A Crossroads. Possibly both. My thought right now is that Initiates and the occasional draw action should be enough though.

Variants

This deck doesn’t use any weird gimmicks, so there is plenty room to either put your own spin on it or even to only take the framework and change the direction of the deck.

Through changing the array of spells, this Agnes deck can easily be transformed into a more classic hybrid role that uses investigation spells alongside combat options. Or you could swap out some combat spells for Mists of R’lyeh or Shadowmeld to broaden your enemy handling capabilities.

The one thing I would urge you to keep an eye on when tweaking the list is the spell count however. Arcane Initiate is the backbone of this deck and I very intentionally went to squeeze as many Spell cards into the deck as I could justify. Obviously the deck won’t topple over and be bad if you really don’t like Voice of Ra and opt for another Uncage the Soul instead. But the four Spell traited skills are fairly crucial, I’d say.

My Own Campaign

As I am writing this, I am actually already three scenarios deep into Scarlet Keys. My start into the campaign is going straight for the Marrakesh > Alexandria > Istanbul connection after London, and I’ve indeed done London, Marrakesh and Alexandria already.

Riddles and Rain: Went very smooth. There’s not a ton of combat to do in the first scenario, so this just all went to plan. Any concealed enemies that popped up were driven from the shadows with an activation of Forbidden Knowledge or Painkillers, to create an Agnes ping that would reveal them. This did eat into her sanity quite a lot, but a late Lucky Charm made sure that I could keep it up until the end. I earned 4xp here, which bought me a Charisma and an upgraded Shrivelling.

Dead Heat: The ability to do an early Dead Heat was one of the stated goals for the deck and yes… it exceeded expectations even. I absolutely clowned on this scenario. Amaranth was in play for 2 rounds, 1 round for each of her sides. She never got to make an attack, shift her key or do any other nonsense. Any of the small undead that show up were dispatched immediately. I finished this scenario on turn 6 and that was only because i didn’t remember where the Ritual Site was, so I had to take a round trip along the locations to advance the first act, otherwise this could have been another round, maybe even two, faster. Daisy and Agnes ended up saving 3 civvies and had none die, for a total of 5xp earned. I got myself a Canteen (replacing Lucky Charm), Peter Sylvestre(2) and Blood Curse(3).

Dogs of War: I want to grab all three keys from these first scenarios, so I didn’t buddy up with the Knight. Instead I teamed up with Agent Sirri to get the Light of Pharos from the Beast in Crimson (version 3 of the scenario). If Dead Heat was Agnes’ time to shine, this one was Daisy’s scenario. More on that next time. As for Agnes, she did what she’s supposed to: Murder. I never drew my upgraded Shrivel, so there was a lot of testing 5 vs 4 involved in this scenario, but with the amount of skills in Agnes pocket, that worked out just fine. I left destroying the Key Locus things mostly to Daisy and just trashed whatever enemies would show up. There was some Aloof involved, but Agnes just bypasses that easily with pings from her ability and Spectral Razor. This scenario took a while, but I wasn’t in any real danger except from the horror both of my investigators deal to themselves. End result was 6xp, which gets me Prophetic(3), an upgraded Azure Flame and I upgraded a Guts into a Fearless(2). The cut for Prophetic was Loner. Since Agnes will usually run towards enemies, not away from them, I didn’t find Loner super helpful. Sure, it saves an action here and there, but not when I really need it. Instead, I think that Fearless(2) can pick up some of that slack. With all the Concealed around, I want to use Agnes ability almost every round which is a huge drain on her sanity of course. I was originally going to go for Guts(2), but Fearless should allow me to spend my sanity for pings more recklessly, which saves actions that would otherwise be spent on revealing mini-cards. Prophetic is kind of like an expensive Sparrow Mask and I’d almost be tempted to just run a second Sparrow Mask instead. But I have the spare XP for the Prophetic and this way the two cards can stack and I don’t eventually end up with a Mask in play that I can only commit.

Here’s how the deck looks now as I am going into Dealings in the Dark:

(This deck on arkham.build)

Truth be told, I am already running out of upgrades to do beyond Jim Culver, another Fearless and the discounted spell cards. I might just save up whatever is left and buy some big XP haymaker from it. Like Eldritch Brand on a Cosmic Flame(5). Because there’s really not a lot that I want to cut here. Or maybe I’ll get a pair of Memories of Another Life, those are always outlandishly good.

Wrapping Up

And that’s one half of my team for Scarlet Keys covered. While this decklist has done some choices towards TSK, none of it super specific enough that you couldn’t just take this list and play it in any other campaign.

Next Up: Agnes has the combat side of the game completely under control, so we are going to need someone to find the clues. Luckily the original Core Set also has one of the best (I even call her the best) Seekers in the game, so this should be a nice deck too. My Daisy deck has Versatile in it to play a blue card, which is how you can tell it’s very good!

Alright, now that I’ve gone and given everything some sort of ranking, I can go ahead and collect all those and do one of the Internet’s favorite things: A tierlist. Multiple of them, even!
Let’s start with the campaigns.

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Campaign Tierlist

If I take the rankings and just plop them into a table and sort any ties within their tiers, this is what i get:

However, for my personal tierlist, there are two important things here that i do want to throw in to make it reflect my thoughts on the campaigns better:

Innsmouth as a 6-scenario campaign is just straight up tier 1 to me, it’s pretty much everything that I want from the game.. And Return to Forgotten Age I rate so highly that it makes TFA overtake Carcosa as well. No significant adjustments to anything else, I do not think that the Returns to Carcosa, TCU or Dunwich change anything about where they place on the list. You’ll also note that i left Night of the Zealot off of the table, i don’t think it competes with these full campaigns. For the same reason, i am also only looking at Dream-Eaters as the combined dual-campaign here and am ignoring the rankings I handed to each sub-campaign.
The bottom three of these rankings (TDE, Dunwich, TCU) are campaigns that I all feel very little motivation to return to right now. It’s actually possible that these won’t be leaving the shelf anymore. The top 3 are always my first thing i gravitate towards. And the four in the middle are definitely always at least in consideration.
So as I type this out, I am realizing that something did change about my perception of the campaigns, even when their relative order didn’t: I used to divide the campaigns in my head into the five very good ones and the five okay ones with a rather big gulf in the middle between Drowned City and Edge of the Earth. Since I simultaneously warmed up to Edge and Scarlet Keys over time and also cooled slightly on Hemlock, there are now three blocks that I’d group together.

I don’t really have much more to say here that i didn’t already say on the pages of the individual campaigns, so let’s move into the scenarios.

Tier 5

I’ll go tier by tier, starting at the bottom. Here’s the six scenarios that I slapped into this tier:

The above overview (and all the ones to follow) is already sorted within their sub-tier: The further up it is, the better I think it is. The further down it is, the closer it is to the rank below. If you’ve been reading my site for a while, especially when it comes to this sort of ranking, then what forms the bottom of the list here probably is no surprise: I rag on Wages, Shades and Congress pretty regularly. Devourer Below and U&U are community-wide generally accepted to be a low point. Seeing Doom of Eztli this far down is a bit more surprising, but i really do not like the original scenario at all. It’s worth pointing out that Return to Doom of Eztli would get a Tier 3- from me.

Tier 4

“Maybe a bit boring, maybe a bit frustrating” is what i put forward as my original definition for Tier 4. And that’s really what this is for the most part: For one, all those low engagement scenarios like Heart of the Elders II, Echoes of the Past or Where Doom Awaits. And then also some scenarios with frustrating difficulty like the Boundary Beyond or Where the Gods Dwell.
The one entry here that I almost feel a bit sorry for is Hemlock House. Putting it in the company of things like Into the Maelstrom or Thousand Shapes is underselling it maybe a bit. Imagine a Tier 4++ just for it if you will! While you are at it, feel free to imagine a 4– tier for Fatal Mirage as well. I am well aware that some of my aversion for that scenario is partly irrational, but what can i do. It is what it is.

Tier 3

“The Average scenario, enjoyable but not outstanding”. Certainly true for most of these, but there are definitely a few in there that do stand out. Like, say what you will about City of Archives, but it’s not your average scenario. And neither is Fate of the Vale, but for Fate I already called out its placement on the list as an aberration on the Hemlock Vale page.
So how close were the entries on the upper and lower bounds of the tier to getting into Tier 2- or 4+? On the upper end… not very close. Lost Sister and Point of No Return read very much like your average scenario to me. Notably, i had Point of No Return in tier 2 in the past and even further in the past i used to even name it my highlight from Dream-Eaters, but that veneer has worn off mostly. Perfectly fine scenario of course, but nothing more. Shattered Aeons is a good finale that i enjoy, but i can’t see it moving up either. Now, on the lower end however… Phantom of Truth is safe, i think. As a reminder, Phantom is here with a sort of combined rank of its two versions. One of it is a Tier 4 for sure, but the other is good enough to compensate. Now, Lair of Dagon, Dogs of War and Ice and Death II however… yeah if i had done this another day these may very well have gotten a Tier 4+ instead. I mean, i am not going to go back and alter my rankings after the fact now, but am i really putting Lair of Dagon over Hemlock House here? That doesn’t seem quite right? Oh well. I suppose it doesn’t matter in the big picture.

Tier 2

This is where the really nice scenarios start and I took quite some time putting these into an order until it looked right to me. My big takeaway from this Tier is that there are a couple scenarios I maybe don’t give quite the amount of respect that they deserve, that I generally tend to not think about when it comes to examples of particularly good scenarios. Riddles and Rain is a good example, as are Silent Heath and Dancing Mad. We talk about scenarios like In Too Deep, Waking Nightmare or Secret Name all the time and obviously there are also some real darlings in here like Midnight Masks, Depths of Yoth and Curtain Call. But something like On Thin Ice or Forbidden Peaks could maybe get some more attention when it comes to things they do particularly well.
That 2- tier is huge! 15 scenarios alone are in that one and the tier does span quite the range, with Apiary and Weaver on one side and Dealings in the Dark and Ice and Death III on the low end. I may have been too stingy and should have ranked some of the top end into Tier 2 proper. Or maybe moved some of the lower end into Tier 3+? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, the lines are drawn arbitrarily and based on vibes. It’s all relative in the end.
Also always worth pointing out: Seven of the campaign openers are somewhere in tier 2. That Curtain Call ranks highest among them is no surprise, but before I started this project I could not have predicted Riddles and Rain being right behind it. Makes perfect sense in hindsight however, i just tend to forget about it because TSK as a campaign is not one that is on my mind that much. Does that mean that Curtain Call wins the contest among the opening scenarios? Not quite. One of them made it into …

Tier 1

And that’s the top end. Like the lowest tier, this is probably not a huge surprise if you’ve been following my blog for a while, because I’ve been droning on about these for a long time now.
Sorting them against each other was surprisingly simple, i didn’t really have much controversy with myself over any of these. Light in the Fog beats out Oath and is without a doubt my favorite piece of Arkham right now. That my top five scenarios are all from Carcosa and Innsmouth is quite the statement. Carcosa even puts in a third one into the Top 10: my former top spot, Pallid Mask. Grand Vault sneaking in there is definitely a surprise. This is one of those placements that i might think differently about in a year or three, but for now i am happy to put it up here.
Ten scenarios in total in this tier, so conveniently this image doubles as “DerBK’s Top Ten Scenarios from Chapter 1“. Three each from Innsmouth and Carcosa and we got scenarios representing Forgotten Age, Hemlock Vale, Drowned City and Dunwich as well.

Putting it all together: Scenario Tierlist

Here’s the money shot:

Some stats:
A total of 87 scenarios across 10 campaigns (+NotZ) were ranked.
10 (11%) of them made it into Tier 1.
32 (37%) are in Tier 2.
26 (30%) are in Tier 3.
13 (15%) scenarios got into Tier 4.
6 (7%) got Tier 5.

It’s a top-heavy distribution, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. I like this game and accordingly It makes sense that I would rank two thirds of the roster in the good to great range of Tier 2 and Tier 3. You can however also flip this sentiment: About two in nine scenarios ranks as “frustrating/boring” (Tier 4) or “actively offputting” (Tier 5), slightly less than two per campaign on average.

A word on chapter 2

As for chapter 2, we’ll see. I don’t think that the three-parters like Children of Blood could meaningfully be compared on a campaign level with the ones from chapter 1. I did exclude NotZ from the campaign rankings as well, for the same reason. A three-part campaign will always be inferior to an eight-part campaign, that’s just not something that’s even worth arguing about. The real interesting bit will be the five-parter. We already have some six-parters on the list: Hemlock Vale is one, TSK is often one, i treat Innsmouth like one. Who even knows how to count Dream-Eaters. So that will hopefully be a better comparison on a campaign level.
On a scenario level, the comparison is worth doing. Chances are that I will do a chapter 2 specific tierlist a year or two down the road and then we can merge that with this one? Something like that. Still plenty time to wait and see how all of this shakes out.

But since I got asked already and I know that I’ll be asked again in the future if I leave this out, let me just throw out my preliminary rankings for Brethren of Ash: Spreading Flames is Tier 2-, same as the Gathering. I like it more than Gathering, but not enough to rank up. Smoke and Mirrors is a clean Tier 2, a half-step below Masks. Queen of Ash gets a Tier 3+. I like the trek through the sewers well enough, but not enough to break out of the “average, solid Arkham” tier. And for Children of Blood, I’d say something very similar: Tier 2- for River of Blood which is kept from more with some wonky mechanics, but I quite like starting on a boss fight. Then it’s Tier 2+ for New Horizons, I particularly enjoy the night version and the relentless combat in it. This genuinely has a shot to scratch at the lower end of Tier 1- for me, but the day version felt a lot less special so as a composite rating for both versions this does probably belong somewhere in the Tier 2 range. And finally i’ll put Tier 3- on Blood Money which doesn’t hold up to the first two scenarios, but isn’t awful either. Both of those campaigns have a good opener, a very strong middle and then an okay finish. I do like Queen of Ash a lot more than Blood Money, but Children of Blood on a whole beats Brethren of Ash. I’d put both of these three-parters over chapter 1’s Night of the Zealot and also over the A-campaign from Dream-Eaters. The B-side of TDE I’d rank over Brethren of Ash, but not over Children of Blood? Something like that? But yeah, too early to really get too delve into that further in detail. Once another two campaigns or three are added to the chapter 2 roster, we can revisit this.

Wrapping Up

And that’s It! That’s what I got for this exercise. It’s unlikely that I am going to change these chapter 1 rankings again, i’d say I got a pretty firm understanding of where i stand on them. The one campaign where i could see myself looking at it slightly differently in a year or two would be the most recent one, Drowned City. But not in a way that would upset the list in a significant way.

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 3
Scenarios: Average around a Tier 3, which sounds fair enough to me. There’s only one scenario here that i think is actually kind of bad. And that one is over so quickly that it registers more like one of the playable Hemlock Vale interludes than a proper scenario anyway.
Campaign structure: The opener is fixed, the finale is fixed. For the ones inbetween the order can be reversed which will cause some changes to the scenarios and which story assets you gain along the way. I’ll just go on record and say that this campaign would be better if it just had been linear. Reversing the order of the R’lyeh scenarios does completely wreck the pacing, necessitates the handout of imbalanced story assets just so you can even (barely) play Canyons as your scenario 2. And then makes Western Wall and Drowned Quarter completely trivial as they aren’t scaling to hold up as a scenario 6 and 7. Add to that the ability to skip Quarter and you just have this undercooked campaign structure that only allows you to make decisions that are for the most part just worse than going through it in the standard order.
More interesting is the addition of an alternate ending that you can reach by claiming all relics and glyphs in the campaign. It allows you to confront Cthulhu in R’lyeh and end the campaign before it returns to the city of Arkham. That is neat, but it will also invalidate the whole deal with the Tasks which is unfortunate as it removes a major driving force from the campaign.
Campaign mechanics: Much of what motivates the investigators to make their way through R’lyeh is tied to bringing back relics and translating glyphs. These function as stretch goals that are seeded all over the campaign and there is a whole lot of them. Similar to what the Flashbacks did for Innsmouth, these glyphs act as something to strive for: While finishing a scenario is sometimes quite easy, doing so with everything done that you want can be a lot more straining with regards to the doom clock and dwindling health/sanity. I like this in general, but there’s just too many of these glyphs. They made 26 of them so they could match them to our alphabet and write “Cthulhu fthagn” and similar things in weird letters on the cards, but that is really not cool enough to warrant having so many repeating glyphs shoehorned into everything. It gets kinda samey after a while when you find the same sort of glyph with the same sort of artwork for the third time in three scenarios.
Further campaign wide goals are set by the Tasks which put some sort of requirement on each investigator that will allow them to gain tally marks for their own task track. On their return to Arkham for the finale, this will give them a powerful boost… or a hefty penalty if they didn’t manage to satisfy the goal. This is quite impactful as a driving force and depending on the specific task can really warp your play around them. That’s a neat way to introduce some variance as well. I like them well enough.
This campaign returns the flooding mechanic from Innsmouth, as well as the Deep Ones. Neither of those two are kept around in a really meaningful way however. Especially the handling of the Deep Ones is just a big disappointment to me.
What is very good however is the number and variety with Elite enemies that the players encounter at every corner. The Inescapable, Star Spawn and assorted scenario-specific big boys are numerous and can come out of the encounter deck at any time. Good stuff.
More Yapping: We are close to something very good here, but Drowned City just barely misses the mark a couple of times. I feel like this is the non-linear elements catching up with the design. This would have been better served with a classic fully linear sequencing of scenarios that doesn’t sacrifice pacing and balance just to appear more open than it actually is.
Something else that i can’t quite shake and that I am even feeling a bit bad for thinking: A lot of this is just Innsmouth again, except watered down and in turn not as excellent. There’s many of the same building blocks there, but while much of this means that this campaign comes with scenarios that are at least solid and often good, it also never soars as high.
What i don’t feel bad for though: I hate Ruby. As a character, her writing. I don’t mind her as a story asset, i actually like her mechanical text a lot. But in the story, she’s possibly the worst NPC we’ve had the displeasure to run around with. The crew of the Theodosia in Edge was very one-note and more caricatures than characters, but at least we didn’t have to read “Claypool smirks” every two paragraphs. Ugh. The worst is when you finish Apiary with the boss fight and in the following story text it is Ruby who actually kills the Alien Queen Brood Mother and her minions, not us. Dumb one-liners included. Just absolutely awful. She’s reason alone to go West with Andy instead. Andy is as charismatic as a loaf of bread, but at least they forgot to give him a speaking role, so he doesn’t just constantly annoy me… Sorry. I’ll stop here. Rant over. Let’s get to the scenarios and never speak of Ruby again.

One Last Job

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: A quick romp around Arkham, interacting with gangsters and mob bosses instead of the usual supernatural creepy crawlies. A refreshing change of scenery. The encounter deck used here is quite horrifying, with a sort of “Greatest Hits” of the Core set barreling down on us. Thankfully, the enemies don’t follow through on how impactful these treacheries are.
Low points: The final confrontation with the mob boss feels a bit cheap as it dumps a whole truckload of enemies on you in one go. This is also a sharp contrast to the rest of the scenario where the enemies weren’t really something that mattered too much. It’s overall still fine, but feels uneven.
My biggest critique with One Last Job is however that none of what you do here has anything to do with what comes later in the campaign. Opening scenarios ideally feature the campaign defining mechanisms and give you a taste of how the rest of the campaign is going to feel. Take for example Pit of Despair, Untamed Wilds or Riddles and Rain as excellent examples of this. One Last Job however… has really very little relation to anything following.
Yapping: You ever sat in a meeting or phone call and think to yourself “This should have been an email”? That’s how i feel about One Last Job. Everything told in this scenario could have easily been part of the introductory narration in the campaign book. Especially since we don’t really move on properly from here to the next beat, after this scenario the campaign text just goes “Flash forward, you are on a boat, R’lyeh is in front of you”. So why do we focus on this specifically? Narratively very unsatisfying.
As for the scenario itself, i don’t mind it but i also don’t love it. It’s perfectly servicable, but fails to pull me into the campaign. It does make me want to play a different campaign, one with gangsters and the underworld, but of course we hard swerve into something completely different afterwards.

The Western Wall

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: For a scenario 2, this is a considerable challenge. There are some impactful enemies in this, there is a lot of ground to cover, glyphs to collect and clues needed to proceed. I like this a whole lot. The depth levels which cause shrouds and test modifiers to go up as you progress make for some very difficult investigations very soon, a flex investigator that hopes to get by on his 4 intellect after modifiers will get into trouble here… this all requires a fair bit of commitment.
Low points: This scenario is close to being real good, but the encounter deck doesn’t live up to the potential. It’s fairly large which causes a high variance in draws and there are too few enemies in it which means you will likely not see much of the Deep One related mechanics matter. While there are some nice Elite enemies that give fighters the spotlight for a moment, with only 7 enemies in a deck of 35 cards there is definitely a good chance that those fighters will also spend several rounds just standing around.
Yapping: I won’t be mentioning the impact on the difficulty if you reverse the scenario order each time. Yes, this is utterly trivial and a waste of your time if you play this as scenario 7. Let’s just bury the whole notion of that “Eastern Campaign” and instead I am going to evaluate these scenarios from their best side.
And overall i quite like this one! I think it does a much better job of being the equivalent of a Pit of Despair or Untamed Wilds for this campaign than Last Job does. The requirements for getting past the later shroud levels can be quite hard to meet if you don’t have a primary Seeker with you and I’ve absolutely failed this scenario before because i was stalling in getting stuff done. More than once, actually. I found that motivating, and it does a good job of signalling how important high intellect is in general for this campaign.
That the whole Deep One situation in this campaign is so damn lackluster is a real shame of course and this is one of two scenarios where it is felt the most. That drags the scenario down for me, but I’d still put it on the lower bounds of good. There’s enough here to enjoy.

The Drowned Quarter

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: Manipulating the flood levels to get to the goal is a novel enough approach and the small location grid makes this interesting enough with only little admin overhead required.
Like Western Wall, the cluevers are the driving force again here, a lot of clues are being spent to lower flood levels and negate the extra flooding that comes in from the encounter deck. Not a problem for a properly kitted out Seeker who discovers all manners of extra clues, but as a scenario 3 this presents some genuine pressure when you are basically forced to trade actions for clues in a 1:1 ratio for the most part.
Low points: Similar to Western Wall, the Deep Ones don’t matter and the enemies in general get lost in an encounter deck that is almost 40 cards and lacks focus. There is some potential here where the treacheries that cause flooding can occupy and stall while enemies keep barging in and then everything is tense and fun. But you might also just draw some wet noodles too often and roll all over the scenario with little to stop you.
Yapping: For some bizarre reason the campaign book allows you to skip this scenario, which is of course a profoundly bad idea for a variety of reasons, from missing out on artifacts, glyphs and xp to missing a tick for your Task. I won’t factor that into the scenario evaluation, it’s more part of the general “all attempts at non-linearity are superfluous” thing the whole campaign has going on.
That being said, this scenario is… merely fine? Mostly this just retreads things we just did in Western Wall. And has very much the same flaws baked into it. I enjoy the locations here and the way we manipulate the flood. But i also suspect that this scenario is another one that heavily benefits from being over relatively quickly.
And yeah, as scenario 6, this is a trivial waste of time, just like Western Wall.

The Apiary

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: Arkham Horror very rarely qualifies in my mind as being proper horror. Like sure, it has tentacles in it and it invokes the names of Yog-Sothoth or whatever. But so does Scooby Doo. The Apiary however is one of the few times where the scenario actually comes at us with a premise and a theme that is genuinely unsettling. We have to make our way through the flesh tunnels of some parasite-filled hive with things trying to latch onto us. In the Western version we even meet the Brood-Mother behind it and are treated to one of the more yucky descriptions of how she threatens to overtake us. Thanks to a generous helping of scenario-specific enemies and treacheries the encounter deck also shares a coherent look and feel. Gold star from me for all of that.
Mechanically, this scenario does evoke one of the all-time greats: Lost in Time and Space. The locations that make up the hive are shuffled into the encounter deck and we have to find them there to get them to the board. On the surface this is similar to LiTaS, but plays out very differently in practice. There are only a few locations in the deck at a certain time and you have ways to plow through the deck and get everything added to the board. So it’s less of a randomized order in which things come out and you have to forge your path like in LiTaS, but simply a somewhat delayed way for the locations to be added. Still, it gives the whole thing a suitably alien feel that works very well.
Low points: This is the one instance where i think that the “Eastern” version is a lot better than the “Western” one. While you get to face the brood-mother and fight off the Stowaway parasites in the eastern version, the scenario does away with much of that if you play this in the standard order and instead puts Cultists into the scenario and turns it into an escort mission. As far as i am concerned, that’s not a great tradeoff.
Yapping: There is a huge difference in between the two versions of this scenario and the rating i assign at the top there is a composite of the two. The version that goes all in on the parasites and the Brood-Mother is a Tier 2+ for me, it’s really good. But the version with the cultists doesn’t reach that high at all and i’d put it one whole rank down, to Tier 3+.
The difficulty between the two versions is also quite uneven, due to all the movement and backtracking The Apiary asks of you there is a huge difference depending on whether you have the Obsidian Claw or not.

The Grand Vault

Rating: Tier 1-
Highlights: The moving platform does shift enough things around to cause some interesting effects. Location connections can get separated or re-established based on where the platform is moving, something the players can use to their advantage to handle Hunter enemies like the Persistent Constructs in a way that feels satisfying and clever.
I like the enemy roster in this scenario a lot, there’s a small encounter deck only and that makes the few enemies that are in it only more relevant. We have the Constructs, but also several high power Elites skulking about, including a random Star Spawn and of course the Inescapable. For the latter, we can even find a permanent solution in this scenario which is also quite satisfying after having that guy around for a few scenarios in a row.
Low points: I got nothing, this is just good. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that there is some crucial errata for this scenario, as the Core location is missing the text that it cannot be entered before flipped by its Forced effect. But that has no impact on my enjoyment of this scenario, especially now on replays where i am well aware of this.
Yapping: The Grand Vault is packed with things to do. Acquire a relic, collect five glyphs, handle constructs, defeat multiple Elites, take care of the Inescapable for good, read the shortest Interlude ever to potentially set yourself up for a Sepulchre of the Sleeper finish. There’s no dull minute in this one. This is the high point of this campaign for me. I am somewhat surprised myself while I am writing this, but I do actually want to put this on the low end of what’s still Tier 1. I like it that much.

Court of the Ancients

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: In a way that is similar to the Grand Vault, this scenario asks you to do a whole lot. Again there’s five glyphs and a relic to gain, there’s a moving platform, lots of Hunter enemies. I am having a grand ol’ good time with this.
Low points: That is in a way however also the biggest strike against it. Court of the Ancients is in many ways just Grand Vault again, except ever so slightly worse in several aspects. The setup is more involved, with a more complex location diagram to follow. The flooding mechanic is pure flavor and has no gameplay impact here. The encounter deck is a 40 card pile again instead of the slick and focused deck from Grand Vault. Now, there is a reason for that brick of a deck, Court wants you to spend clues to dig through it to find specific cards… but it’s a very random affair that mostly has you draw the same Omen treacheries over and over again.
Yapping: With Court, I have been on the bad end of variance at least twice now which led to being unable to gain all Glyphs. One of those times, this scenario was the only thing standing between me doing Sepulchre. That is not to say that this is a bad scenario. I quite like how finishing it is absolutely trivial: You go on the elevator, slap the Tyrant around, you ride it up (or down), and exit. You could be in and out in like 5 rounds and that’s already accounting for taking your time with the Tyrant. But of course you want to spend time there and do all the stretch goals and achieving that is actually quite difficult. Challenge is good, I just wish this had less randomness to it. And like with Western Wall and Drowned Quarter, it would have been smart to not have Court right after Vault. If there had been a scenario or two between them in the campaign, them being so similar probably wouldn’t have mattered as much.

Obsidian Canyons

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: Canyons is an outrageous scenario. The location mechanics are excellent in what they mean for your movement and that of your enemies. The locations themselves are super varied in their effects. There is so much that you can dig into to optimize and the mechanics encourage to always think a round or two ahead, about where which locations will likely end up. This is a brain burner of a scenario in a way that i find very engaging. Absolutely not something I would want to see regularly, but as a one-off scenario, this tickles my brain in very pleasant ways.
Low points: Oh my god, the setup however. This takes forever to put on the table. And it’s not just the pure putting together the cards and arranging them into multiple decks and set asides and locations as usual, but also reading all the special rules and understanding them… i’ve played whole boardgames that have fewer rules than just the extra stuff that this slaps on top of an already very involved game. It’s a big ask and i don’t blame anyone for throwing their hands up in frustration.
There are also so many things you can forget. Did you trigger the winds? Do you remember from which side they are moving this round? Did you do your agility test when moving into a new location. Wait, do i have to do the test after revealing a location from the deck? It’s genuine effort to keep everything straight and the whole thing goes on for so long it becomes a matter of endurance.
Yapping: Is the effort worth it? Well, it’s a similar situation as with most of Hemlock Vale. I don’t think that this scenario wastes our time with unnecessary setup, the payoff is there. But this could really have benefited from sanding down some rough edges. Did we really need to collect some very specific Core Box encounter sets just to act as placeholders? Do the agility tests on the locations add enough to an already stuffed scenario? Is the additional mid-game setup with four rows on the Western Route overdoing the bit?
Speaking of the routes, that this is your scenario 2 on an Eastern Route is a laughably bad decision and exhibit A for why that route probably shouldn’t even exist. It’s as if you started your Scarlet Keys campaign on Without a Trace.
My tl;dr on Obsidian Canyons: Personally i like it and think “the juice is worth the squeeze”. But this should have been a Stand-Alone instead of part of a campaign, that way they would’ve been more justified in going as hard on the setup as they did.

The Doom of Arkham, part I

Rating: Tier 4-
Highlights: We are back in Arkham! And doing a fairly standard Arkham scenario with Arkham mechanics. Nothing wrong with that in principle…
Low points: …except there’s nothing interesting happening here at all. This is all utterly trivial. At this point you have truckloads of XP in your decks and just gotten the payoff for your Tasks. While you do give up your earned relics for a moment, that does very little to compensate for how little the encounter deck has that can challenge the investigators at this point.
Yapping: Classic Arkham gameplay is good, but only if it comes with a sense of challenge attached. Doom of Arkham is just going through the motions. Even its encounter deck uses only stuff you’ve seen before. This is just boring. At least it’s over quickly.

The Doom of Arkham, part II

Rating: Tier 3+
Highlights: It’s Cthulhu! Cthulhu isn’t boring! We get some good gimmicks for the confrontation with the big poster boi of the Mythos here, as Cthulhu godzillas through Arkham, mostly ignoring the investigators who are mere collateral damage caught in his sweeping attacks which are represented by their own deck.
The city starts out relatively unharmed and gets flooded over time and the rooftops that act as a safe place to attack from can get destroyed, too.
Cthulhu himself is represented reasonably grand through multiple enemy cards and his own set of special treacheries. He works kind of similar to a boss in Aeons End and that gives him the spotlight he deserves.
Low points: It’s a typical problem that many Arkham finales have: The investigators have accumulated XP and a host of story assets and simply outscaled whatever the scenario is putting forward. In addition to the artifacts you also get three story allies to help out, as if that was needed. Overall It’s not as bad as with some others (looking at you, TSK), there’s still plenty of things that are worthwhile to engage with here. But if you arrived here, there is little reason to expect failure.
Yapping: I don’t mind this. It’s on the easy side, but not to the point of being totally trivial. It gives you a nice way to take your souped up deck and dunk on Cthulhu and assorted Elites and that feels like a satisfying conclusion to this campaign to me. I certainly like this a lot more than the finale of Innsmouth, for example.

Sepulchre of the Sleeper

Rating: ????
Highlights: It exists…
Low points: …allegedly.
Yapping: Didn’t play it yet. So far I didn’t manage to get all glyphs in any of my playthroughs, I was always a couple short, either leaving some in Apiary or Court. It’ll happen eventually, i suppose. I expect this to be something to do once, but since it does replace the regular finale and also makes the Tasks not matter, I am not likely to do that more than that one time, even if i do end up getting the opportunity.

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 3+
Scenarios: Average out somewhere in the Tier 3 range. I think it’s fair to say that the day-time scenarios trend towards the lower end while i generally think that the night scenarios are where Hemlock Vale shows its best side. On a scenario to scenario base, i actually don’t like Hemlock Vale all that much, but the ability to pick which ones i play on the three days does help a lot. So if i don’t want to ride the minecart, i don’t have to.
Campaign structure: After a campaign that was very linear still (Edge) and one that was too sandboxy (Keys), Hemlock Vale settles in the middle with a firm structure of three days and nights where you can slot different scenarios. It is strongly suggested to follow the standard night-time scenarios, but you can divert from them. That gets punished a lot however and will lead to a worse campaign experience overall in many ways.
Still, if you take the campaign structure as having three fixed night time scenarios and getting to pick three out of five others for your day-time activity, then that’s a decent amount of freedom that allows for replays to feel different while still preserving a sort of framework that allows for a story to be told coherently. A great compromise in my opinion, i like that a lot.
There are two more things that Hemlock Vale is notable for. The first is the Codex, which is basically a way to have story beats expanded on in the campaign book, but having those be triggered by ingame actions like Parleys on assets and enemies. I’ve many times lamented how Scarlet Keys and Edge of the Earth do the interactions with NPC assets, contrasting for example Thorne (an interaction that only happens in the book) with Ichtaca (where you decide in gameplay how to handle her). The Codex offers a suitable compromise and i like it well enough.
The other thing is the playable interludes. While Hemlock Vale only has six scenarios to a full campaign, we get some additional rounds with our investigators in a map of the village where we interact with the various villagers. I think this is done quite well and the interactions are mostly meaningful enough for this to matter. There is some rules awkwardness around it, but the general idea of treating these like an act/agenda zero for the following scenario works. I wouldn’t want something like this often, but for this campaign, this is good.
Campaign mechanics: The campaign goes fairly heavy on a discard from hand archetype and will frequently cause investigators to lose cards this way and have other cards trigger on being around when that happens. This has different impacts based on the investigator of course – while an asset based investigator who has set up their board won’t mind discarding a spare copy of something, a skill or event based investigator might very well struggle here. In addition to that however, the campaign also goes after assets in play a bit more than usual. So any investigator will need to consider what happens if certain key cards of their deck end up in the discard pile instead of in play. That’s overall a good thing, some disruption to keep players on their toes makes for better games than knowing that you’ll be able to reliably follow your three-step plan to victory.
Lots of time in this campaign is spent on interacting with the residents of the Hemlock Vale village, of course. This is well done, these people feel a lot more alive and interesting to me than the crew from Edge of the Earth.
More Yapping: Hemlock Vale is an ambitious campaign that takes some big swings at campaign structure, theme and game mechanics. Not all of it works, of course. But enough does to piece a campaign together that is fun to play. All the various trappings of the Codex, the playable interludes, the choice of scenarios, the day/night structure… all of that i think quite highly of. It’s a bit of a shame that i feel a bit let down by many of the scenarios here however.

The Twisted Hollow (Night 1)

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: The randomized and resetting board combined with the lantern mechanic that separates dark locations from lit ones gives Twisted Hollow a unique twist on movement. That is further built upon with plenty of Hunter enemies, making for a focused scenario that does its particular thing well. Particularly notable among those enemies is of course the Bear Hybrid which is a huge honking threat that you will want to be able to deal with properly.
Low points: There are three acts to this scenario that vary in what they do with the locations and while the first two parts offer some cool exploration and stumbling around without perfect knowledge, the last bit ends up being too random. A large grid of locations is built from the get go, the exit is somewhere and you need to find it in time. It could be the second location you look at. It could also be the tenth one. There is no way to push odds in your favor, you simply have to spin the wheel and hope for the best.
Yapping: The scenario also features the pursuit zone, a mechanic that was used before in Forgotten Age to semi-preserve enemies’ impact on the board when the locations reshuffle. Like in Depths of Yoth, i am not a huge fan how this pursuit zone works, but i don’t mind it enough her to list it in the negatives. It may even work a bit better here than it did back in TFA.
Overall this is a very solid scenario that sets a good mood and decent enough gameplay. Since it builds its encounter deck for a large part from scenario specific cards, much of this feels a lot different from what you’ve seen before, no matter how you spent day 1.

The Longest Night (Night 2)

Rating: Tier 1-
Highlights: This scenario pulls no punches. The goal is not to defeat something or to gain a number of clues, it’s to survive a number of rounds. You manage it, you win, no matter the board state. What this means is that this scenario gets away wih just barrelling down on you, giving you more to do than you can handle. All enemies are separated out into an extra deck and you draw both an enemy from that deck and a treachery from the regular encounter deck every round. And don’t even think there are breather cards in there, everything is something that will ask you to act. We are talking asset hate, we are talking damage and horror, we are talking Frozen in Fear. And then you get the Hybrid Bear on top and movement requirements from having the enemies come from multiple directions. Oh, and you have to guard a story asset along the way. You will not be able to put out all fires on the board, instead setting priorities and deciding on what to handle and what to let happen are a constant thing.
To help you even stand the slightest chance, you get some incredibly powerful extra options however. Clues can be spent to place traps, decoys and barriers to manipulate, damage or stop enemies. And thanks to a certain ability on the center location that allows buying clues for actions, even pure fighters can (and should!) dabble in these clue abilities to make sure they can handle everything that is coming. You even have the option to start torching the place which will hurt (almost) everything that tries to come through the flames. There’s a horse too to get around! Yeah, it’s a lot. The Longest Night is a gauntlet that despite technically lasting fewer rounds than the average scenario does will test your investigator’s endurance and your own.
Low points: Things can get a bit crowded on the table and one can easily find it difficult to keep track of everything. You have lots of options. The traps, decoys and barriers all come with a couple rules. Most enemies from the deck are immune to one or more of these barricades and you have to keep straight which ones are going to be affected by what.
It should also be noted that this is a scenario that makes heavy use of various special abilities that you have here and those can potentially put the abilities of your investigator or deck on the back burner. You aren’t getting invalidated here, no matter how you fight, clue or evade, that is all still perfectly applicable. But you do get a lot of alternatives here that you will need simply to keep up with everything that is happening.
Yapping: I love The Longest Night. It’s very much not classic Arkham and if this went on for any longer than it does, i would probably start grumbling soon enough that i want to get back to the core game instead of doing something rather different. But this is 10 rounds. Well, maybe 12 or so if you have to remove some doom through a treachery that prolongs the assault. And these rounds are anything but boring, they are a fantastic puzzle to figure out. And maybe most important, nobody is left out from the puzzle. No matter if you are a seeker, a fighter, an evader… everyone can do their part to slow down the advance of enemies. Easy Tier 1 rank, only surpassed by those few scenarios like Oath or Threads that reach greatness while still doing the classic Arkham gameplay.

Fate of the Vale (Night 3)

Rating: Tier 3, with a heavy asterisk (see below)
Highlights: Look, this scenario is incredibly divisive and i have heard anything from “It’s brilliant!” to “It’s trash!” and i can’t really heavily disagree with either because Fate of the Vale is arguably both. But wherever you put it on that scale, you can not deny the sheer audacity of this scenario. Even if we assume for a moment that this could be a bad scenario, then i would still take a finale that takes such a unique and outrageous swing over any snoozefest of a finale that provides no challenge or special interest.
Whatever else is the case, Fate of the Vale is memorable. And when i like to say that the worst a scenario can be is boring, then surely the inverse must be true as well?
Abyss deck? Memorable. Four variants? Great. Wild final enemy? Fantastic.
Low points: Depending on which variant you play, there are however some mechanical holes that needed plugging. Especially the fireworks version is notable for being too tight on the side of the doom clock which lead to a lot of frustration. The other frequent complaint is that it’s too easy to miss your “True Self” in the Abyss deck on the first go through it. When that happens, you probably are going to lose as you’ll not be able to reclaim your investigator card before moving through the whole Abyss deck again. There are some options on locations and the like that are supposed to help with that, but they are so comically overcosted in clue costs that they might as well not exist.
On the side of the actual encounter cards in the Abyss deck, i don’t really like how heavy they are on dealing horror to investigators. It’s a barrage where almost every other card (more than that actually, if you also count enemy attacks) threatens to deal horror and that can put a lot of investigators into a really weird position.
Yapping: I struggled with putting a Tier on Fate of the Vale. My feelings towards it put it somewhere in the Tier 3 range insofar as i don’t think it’s quite good enough for more, but it’s also enjoyable enough to not deserve to be ranked low. That being said, Tier 3 by my initial definition means “Average. Enjoyable, but not outstanding.” which… doesn’t describe this scenario at all. But where else do i put it. It’s definitely not boring or forgettable either (which would be Tier 4) and i don’t think it passes for a higher Tier just on the back of its audacity either. So… i don’t know. Let’s call it Tier 3 so there is some number on it, but redefine what that means just for this instance to “Not Bad. Also, not Good.”

Written in Rock

Rating: Tier 4
Highlights: This is a scenario where the encounter deck is focused on enemies, many of which are Hunters and it’s a selection of enemies I do like quite a bit.
Low points: The minecart mechanics aren’t all bad and there are some neat interactions with it, but overall it does require a lot of admin just to handle something that replaces our usual movement options with something a lot more restrictive.
Yapping: Horror in High Gear did it better? That’s probably my opinion on Written in Rock in a nutshell. In favor of Written in Rock, it’s not as easily breakable as HiHG is. But for all the rest… i don’t know. The minecart is ultimately not a lot more interactive than the cars are. But the big thing here for me is something i said earlier in the HiHG review: “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.” And what can i say, Written in Rock steps over that line for me. It goes on long enough that the slide puzzle becomes annoying instead of novel. And maybe worst of all, the setup already eats up a lot of that goodwill, as it takes forever and requires replicating a large location layout using a reference in the rule book with exact locations going in certain places and it’s just a pain to do. The scenario doesn’t even start with that grid, it has you do that mid-scenario so you can walk across three regular locations that are in a line before you get to the real meat. Because apparently the playable interludes aren’t enough preamble. There is something worthwhile buried under these minecart mechanics, but for my money its too much effort to get there.

Hemlock House

Rating: Tier 4+
Highlights: The focal point and highlight of Hemlock House are of course the enemy-locations, as the investigators have to fight the house itself here. Super cool in concept and the execution works well enough. The “Predation bag”, an extra chaos bag used to randomize how rooms go dormant or awaken, is solid enough even tough it comes with similar admin baggage as the Infestation bag from Waking Nightmare.
Low points: Bluntly said, the scenario lacks bite. The encounter deck is weak and very often cards feel like near-freebies. The location-enemies do not attack for enough to be really scary. Neither do the rest of the enemies here.
There’s nominally two variants to this scenario, as you can either seal everything or defeat everything. These two are so divergent in difficulty however that going the defeat route only makes sense as an intentional challenge because the scenario is so easy by itself. Thing is though… the defeat route isn’t really difficult either. It just takes longer.
The resolution then only rewards you for going all-in on either of these options. Sealed five locations and defeated five others? Sucks to suck, no bonus XP for you. Should’ve done at least a 8-2 split for 1xp or a full all-in for 2xp. Why though? Hemlock Vale has a couple of these “gotcha” moments and they are always awful.
Yapping: There’s not a lot here that would actually require some deeper thought or special consideration. I appreciate that this does something unique, but that novelty wears off after a few plays and what is left then is not much. I’d put this scenario into a bucket with Echoes of the Past, Heart of the Elders II and Thousand Shapes of Horror. Eh, a bit above those because the location-enemies really are neat, i don’t want to undersell them. But not all that much higher, on a replay this is a fairly banal scenario.

The Silent Heath

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: The enemy selection deserves a highlight again. We are up against an insect hive, enemies we don’t see anywhere else. What’s cool here is that we can either start shooting and slashing our way into the hive … or we can sneak past them since most of these insects are Aloof and there are some negative effects that do scale with the amount of insects in the Victory display.
I very much enjoy both the off-center theming with the insect hive and also the gameplay around how to handle the enemies and how to handle sudden spikes in activity on the board. When that Queen arrives and every insect from the victory display returns to the investigators’ threat areas, things get really interesting!
Low points: I have some minor quibbles with the way too large encounter deck and with how the scenario pushes maybe a bit too much into the direction of fighting the hive over the sneaky approach. But they are really minor ones that don’t put a dent into how much i like playing this one.
Yapping: A scathing review of the day-time scenarios so far with both of the previous ones landing Tier 4 ranks, but thankfully the other three are all better than that. Silent Heath jumps straight up to the upper end of Tier 2 even, just off the back of being competently put together without any major complaints and then carried to the front by theming. I just really like these insects.

The Lost Sister

Rating: Tier 3+
Highlights: The Dark/Light mechanic that is on a couple of encounter cards isn’t a huge factor throughout the campaign, but Lost Sister is the one scenario where it is put into the center. This works reasonably well and gives the whole thing a neat twist that makes you care about where you engage certain enemies and whether you want to end your turn in a different location to possibly avoid some treachery or another. This most comes through with the Elite enemies in this scenario, all various mutated crustaceans. You are literally fighting big lobsters and horseshoe crabs.
Low points: Aside from the fights with the crabs, this scenario is again lacking a bit of bite however. It’s not as bad here as it is with Hemlock House, there is still plenty to care about. But during times when the crabs are handled and you are just moving through the caves, the encounter deck struggles to serve you cards you have to really care about. Notably, this is also the scenario that houses what is maybe the worst designed card in this game, Cavern Moss.
Yapping: Purely on the back of the mechanics, this scenario isn’t doing anything too special, but i like it more than the sum of its parts would suggest. The Elites are mechanically well-done enemies and the light/dark mechanic is enough of a subtle twist to make this appear more unique than it probably is under the hood. I’ll put this on the high end of average.

The Thing in the Depths

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: It’s an escort mission that is actually not a pain to do. The Turtle Hybrid you protect here gets attacked by another monster and you have to make sure it can reach its destination. Simple enough.
Low points: The biggest flaw of this scenario is probably that the big bad “Thing in the Depths” just rolls over and does nothing if you are able to evade it. Which is not difficult at all. That then leaves only its tentacles to deal with and a few relevant enemies from the campaign wide encounter sets. Except for the Stag Hybrid, nothing that’s really worth talking about.
There is a thing with the locations here where the flip when you stay too long at them. I very rarely had that matter much aside from a treachery that deals damage directly to your allies if you draw it while at a Sunken location.
Yapping: Thing in the Depths is a decent scenario to play on the first day when the enemies still pose a decent challenge to the team. The “canon” route which has you follow Rosa along, actually does nudge you towards going here day 1, so that’s good. On later days, there’s not too much here, but to its credit the scenario is fairly quick to both set up and play through and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Not dragging on for too long seems particularly notable for an escort mission. Thing in the Depths has some flaws, but i don’t mind going through it. On later days, it probably goes down to a 3-, but since the text actually does nudge you towards it, i am feeling generous enough to rate this scenario for its best case of being played day 1 with a clean Tier 3.

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 3-, now that i have put in the work
Scenarios: Average out to Tier 3+, however that is misleading for two reasons. One, the variance: I put two scenarios into Tier 5 here which pulls down this average a lot in spite of most of them just straight up being solid Tier 2s. The other is that Scarlet Keys gives you some freedom in which scenarios to play. So you don’t actually experience the average overall, you can curate where to go. In this case means that the Tier 5 ranking i gave to Shades of Suffering doesn’t actually matter much to me… i will simply not go to Kuala Lumpur.
Campaign structure: Highly divisive. The design takes a massive swing here in presenting players with an open map that can be traveled along, spending time to freely forge paths along the pathways that connect scenarios and CYOA-style encounters. With Scarlet Keys you arguably get out of it what you put into it… which means that if you think you can just show up and play the campaign, you are likely in for a bad time.
Usually, Arkham campaigns are focusing on what happens in the scenarios and center their gameplay around that. Scarlet Keys puts a high emphasis on what happens in between, with long paragraphs of story text, route planning, timed events and other things that aren’t really part of what we’d usually consider the typical Arkham experience.
If you bounce off this extra admin, you usually do so with little room to argue. People that dislike Scarlet Keys tend to really heavily dislike it.
Campaign mechanics: At the center of the campaign are two fractions that are in conflict with each other, the investigators sandwiched between them. The first, the Outsiders, are body-snatching entities whose marquee mechanic is Hollowing. A hollowed card is removed from the game and put into a special pile where some other cars might be able to refer to them later. For most of the campaign, hollowing is just a slightly worse version of discard however and only at a few points the mechanic opens up wide enough to be different enough in an interesting manner.
The other faction is the Coterie, an assembly of dysfunctional people that all hold “a key”, an item of power. Much of the campaign is centered around acquiring and using these keys and they even do get their own double-sided card type. They are very neat. The Coterie is also associated with the Concealed keyword, which lets enemies not spawn on the board, but hide behind several decoys so the investigators have to sniff out where exactly the enemy is before they can interact with it. Concealed is at its base level an action tax, but it is a highly interactive one. Almost any sort of test, guaranteed damage, clue gain, auto-evades… there are a lot of ways to interact with Concealed that make sure that every investigator has something meaningful to contribute. The mechanic is heavily iterated on over the course of the campaign, while it does appear often, it’s always with a new twist on it which keeps it from getting stale… at least in my opinion. I know that not everyone agrees with this take and that many consider Concealed to be used too much.
More Yapping: Scarlet Keys likely has the worst blind play of any campaign, as stumbling across the map without a plan will just waste the very limited time resource on redundant or irrelevant adventure texts or plop you into scenarios you are barely prepared for. The typical first play struggles to even touch five scenarios in total and can feel very unsatisfying and limited as a result. It gets considerably better on replays, provided you are willing to put in the extra admin work of planning a route, knowing which interaction is where and how to craft a coherent whole from the sandbox we are handed. This requires genuine effort, more than many people are willing to have pushed on them. I’ve done this work, I can start a new TSK campaign based off of that and the available community resources and that makes the whole thing a lot more approachable than it was at time of its release. It still does require some extra effort however and that keeps me from going back to TSK as often as the average scenario quality would suggest. ArkhamLCG is in my opinion not the game for this sort of experience. This admin work of taking the sandbox parts and putting it together in the optimal sequence to achieve some measure of mechanical progression and pacing? That’s the designer’s job. Not the player’s job. I wish the designer did that job here instead of just handing us the puzzle pieces.

Riddles and Rain

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: R&R does a great job of being a campaign opener, it introduces the enemies and all relevant mechanics in an efficient and basic way. Especially for a campaign like Scarlet Keys that heavily features those mechanics and sends you off on a quite involved journey, such a grounded first scenario is appreciated. I really like the gradual increase in scope, it starts out with just one location where you need to get a couple clues, then introduces more and more places, enemies and mechanics until you are in the thick of the campaign.
Low points: Truth be told, there’s not a whole lot to dislike about Riddles and Rain. The hollowing lacks payoff, but that’s an issue of that specific mechanic, not of the scenario itself. This is just all around solid.
Yapping: Honestly, if this was the first scenario to any other campaign, it could even serve to introduce new players as it starts super basic with just few locations before opening up more. A lot of the structure of this scenario is straight out of The Gathering. Now, TSK is maybe the campaign i would recommend the least to teach newbies, so that potential is kind of wasted in that regard… but it does make for a chill opening where you start out rather simple and then TSK opens up fully in front of you and things become decisively less chill as the rounds go on.

Congress of the Keys

Rating: Tier 5+
Highlights: The story part before the actual scenario starts is awesome. The vote of the Coterie and how it pulls everything together that happened during the campaign is simply stellar. It rewards decisions made during the campaign while also giving you pointers towards what to shoot for in your next TSK campaign. It’s exemplary in that regard.
As for the actual scenario… the boss is fine and does provide a meaningful evolution of the concealed keyword when you aren’t able to just bypass it. Other than that i don’t have many kind things to say about it because…
Low points: …the actual scenario is a huge disappointment to me. It’s a pastiche of things that came before, but where one would expect a final iteration on the mechanics, it instead gives only reduced versions of them. Examples are the concealed locations from Without a Trace being used here, but in a way that is very reduced and less interactive. There’s a weird gimmick mini-game in the middle that, just like the final boss, can be trivialized with the help of story assets. Since it’s just a memory/guessing game in the first place, trivializing it is maybe even the better outcome.
In general, this scenario is incredibly easy if you did manage to bring a few of the story allies or keys. If you did particularly well or went the route that includes Without a Trace, it borders on being insultingly trivial as your investigator and deck stops mattering under the pure weight of having a dozen abilities and actions available from all your campaign rewards.
Yapping: In addition to posing very little challenge, the scenario has the audacity of taking forever. And of having an obnoxious double-layered setup that straight up makes you waste a whole lot of time on assembling a second encounter deck (including conditional adds and set asides) that gets used for all of two or three rounds. I don’t necessarily mind a more involved setup if it’s worth the effort. But this… honestly i am just ticked off for all of it and am already going into my first round tilted because i know i just wasted ten to twenty minutes on sorting encounter cards and shuffling up a deck that doesn’t matter. Since the scenario is near-trivial in most cases anyways, I’ve skipped it in the last two TSK campaigns I played and I think i am better off for that.

Dancing Mad/Havana

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: This is the scenario that does the best job of balancing both Concealed and Hollowed as major mechanics and have them both matter. It’s a small map of locations which enables Concealed enemies to hide particularly well as it causes their decoys to overlap and shuffle into each other. The encounter deck also supports both Concealment and Hollowed with treacheries. This is an all-around good time that uses the campaign mechanics well.
Low points: I am not super fond of the gimmicky resolution with the two Desi’s and having to store one away in a secure location until the campaign resolution reveals which version you picked. It’s a personal preference for sure, i know plenty people to like this actually. For me, the gimmick factor is over the line here, but it doesn’t distract from the quality of this scenario overly much.
Yapping: Yeah, this is simply a competently made scenario that uses all the campaign specific tools to modify the basic Arkham formula. Easy Tier 2 entry and one of the highlights of the campaign in my book. It is missing maybe that extra bit of special sauce to push it over into the ranks of real greatness, except for two copies of a certain treachery this scenario uses only cards we get to see plenty of all campaign. Maybe the Desi switcheroo was supposed to be that special scenario-specific bit to earmark it from all the others, but at least for me it wasn’t able to fulfill that promise. Still, this is complaining on a high level now, let’s just take the good rank and move on!

Dead Heat/Marrakesh

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: This scenario does exactly one thing and it does it extremely well. We forget about Concealed, we forget about Hollowed, this is a horde scenario. It is extremely fight heavy, with enemies appearing all over the map and threatening bystanders and investigators alike. The investigators are asked to be efficient with their enemy handling and their movement as well as these enemies do pop up all over the place. Throw a couple high-powered Elite enemies into the mix and you end up with one of the best pure combat scenarios in the game.
Low points: Marrakesh is a trap. If you do not know what this scenario is, you are in for a rude awakening on your maiden voyage of Scarlet Keys and might just find your campaign sealed here. Not only is this extremely difficult for unprepared groups and not only are the consequences for failing dire, but this location is also just one step away from London where you start. I am looking at the scenarios in this article from the point of view of someone who knows what’s coming up, so i won’t hold it against it here… but i did want to mention it.
The first real negative i have to say about Dead Heat is the consequences, more importantly how they are resolved. Only explicitly saved civilians do count in the end. Even if you only have a single one die and finish the scenario with everyone else being alive, you still have to take the trauma as the resolution will only compare dead vs saved, ignoring anyone who simply survived as not mattering. This also makes resigning in this scenario a spectacularly mean trap to fall into.
The other thing is that the encounter deck heavily relies on denying actions in a way that feels unfair and non-interactive. It’s one thing to ask players to cover a couple locations at the same time, handling enemies that pop up with high frequency. Another is to slap Frozen on Fear on them, then asking them to do the same. If it was only Frozen in Fear, this would be a minor point, but sadly the encounter deck has several other effects in store that also don’t do much else than take away your actions without much of a chance to interact with that.
Yapping: We are so close to greatness here, this scenario is distilling an aspect of the game down to its purest form and giving you a good benchmark to test even high-powered fighter decks against. Dead Heat has the bones of what could be a Tier 1 scenario, but for that it really needed a better encounter deck that had more tricks than stopping players from getting to play the game.

Dealings in the Dark/Istanbul

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: This scenario is very driven by Concealed mechanics and presents a huge swing towards iterating on the idea behind Carcosa’s Echoes of the Past: What if the main driving force wasn’t the doom clock, but the enemies collecting clues in a race with the players? Istanbul does this a whole lot better than Echoes, crucially it avoids the pitfall of the clock no longer mattering. These cultists will collect clues and will steadily push on their agenda.
Low points: The mechanics are ambitious and mostly work, but they can break down for the final bit where you are supposed to run away with the key in hand.
This scenario also handles evasion in a way that makes it a bad idea. Groups or solo investigators that heavily rely on evasion can feel left out and perceive it as unfair how they are specifically hard-countered by the scenario-specific rules.
Yapping: This makes for a very solid early stop for your trip around the world, as the scenario hits a good difficulty level for investigators with just a couple XP in their decks, while also being solidly rewarding through either making Ece your ally or claiming the Antiprism key. I initially held this scenario in very high regard and even called it my favorite scenario from TSK in my initial impressions, but on replays some of that faded. This can be a very long and tiring scenario, including a mid-scenario setup and the payoff doesn’t *quite* seem to match the extra admin from all the bells and whistles. It’s a good scenario, but other parts of TSK that do their thing more effortlessly aged better for me.

Dogs of War/Alexandria

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: Dogs of War is one of the scenarios where you get to make a choice between multiple versions of it and those versions are quite different. The defense version that sees you bodyguard a couple story assets that are under attack plays and feels very different from the one where you are trying to breach through those very same defenses.
Low points: There’s nothing really all that interesting to it. It’s not particularly difficult and somewhat stretched out. Especially the version where you are asked to keep the Beast in Crimson in check, can also be quite easily solved by simply evading the guy every round which will leave you with an unimpressive rest of the scenario.
Yapping: The scenario doesn’t do anything super wrong, it just overstays its welcome a bit. If this was a few rounds shorter or had some sort of mid-scenario twist that shakes things up, this could have been absolutely fine. As is… not offensive or unpleasant, it’s just a bit forgettable.

On Thin Ice/Anchorage

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: The Void Chimera is conceptually a super cool enemy and actually quite terrifying. So is Thorne, for that matter. Weirdly, the most terrifying thing in this scenario are the bears though… So yeah, there’s some challenge in this scenario for sure which makes sense considering that Anchorage is fairly far away from the London start, so you will likely arrive here somewhere around the midpoint to end of your campaign.
Low points: The Void Chimera with its own specific decoys is a notable evolution of the Concealed mechanic… so it’s a bit of a pity that it likely won’t come into play because after the blind play you will know that putting down the scouting reports on the locations is not really optional, it’s something you just have to do because putting down some clues is just so much easier than having to potentially tangle with an impactful Elite.
At 43 cards, the encounter card is also less of a deck and more of a random pile. It’s not super harmful to the experience here, but it also means that the parts of the encounter deck that are neat (like the bears) don’t get to reliably matter and neither do the treacheries that do something when drawn in multiples.
Yapping: Overall i am coming at On Thin Ice from a favorable angle, i think this scenario is perfectly fine. It could have been better in some regards, but there’s nothing here that i actively dislike all that much… with one notable exception: I just really don’t like how the interactions with Thorne pretty much happen completely outside of the gameplay, within the text instead of having a confrontation happen on the board, like with Ichtaca in Untamed Wilds. And no amount of calling me kitten in the text can make up for that.

Sanguine Shadows/Buenos Aires

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: In theory, you could finish this scenario without ever picking up a clue. That’s kind of refreshing! Obviously, collecting them can still be used in many ways, so Seekers aren’t invalidated here, but the driving force behind progressing this scenario is instead a new iteration on the Concealed mechanic. That makes the cat and mouse game between the investigators and La Chica Roja play out in a rather unique way.
The scenario also has a second part to it that shakes the whole ordeal up considerably again through the introduction of a new boss with, once again, unique mechanics based on Concealed to weaken and ultimately defeat them.
Low points: Getting to that second part is a crapshoot however, as it requires you to win the cat and mouse game three times without dropping a game. There’s enough random variance in the game that this can fail even when you are playing correctly, just through random happenstance behind which cards land where and that can be grating. The final half of the scenario expects perfection in the first half to be able to reach it, but that perfection can sometimes simply be out of reach.
The first half requires repeating the same thing three times. In the community, this comes up as a negative for this scenario often. Personally, i don’t feel very strongly about that, much of the game requires repeating the same steps and while it’s more explicit here with the resets of the board, i don’t mind it particularly much.
Yapping: I’m pretty sure I rank this one higher than most people do, simply because i don’t mind the repetition in the first half and i also seem to have a higher opinion of Concealed than the community at large does. Buenos Aires is simply put “Concealment: The Scenario”, so one could see why that perspective would matter here!

Shades of Suffering/Kuala Lumpur

Rating: Tier 5
Highlights: I recognize and acknowledge the attempt at taking Wages of Sin and trying to improve on it. For what it’s worth, i do think Tzu San is an awesome villain and the confrontation with her isn’t bad. I can even get behind the punishing nature behind how the Shade Reaper works…
Low points: …but sadly Shades still does most of the things that i despised about Wages. The requirements by the different geists are super random and again you end up in a situation where how well you do isn’t necessarily determined by your decisions and gameplay, but by random chance.
In some ways, Shades is even more grating. Wages had some (unrealized) sparks of genius with its dual encounter decks and flipping locations. Shades encounter deck is just action taxes. At least you aren’t being bombarded by other enemies from the encounter deck the way that Wages does it.
Yapping: *shrug* I hate it. Awful. Yes, there are some glimmers here and yes, finishing this successfully seems less out of reach than Wages. But still the best thing that i can say about this scenario is that it’s at the end of a quest chain from Shanghai down to Kuala Lumpur, so it’s easily avoided. I can play Scarlet Keys and even if i find my way past Shanghai, i will just pick up Flint there and move onto greener pastures. So unlike Wages, it at least doesn’t pull the rest of the campaign down with it. It’s unlikely i will ever set this up again.

Without a Trace

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: It’s a weird scenario. And i mean that in the best ways. You get some mechanics around concealed locations that are always a hair away from collapsing under their convoluted rules, but somehow they seem to work out just fine. You get some weirdo Elite enemies that do something that the campaign at large sadly failed to achieve until here: It makes Hollowing matter as a mechanic beyond just being fancy discard.
The scenario gives a glimpse at the Otherworld and it’s delightfully different, one of the few times this game actually manages to convey that we are no longer in a place where things work the way we are used to (see also: Lost in Time and Space, Before the Black Throne).
Low points: I’m still not really sure what i think of the concealed locations. They are unique and interesting for sure. But are they good gameplay? Are they worth all the faffing about with the left, middle, right alignments and trying to get all the rules straight? They kind of aren’t, i don’t get the same level of interaction from them that i get from something like Explore or Innsmouth layouts… but on the other hand one could argue that the friction is the point here, it’s what makes this whole ordeal feel the way it does.
This scenario also has sort of a brutal doom clock that puts a lot of pressure on you. It’s not as bad as some of the real outliers like Where The Gods Dwell, but you absolutely don’t have a lot of wiggle room, failing too much will be punished harshly.
Yapping: To me, this is the de facto campaign finale most of the time, similar to the situation i have going on with Innsmouth and Light in the Fog. Since i enjoy this scenario quite a bit, i am very happy to trade Congress of the Keys for Without a Trace. Its requirements take up 17 time, around half of the time before the campaign forcefully ends, so there is plenty of room to plan different routes around the trip that is basically leading you from London to Sydney, then back again and finally within reach of the Americas. So planning for a campaign ending with Without a Trace does not limit much of your options towards other scenarios you might want to visit.

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 3
Scenarios: Average out to a lower Tier 2 and much of what is lower than that can be skipped. That is actually somewhat remarkable. While i don’t think too highly of Edge of the Earth as a whole, it’s better on a scenario by scenario basis than I expected before putting down the numbers.
Campaign structure: Edge of the Earth was the first campaign that was designed as a complete box, without the restraints of Deluxe Boxes and Mythos Packs. I’d argue that overall the exploration of what this newfound freedom means was a bit of a miss, as the non-linearity is mostly expressed in the ability to skip parts of the campaign. While the freedom in card budget was mostly used to spend outrageous amounts of card stock on the partners, their different versions and associated assets. Fifteen cards on a final boss. It is no surprise then that much of the campaign has to get by on reusing the same location grid for multiple scenarios.
Edge of the Earth is strictly linear, with very little impact of your decisions on anything long-term. One of the most impactful things for how the campaign progresses is which partners survive and which don’t: a process that is mostly left to chance.
Campaign mechanics: Edge of the Earth has several campaign features that persist from one scenario to the next. Most notably the Frost tokens, a new type of token that accumulates in the chaos bag and unless managed through different means, they will threaten to autofail many tests.
The other persisting feature is the Tekeli-li deck, an assortment of weaknesses that get shuffled into the player decks. While not huge swings by themselves, they stay in the deck from one scenario to the next until drawn, so their payoff is near guaranteed unless you spend some sort of effort on removing them.
I like both of those mechanics a whole lot and would call them EotE’s strongest feature.
Edge also features a roster of nine NPC expedition members who you can call on to help you in various ways. Along the way, some of them will die and depending on who is left, some challenges will be more pronounced than others.
More Yapping: To me, the campaign structure of Edge of the Earth is a huge miss and its weakest feature by far. And unlike Innsmouth, the scenarios do not come with the same degree of variability and replayability to make up for that linearity. I am also much less impressed by the encounter decks. While the weather stuff is cool, it is especially the enemies that leave me completely unimpressed here. Finally, i heavily dislike how much this campaigns snowballs. Got a good Ice and Death part I? Then you can farm the other two for more supplies. Got a bad one? The campaign will beat you while you are down. Got a good Forbidden Peaks? Enjoy being showered with XP and assets. Bad one? Enjoy trauma. Got at good Heart of Madness part I? Well, part II will be trivial then. A core part of why Arkham campaigns work so well is the ability to fail forward and i’d argue that Edge is missing that aspect. All of that manages to push EotE as a campaign a full tier lower than its scenario average would suggest. I might even be generous here. I’ve had some real bad plays of this campaign before and only semi-recently warmed up to it more.

Ice And Death, part I

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: The trio of Ice and Death scenarios offers up an intriguing bit with regards to its location layout: The map is large enough that you will likely need all three scenarios if you want to uncover all of it. That makes for some excellent moments of exploration where your time is not just spent towards getting the usual things done, but also to uncover all of the maps secrets.
The scenario is also quite challenging in parts. With its impactful treacheries, high clue requirements and chunky enemies it throws a lot out towards the investigators who are still on their level 0 decks and immediately will need to prove themselves. You have the partner assets as a notable power boost for your fledgling decks and they are very needed here.
Low points: The magic of the exploration aspect wanes pretty quickly on replays, however. Once you know where to get the desirable shelter values and which supply items can be recovered in which place, the desire to uncover the whole map is a lot lower and in turn so is the necessity of doing more than cherry picking the good stuff. This can lead to part II and part III even become undesirable to play.
Yapping: On my first play, i would have called Ice and Death part I a straight up Tier 1 scenario, it gives me a lot of what i like about the game and then also some genuine exploration and mystery on top. On replays this did pull back considerably, but still leaves a scenario with very solid ground structure that is fun to play. While you can metagame around which places to visit and which supplies to acquire, you are still left with a challenging encounter deck and some engaging classic AHLCG gameplay.

Ice and Death, part II

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: This scenario has a very pressuring doom clock and even makes a point of the resign option being somewhat restrictive. So you have to plan around how much time you have and whether you can risk going on for another round or two … or turn back to play it safe in the face of Ancient Evils and other doom mechanics.
Low points: How much this scenario has going on depends on how well your part I went. The better it went, the less you have to do here. Which means you likely will get a great experience out of this scenario on your first play, but once you know what you are doing in part I, the part II can have not a whole lot of bite behind it.
There is also a huge random element to this scenario that can be frustrating. In the time constraints of the doom clock, you aren’t going to be able to check out all places where the lost expedition members could be, so there will always be a chance that you are doing your best, but still have nothing to show for it but extra frost tokens and Tekeli-li.
Yapping: This scenario doesn’t do anything majorly wrong – worst case, it’s over fairly quick because there’s really not that much to it. On replays, the typical experience here will be that you have only one or two persons wandering out in the cold. Going after them is a bit of a crapshoot, but usually worth doing at least. You can also just use this scenario to get a bit more of the map done and maybe even get another supply or two. If you are real lucky, you can even remove some frost tokens here.
That being said, reasons to play this are almost completely meta reasons of wanting some supply item or needing to save whoever wandered off. When I play this it’s not because the scenario itself is particularly noteworthy.

Ice and Death, part III

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: This is as laser focused as part II was, but i think part III works out to be a lot more interesting. It’s a combat heavy scenario, which after part I (which has few enemies, but impactful ones) and part II (which has next to no combat) offers something new into the mix. This is quite challenging, with enemies coming from all directions. The Seeping Nightmares are tough and there is every possibility that you fail this one if you don’t bring some very good fighters.
Low points: If your fighter isn’t able to defeat multiple 6 health enemies in a reasonable time frame while still on relatively low XP, you can be in for a bad time. There are also 5 treacheries in the encounter deck that cause premature enemy spawns and that can lead to heavy spikes in enemy activity that are hard to buffer for. The scenario is optional, but missing out on the 5XP you get here will only snowball to more problems down the line.
Yapping: I like a good combat scenario. Most of the game is focused on making the Seekers shine and fighters be their bodyguards. Scenarios like this one put fighters into the driving seat and let them show off what they can do. That’s valuable. While there are combat driven scenarios that i enjoy more (Dead Heat, Longest Night, New Horizons are three that come to my mind), this still ranks a good deal above average for me.

Fatal Mirage

Rating: Tier 4-
Highlights: The strength of Fatal Mirage lies in its narrative, not in its gameplay. If you want to learn more about the background of the expedition partners, here’s where you get at least a little bit of it.
Low points: It’s too big. It’s just too much. There’s a branch for every expedition member and they all work out the same. At the same time, they do take up a bit of time. You can’t resign at will, only at the end of a branch which can take you an amount of time that is hard to estimate… so where Ice and Death II made you take calculated risks of how long to wander about in the map and when to resign, Fatal Mirage takes a lot of that away. When you get the opportunity to resign, you might be 6 rounds away from your next one. Knowing that, do you stay? I suppose the penalty for dooming out isn’t too huge at least.
One big piece of beef i have with Fatal Mirage is also its encounter deck. Edge of the Earth is notably one of the campaigns that has a good balance of treacheries testing willpower and those that test agility which is something i always appreciate. Fatal Mirage is the exception, with a willpower focused encounter deck that looks like its straight out of Circle Undone. While i see how that’d be thematically appropriate, it is a big step backwards in terms of gameplay. The encounter deck also has close to 40 cards, giving way to huge variance with regards to its doom effects.
Yapping: What if we take Ice and Death part II, but instead of ending it before it has a chance to overstay its welcome, we stretch it as far as possible and even threaten players with having to play it multiple times? I really don’t like this one. Despite all the flowery texts and bits of writing, in terms of gameplay it doesn’t do anything particularly interesting at any point. It’s shockingly simplistic really, all the branches are pretty much identical. I don’t think a scenario as repetitive as this one can support its claim to being replayed multiple times at all. I barely can make it through one play of it. If i were actually forced to play this multiple times, it’d be a straight up Tier 5 entry. It’s not quite THAT bad on the first play of the campaign, but it’s again something I don’t do because i want to play this scenario, but because i am after the reward. To be fair, turning a partner or two into their “Resolute” versions is an amazing reward and one of the few ways to interact with all the randomness around the partners’ untimely deaths. So i will likely play through it exactly once per campaign to make sure nothing happens to whoever I want to keep around… but i will be bitching and moaning to myself about it all the way.

To The Forbidden Peaks

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: I quite like how the supply assets that we collect during Ice and Death are a burden to us in this scenario, as we need to carry them up the mountains. This is an example of an action tax done well, with plenty of interactivity and ways to handle them among the group.
This is an action packed scenario. While I find the Elder Things to be a bit lacking as enemies, there are enough of them and of the Eidolons around to keep you busy while trying to make it up the locations. There’s even a boss encounter that is sure to make everyone scramble for their actions to get the board under control again.
You can’t really plan too well ahead. Due to the randomization of the locations (something that has been missing in this campaign so far) and how and when the weather treacheries hit, the scenario requires some amount of adjusting on the fly.
Low points: Much rides or dies on how well you do in this scenario. If you finish it as advertised, you end up with as much XP as the whole Ice and Death saga before it plus up to half a dozen powerful story assets. If you fail, all that goes down the drain and you got little more than some trauma and some pity XP to show for it. This is too high stakes for a scenario that in terms of narrative is just “walk up this mountain”.
Yapping: In the past I’ve been super critical of this scenario, pretty much condemning it from the start for how pivotal it is to how your campaign is going. Now, that critique stands, Edge of the Earth is in general the low point of the game when it comes to the whole “fail forward” aspect of Arkham’s campaign structure.
But taking that meta aspect aside… To the Forbidden Peaks itself is actually pretty good. It’s certainly a good deal better than Essex Express, another linear scenario with unreasonable stakes. The whole thing is very engaging, there are no dead rounds of just drawing cards to be found here, everyone is in a permanent state of having to make all actions count and it just seems very fair to me. Carrying the assets up requires teamwork, forcing the players to interact more than just everyone “doing their thing”. Similarly, the effects that can have someone slide down a location or two can separate players from another and force interesting decisions upon them. This is even felt in the two-handed solo games that i do, i can only imagine that this hits even better in actual multiplayer with multiple people at the table.

City of the Elder Things

Rating: Tier 2+
Highlights: A large grid of randomized locations, a goal to do as much as you can in this grid, an array of chunky monsters stalking your across this grid … this scenario has a lot of things that I tend to like a lot. Randomization not only comes from the location grid itself, but also from the placement of the tokens you try to collect in pairs here for various purposes.
Since the layout includes a whopping 17 locations, we are even given a special movement ability here that allows us to spend the many clues we have to collect towards getting faster around the map.
Low points: While the scenario comes in three versions, you have very little control over which one you’ll get. I’d have preferred a simple choice here.
It also slightly overstays its welcome? There is really a whole lot of keys to collect here and you have a lot of time to do so. Chances are you are going to fall into a sort of rhythm here where one of the real greats (like for example Devil Reef or Pallid Mask) would’ve kept you on your toes throughout. One factor in this is that you do the whole setup at the start and you know exactly where to find each key. So instead of doing an exploration of the map, this is more of a spatial puzzle to solve with few surprises except for what comes from the encounter deck.
Yapping: A very solid scenario overall, but could maybe have gained something from slightly reducing its scope? Seventeen locations and close to 40 cards in the encounter deck is maybe a bit overblown. Still works out fine, though. This is my highlight of the Edge of the Earth campaign.

The Heart of Madness, part I

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: A large grid of randomized locations, a goal to do as much as you can in this grid, an array of chunky monsters stalking your across this grid … this scenario has a lot of things that I tend to like a lot. Wait, what. If you are having deja vu right now, it’s because Heart of Madness is somewhat similar to City of Elder Things on the surface. If we go into the details, the differences are noticeable however. Where City had you know in advance where the tokens are that you want to collect, the map in Heart of Madness is properly face down and you don’t know where the locations are that you need to acquire the seals. Handling the seals gives this scenario enough of its own spin to be interesting and the sense of exploration that was missing for me from City is definitely there.
Low points: It’s kind of easy. Unless you botched previous scenarios and only arrive here on the tail end of a failure cascade, you are likely going to have a somewhat easy time with this. Enemies are somewhat easy to evade and stay away from while the treacheries are fairly … generic.
Yapping: The bones of the scenario are quite good, with a better encounter deck this could have been as good or better than City of Elder Things. It’s still a very fine scenario, just falls a little short of other “big map” scenarios of the past.

The Heart of Madness, part II

Rating: Tier 3+
Highlights: I am very torn on the final boss because i despise how its taking up 15 cards that could have been used in a dozen other ways instead, but I suppose I have to concede that it plays interesting and different. Ending the campaign not on a defeat of an Old One, but with fighting tooth and nail to keep it at bay while trying to flee the complex and seal it in is good stuff.
Low points: Again, this is somewhat easy. Even more so than part I, because chances are you now are in possession of some of those seals. And those really wreak havoc on the challenge this finale would otherwise pose.
Also, “The Ramp” is blistering nonsense.
Yapping: An actually solid final scenario. Rare enough. On its own, it’d easily make it into Tier 2, but as part of the campaign it’s sadly a bit overshadowed by its own part I. Revisiting a similar location grid and many of the same encounter sets makes this feel very samey to that part I. Add in that the seals collected in part I are also trivializing some of part II’s bits and i can’t give this the same sort of ranking I gave the previous scenarios. After City of Elder Things and Heart of Madness I, this finale takes too long before it gets to something new and exciting. I like the boss well enough and while the ramp is silly, it’s not a big deal.

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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.

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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.

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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.