Intro
This is the start to a short series of articles meant to educate about two things:
One, what will the game do to try and make us lose a scenario?
And two, what can we do against that?
And then i also want to extrapolate from that a bit and spin this off into a sort of basic tutorial for the game in general. I will assume that you have at least attempted the Brethren of Ash campaign and will use spoilery examples from there. I will also pull some examples when necessary from chapter 1 campaigns, i will show some encounter cards, but will not spoil anything story relevant.
There are two main ways the game tries to stop you from winning a scenario. The first one is defeating you by heaping damage and horror onto you until you can’t take it anymore, which is what we are going to talk about in this article. The second one is having time run out on you, through the ever ticking doom clock and stalling techniques – that and the related concept of “tempo” will be the topic of the second article. I have some vague ideas about possible third or even fourth installments for the series, but let’s see where the first two go before i commit to more.
Damage and Horror: The Basics
Well, let’s start all the way down at the base level then. Game terminology! Each investigator has a health and a sanity value. If you take damage or horror while unprotected, you have to put a corresponding token on your investigator card. Should you at any point have equal or more damage on you than your health value, you are defeated. Same, if you have equal or more horror on you than your sanity. If all investigators are defeated, the scenario ends in a loss. But even if there’s still other players left after an investigator defeat, the group is now short one person and likely a critical role. If your seeker is out of the game and the remaining players are unable to get enough clues without their help to finish out the scenario, then that’s a problem. More often than not, scenarios tend to end in a loss after an investigator goes down, so that is to be avoided at all costs.
A defeat by damage or horror will additionally result in Trauma, either physical or mental. Trauma means that you start each subsequent scenario with damage or horror already on you which can in extreme cases snowball into another defeat, more trauma and so on.
The two main ways for players to ward off damage and horror are soak and healing.
Soak is not a game term, but the established word for the ability on some assets to hold damage or horror. An investigator that is dealt damage could put the resulting token(s) on their ally or a piece of armor or clothing, where they don’t go towards their own threshold of defeat. It will not prevent the damage from being dealt, but allows you to redirect it somewhere else.
Healing is what you can use to remove damage tokens from play after the fact. Again, it will not prevent the damage (or horror) from being dealt, but it can remove them afterwards… assuming you survived, of course!
Prevention also exists, but is much more rare than soak and healing. Obviously we’d all prefer to not being dealt any red and blue tokens in the first place, but the more common way to do that is not through outright damage/horror prevention, but in indirect way like for example cancelling attacks or passing treachery skill tests.
There’s some more nuance to it, like direct damage and horror that bypasses soak… but in broad strokes that’s the deal. So, let’s widen our scope a bit and check out where those nasty tokens are even coming from.
Sources of Damage and Horror
Occasionally there might be a scenario effect directly pinging you for damage or horror, but mostly they come from three sources: Enemy attacks, treachery effects and other card abilities.
Starting with enemies, let’s straight away clear up one common misconception about how the game operates. Arkham Horror is a game set in a world where lovecraftian monsters stalk the shadows and kill people – or worse. Intuitively, you’d assume that when our intrepid investigator runs into a flesh-rending ghoul or a monstrous Byakhee, that’d be when their health and sanity are most in danger. You’d be wrong. Enemy attacks make up a very little portion of the damage and horror you are likely to face, in most circumstances it’s the treacheries that wear you down. Enemies *threaten* damage and horror, but will most often not actually get to deal it, their effect on the game is better measured in how many actions they take away from the players than in how much they wear on their life totals. For that reason, the majority of enemies do belong much more to the topic of the second article i am planning to do, the one about doom, stalling and tempo. More about that then.
Another common misconception is that investigators are fragile and easily defeated. That is actually mostly untrue as well… within reasonable expectations these guys and gals we play are actually surprisingly resilient. Investigators in ArkhamLCG are not like the ones in Call of Cthulhu which bleed out after being clawed in the shoulder once by a Nightgaunt, these people are tough cookies that run on “Just A Flesh Wound” action hero tropes.
To illustrate this, check out Joe Diamond‘s health and sanity of 7 and 7. If he were to draw a Hellhound, Nightgaunt or Mutated Experiment and just stand still, doing nothing, without any armor or healing at all, that enemy would still require 7 turns to defeat Joe. For reference, that’s slightly less than two thirds of the duration of the average scenario. Even a relatively vulnerable investigator like Isabelle Barnes who only has 5 health (balanced out by her 9 sanity) could in theory stand there for 4 full rounds and just have a monster whack on her and still be alive. For Arkham investigators, life and sanity are just another resource that you can spend to get ahead.
There are enemies that hit for more than 1 damage and/or horror and especially if they are also a bit more resilient to being defeated they will change some of that dynamic, but those are surprisingly rare and many scenarios will only have one or two of them, if at all. Even at their most extreme, enemies barely ever hit for more than 3. To put this into perspective, Joe Diamond at full health can take two attacks from Azathoth itself and live to tell the tale.
That being said, your investigators will usually not reach the notable enemies while completely unharmed. While occasional attacks and scratches won’t kill them on their own, they can stack up. If during Brethren of Ash, your Joe already took some stray hits from cultists and Hellhounds, had to stand in a Fire for two turns and had some Noxious Smoke choke him out, he will be much less inclined to just take the attacks of the Servant of Flame than he would while still at full health.
There are two big reasons why treacheries are more capable of defeating us than monsters are. The first one is simply that the numbers go higher. Enemies usually only hit for 1, sometimes 2 damage and/or horror. Treacheries commonly scale up to 3 in one hit. The other is that treacheries have an immediate effect and if you don’t pass a test (provided you get to take one, some just do their thing) you take the hit. Enemies spawn and there’s a full investigator phase between that happening and the enemy phase, making it much easier to prevent taking any damage unless you deem it acceptable against the alternatives.
Now, obviously not every treachery is able to deal damage or horror and you will be passing at least some of the tests. But the actual fallout from the treacheries is less predictable than enemies are and just the threat of something hitting you for 3 damage or horror in the mythos phase should constantly be on your mind. The variance that comes from this is also how investigators can suddenly appear fragile after all. If your investigator is Isabelle Barnes who has 5 health, then she could in theory simply draw Noxious Smoke in both the first and second Mythos phase, completely botch her tests and keel over from the resulting 6 damage.
Scenario effects and card abilities are for the most part much less impactful and only contribute some additional points here and there. Had a Mutated Experiment die at your feet? That’ll be a horror. End your turn at the burning Miskatonic University? Take a damage, it is your fault it’s burning after all. You play around these as best as you can, but aside from that they just blend in with the rest of the damage sources.
Your investigator
When you want to evaluate how susceptible your investigator is to being defeated, there are primarily four numbers on their card that you will want to care about.
Their Health notes how much damage they can take. Sanity is how much horror they can take. This is pretty straight-forward and self-evident, higher numbers are better. There are some details to point out, however. The typical investigator will have 14 points in total between these two stats and between 5 and 9 in either. So if you for example look at Joe Diamond who has 7/7 in health/sanity, that means he’s not particularly vulnerable to either damage or horror, he can take a beating on either front. On the opposite ends of the spectrum you have Isabelle Barnes who is has 5/9 and Daniela Reyes who is 9/5 and accordingly are each particularly vulnerable to either damage or horror. As a general rule, a 5 in your Health or Sanity requires attention, as bad luck on just two treachery tests can spell your end.
That health and sanity add up to 14 is true for the vast majority of investigators, but not for all of them. There are some exceptions in chapter 1 like and Calvin who only gets 6/6 because of his special investigator mechanics. More notable are the investigators from the Investigator Starters (Nathaniel, Harvey, …) and from the Evergreen Decks (Tommy, André…) who get an extra point here. The two survivors from those decks even get yet another additional point, which gives both Miguel and Stella a truly impressive 8/8 health and sanity to work with.
The other two numbers that are important to consider are their Willpower and Agility values. This is because they are the primary skills being used to defend against the impact of treacheries. And since treacheries are the biggest source of damage and horror, being able to prevent some of them can do a lot to keep your investigator alive and sane.
One thing that isn’t a hard and fast rule, but that works out pretty well as a rule of thumb is that treacheries that deal damage will test your agility to counteract them, while treacheries that deal horror will require a willpower test to defuse. Again, there’s plenty of counter-examples, but as a rough guideline this works well enough. Does your investigator have low sanity coupled with low willpower? Low agility with low health? You might be in trouble, if you don’t do something about that.
If you take all these numbers together into account and also factor in any investigator abilities that might matter here, there’s some takeaways that again might be counter-intuitive. For example, i have held up Joe with his 7/7 health/sanity as relatively durable while using Izzie with her 5/9 as an example for a fragile investigator. The reality however is that Joe is cursed with just having a 2 in both Willpower and Agility and no relevant investigator ability to directly help out with that either. That will often turn him into the punching bag of the Mythos phase, with many treacheries going through uncontested and hitting him for full effect. Meanwhile, Izzie sports a 4 and 3 in willpower and agility and is centered around a playstyle that favors skills to boost up her values, which means she will have answers to those treacheries and can be relatively comfortable in knowing that the Mythos can not touch her. So in a direct comparison, at least during the Mythos phase Joe is actually the more fragile one between the two and he will need to devote some attention during deckbuilding towards making up for that. Of course, Izzie will need to be mindful of her 5 health as well. While passing her tests goes a long way, not all damage coming her way will actually allow her such a test, like her very own signature weakness.
Soak vs Healing
The most obvious way to increase your ability to stay alive is to just crank up those health and sanity numbers. This is done through assets that provide extra health and sanity, something we have come to call Soak.
Advantages of soak are:
- It’s asset based, which means it’s usually not subject to timing restrictions or extra conditions. You can simply put the tokens which would otherwise go on your investigator on these assets where they are effectively canceled.
- Its use can be spread out. As long as the asset provides enough points, you can allocate damage and horror from multiple sources across turns to it, trying to maximize its effect before it is defeated. One piece of soak can effectively cancel multiple damage/horror sources.
- Most assets do something else in addition to the soak. So you are not necessarily losing tempo through playing them, you are still progressing the game in some way or setting yourself up while *also* getting the benefits of the soak. The most common example is allies which do something on entering play and/or while in play and then also can take some punishment in your stead.
Disadvantages of soak are:
- It doesn’t heal you retroactively. If you want the soak to take damage for you, you need to play it before the damage actually happens.
- If the soak comes from an asset that does something else, it’s usually expensive to play. While a good ally will come with other benefits, you might still be looking at a 4 resource to play them. Assets that only have soak do exist and they don’t share this flaw, but then again you are also giving up one of the advantages with them.
- Soak is for you alone and won’t help other players at your location.
- Them being assets might come with other baggage or opportunity costs, like taking up an equipment slot.
- Direct damage and horror bypasses your soak. While it’s not super common, some treacheries and card effects might just be able to finish you off that way.
The other option is employing Healing, which doesn’t increase your number itself, but makes it last longer through reducing the amount of damage and horror tokens on you.
Advantages of healing are:
- It’s retroactive, so you can scale it to the damage and horror you’ve actually taken and only play it when actually needed. That means you don’t have to spend resources, cards and actions to ward off something that might not end up mattering after all.
- It’s efficient. Healing cards for the most part do only heal, nothing else. So when you invest your resources into a healing card you would expect to get better returns than when you would put them towards a card that serves multiple purposes at once.
- Healing comes with options. Many healing cards can be used on other players or with the option to heal assets instead of yourself.
- Healing will take care of the damage/horror no matter the source. Once a damage token is placed down it doesn’t matter anymore if it’s from regular damage, direct damage or trauma. Healing can take care of either, where soak would only be able to touch regular damage.
Healing has some disadvantages as well, of course:
- It’s often one-shot events which comes with less flexibility than asset based soak. Asset based healing does exist too, but will usually be bound heavily through a limited number of uses as well.
- Spending cards and actions on healing means you aren’t spending them on advancing the game. While not losing is important, the tempo loss that comes from playing cards that don’t investigate or fight needs to be considered.
- Healing can often be awkward to use in the heat of battle. While you can put down some extra soak in preparation for a tough boss enemy fight, it can be problematic if you have to heal mid-combat.
Again, none of this is set in stone. Arkham being a card game with lots of cards, there will always be examples that break one or more of these rules. Often, breaking one of these rules is why a particular card is actually good. For example, Lucky Charm is not only a cheap asset for soaking a few points of horror, but it also allows moving already existing tokens around, enabling your soak to also cancel out direct damage and horror. Bandages might be worded as a healing card, but the way it applies on taking damage, it acts more like soak but again bypassing some of its disadvantages. Bodyguard and Rookie Cop allow a Guardian to use their soak to tank for other players at their location, something that normal soak doesn’t do.
Damage Prevention or: “Just pass your tests!”
Literal damage prevention as an effect does exist in this game, but it’s rare and will usually either come with steep restrictions and/or can be understood as variants on soak or variants on healing that come with similar up- and downsides. If you want to not need soak or healing or at least less of it there’s still a way to make it so you take less damage than someone else would. And that is passing your treachery tests. Easier said than done, of course.
If you use a Guts or Unexpected Courage to pass the test on a Noxious Smoke, that’s really the most efficient way to get by. You just warded off 3 potential damage and it cost you neither action nor resources. It only cost you the skill card and if you used Guts you will even get that card in hand replaced. Obviously, this outcome vastly surpasses anything that soak or healing could do for you. That being said, if you fail your test, you now take the full brunt of the effect *and* lose your card you invested into the test…
So when looking at your investigator and decide on which cards to run in their deck to make sure they don’t get defeated, your first question should be how you can make them pass as many of those tests as possible. If you have a willpower or agility of 3 or more, that will usually be worth building on, with the likes of Guts and Manual Dexterity. But it’s also worth considering the commit icons in your deck. A nice set of icons like on Lie in Wait or De-Escalate can make the difference between a card that gets cut as your 31st card that doesn’t make the deck and one that earns its place.
It gets more difficult if you have a 2 or even less in your defensive base skill values. Again, Joe Diamond is our prime example here, with a 2 in both. One could question if it’s even worth running Guts for him. Assuming that most treacheries will test at difficulty 3, bringing your skill value up to 4 still doesn’t put you in a great spot. Sometimes it’s still worth doing, but in those cases, going for the guaranteed effects of soak and healing may very well be preferable. Or you find cards that offer large bonuses, like the talents that allow spending resources to spike your skill value or skill cards with 3 or more icons to commit to key tests.
Skill cards aren’t the only way to improve your chances with skill tests, there’s plenty of asset based solutions as well. As a passive bonus they will usually give +1 to the skill test instead of the +2 or more that can be gained from skills, but they will give it for multiple tests as long as they stay in play. Especially investigators that have high base values of 4 or more in either willpower or agility can gain a lot of extra test security from these assets. A Bloodstone will take Marie Lambeau from 4 to 5 willpower, which is a notable step up when dealing with tests of 3 difficulty. At that point she’ll already pass most of those tests with about 70% certainty (on Standard difficulty) and just a single commit of one or two icons can increase that further or even put it in “everything but the autofail” range.
There is one more thing i want to talk about that falls under the “damage prevention” umbrella and that is Evasion. Enemies do threaten to deal damage and horror to the players in the enemy phase and for the most part that means that the players will use up their actions to neutralize them before the enemy phase comes around. Evasion is a way to not spend a whole lot of effort on that and just temporarily take an enemy out of the equation. It uses agility, so it shares a skill with one of the ways to defend against treacheries. The same sort of considerations apply here, with a base value of 3 or higher being worth to build on while anything lower might mean that evasion is just not in your skill set. At least not the usual way without some card that specifically enables it, like Breaking and Entering.
Conclusions and Deckbuilding Tips
When building your deck, you will first want to take stock of your needs to find the right amount of survivability from your cards. As we’ll go more into in the second (EDIT: third) article, there is a push and pull between tempo and survival, between winning the game and not losing it. You don’t want to build overly defensive or you might struggle to bring enough power to the board to finish in time, but on the other hand it doesn’t matter how powerful your weapons are if you get defeated from horror so the glass cannon approach is usually a bad idea as well.
The first step should be identifying your shortcomings.
Low health? Low sanity? You will probably want to skew the soak that is available to you towards fixing that up. Soak specifically will be good here as it can be played in advance, so you don’t get some surprise damage or horror sprung on you while you have healing cards in hand you can not use in time.
Low willpower? Expect to take more horror than other investigators, how exactly to deal with that might depend on your sanity again. Low willpower, high sanity is a combination that healing can cover very well as you do have a buffer for at least one or two big impacts that you can react to afterwards. Low willpower, low sanity… well, you might just need both soak and healing. The same goes for low agility in relation to the health value, of course.
Do you have good or at least passable willpower or agility? In that case, Guts and/or Manual Dexterity are probably going to make the cut. Other skills and assets can further bolster your encounter defense. A strong defensive attribute can be enhanced to the point where you neutralize most of the danger coming from the encounter deck, freeing up deck space to instead plug up where you are lacking.
The class of your investigator has a big influence of all of this. Not only does the card pools of the classes have different strengths and weaknesses, but the investigators themselves trend certain ways.
Guardians usually have solid willpower, but only middling to bad agility. They trend towards higher health than sanity. Their card pool has plenty of good soak and some healing for both damage and horror.
Seekers are fairly balanced overall, with slight trend towards willpower and sanity over agility and health. Their card pool has a lot of horror healing and few damage healing cards. Cheap disposable allies that can be used for soak are a bit of a Seeker trademark.
Rogues are notoriously weak in both willpower and sanity, but they are the premier agility class. Their soak isn’t efficient and there is only little healing, which makes them scramble to find ways to offset their willpower vulnerability.
Mystics are on the other end of the spectrum, they are the willpower class and generally feature high sanity over health. Their agility is often lacking, but not to the degree that rogues are lacking in willpower. Their better skill cards and access to encounter cancellation gives them solid outs to their vulnerabilities.
Survivors are true to their name and the least vulnerable class. Their willpower is not exceptional, but also not bad and can be easily fixed up with their cards. They trend towards good agility, but not as much as rogues. They have good soak and healing options available as well, although more for damage than for horror.
Again the usual disclaimer holds true that these are trends, not hard and fast rules. High willpower rogues exist, as do low agility ones. Or, for that matter, those without a statline to speak of at all. There is also some difference in philosophy here between chapter 1 and chapter 2, for example the horror healing being a major part of Seeker is a more recent development and was previously more found in Guardian and Mystic. Generally, the game is playable solo which means that each class has at least some tools to do everything, they just are going to vary in how efficient they are.
One of the hallmarks of a good card is that it can do several jobs at the same time. If you play Daniel Jameson, he will increase your agility by 1, providing value both against damage treacheries and against enemies. He also brings a relatively large amount of soak with him that can by itself offset another one or two treacheries or attacks. If you are Isabelle, then Bloodstone will not only build up her already solid willpower, but also provide some damage soak that perfectly acts as a contingency for her one glaring weak spot.
Another thing that might influence your decisions in this regard are multiplayer concerns. Do you have Carolyn Fern on your team? She might just be able to take care of your horror issues, in fact she might welcome your for taking horror that she can turn into clues. Do you have a Daniela on your team who is playing Bodyguards and Rookie Cops? She might be able to soak some damage or horror for you when it would endanger you otherwise. Is Izzie with you? She might be able to throw some of her bottomless supply of wild icons your way when you really need them. Obviously, you can’t rely on other investigators all the time, but it can take some of the edge off to know there are contingencies.
To be continued…
The final bit i is one i want to only talk shortly about here, because i am going to pick it up again in the second article. There is a bit of a trap to having too much survivability. You want enough to reliably get to the end of a scenario of course. But anything more than necessary is going to be a liability because it comes at the opportunity cost of something that could have helped you “win” instead of only “not lose”. Don’t go overboard and try to find cards that maybe do something else than just add survivability. There’s a lot more to say about this, but I will leave it at that anyways as sort of a teaser for the next article, “Doom, Actions and Tempo, or: How To Win at Arkham”! EDIT: … for the next articles, starting with “Doom and Clues, or: How to Win at Arkham, part 1“