Troisdome: Arkham Horror VS Elder Sign VS Arkham LCG

Board Game VS Dice Game VS Card Game

I suspect the winner on this site will be the newest one, but maybe I'll be surprised. I left out Eldritch Horror as its basically a reimplementation of AH. So any wayward votes for EH will be counted under the Arkham Horror board game.

Vote: Call of Cthulhu LCG

Arkham Horror is a terrible game. Despite the mantra of the fanatics who love it, it tells no cohesive story. It's narrative is merely a bunch of disjointed snippets that have no relation to one another. It is long. It is dull. It's upkeep is a complete pain in the ass. I hate it.

Elder Sign is weak. It may be better than Quarriors but it isn't as good as Dice Masters. If I want to play Yatzee, I'll play Yatzee.

Arkham Horror LCG is great fun with a scaling set of difficulty. Is based on another great game (Lord of the Rings LCG) but is better at multi-player. It's story is cohesive, intriguing and entertaining. Of these three, it's no contest.

Vote: Arkham Horror LCG

Years before I started playing Arkham Horror, I was running the Call of Cthulhu rpg for my friends. Sprawling campaigns like Spawn of Azathoth and excellent one-shots like nearly everything in Mansions of Madness (the rpg supplement, not the boardgame). My favorites were the Lovecraft Country supplements, because instead of offering tightly-focused narrative adventures (aka "railroading the players"), Lovecraft Country supplements were big sandboxes for characters to wander around in. I could set adventures in the Town of Arkham or Kingsport, and players could chase the clues, lose their way, and sometimes end up in surprising danger of an unrelated nature.

I also read a lot of books. The essential nature of a narrative is to endlessly pursue the question, "And then what happened?" A story can be tightly focused, even claustrophobic, in obsessing on a limited number of characters in a very specific situation, or it can be an epic journey through a wide range of situations and locations and characters. In the hands of a decent writer, either type of story can be great.

Arkham Horror is a Lovecraft Country sandbox-style adventure, an epic story where anything can happen next. The story may be an illusion, but the characters have a lot of control over where they go and what they do, which can still add up to a decent narrative.

Arkham Horror LCG is a small tightly-focused adventure, where the GM is keep the players on the railroad tracks, and the only deviations permitted might be the order in which plot elements reveal themselves. Players have less control and replay is limited.

Elder Sign is Cthulhu Yahtzee. A boring dice-rolling exercise that can be partially alleviated with the app and some alcohol.

Vote: Arkham Horror

Arkham Horror represents my full return to gaming since 1995.
Prior to that, I was only playing Haborg games Epic Duels and Heroscape.

I love AH. And I hate it. I can craft enough of a narrative from it, and exploration is great. But the set up is an absolute chore. It never gets played anymore, and the amount of stuff I have is frankly - gross.

I had Mythos as a college student. I didn't like it. Related; I did not like the CoC implementation.

I thought Elder Sign would be the thing. It was not. I've enjoyed the occasion game on my phone.

I thought Eldritch Horror would be the thing. It was not. It reminded me a lot more of the globe trotting scenarios from the CoC RPG (especially, Curse of Cthulhu and Masks of Nyralathotep). Unfortunately, it also reminded me of Pandemic. I don't like Pandemic.

I thought Arkham Horror LCG would be the thing. Except on principle, the idea of a LCG disgusts me. My moral gaming code is shattered. The LCG is pretty god damn great.

ARKHAM HORROR LCG

Eldritch Horror. Elder Sign is one of our favorites but the “story-as-blurbs” isn’t cutting it as narrative.

I played the Call of Chtulhu CCG at one point and it flopped; I was hesitant to try the LCG and was pleasantly surprised, while being disappointed at the subscription-style format which would have me buying endless expansions.

VoTe: ELDRITCH HORROR

I've never played the LCG, and I sold my Arkham Horror after barely touching it due to its length.

Elder Sign is still on my shelf. Winner: Elder Sign

I've only played Arkham Horror, but I've played it a lot. It was my solo gaming companion through two terms in baby-jail. Long nights with a baby in a sling and Cthulhu on the board. I think I'd like the LCG if I ever played it. The dice game holds zero interest.

Winner Arkham Horror

And for my next number, I'd like to return to the classics, perhaps the greatest classic, in all the world of musicboardgaming:

Vote: ARKHAM HORROR

I've enjoyed the years with Arkham Horror, but all of those most recent years have contained no sessions of it. I've had my complete collection up for sale for quite some time now. It's a decent time, but the bookkeeping attached to it with many of the expansions just isn't worth it, in the end.

I tried Elder Sign, both real world and app versions, and didn't get much out of it. Too abstract for a setting that should be the pinnacle of Ameritrashiness (see: Arkham Horror.)

I LOVED the Call of Cthulhu LCG, but could never find any other players, so I sold it. I haven't tried the new one because I don't do collectible stuff anymore.

So, if my vote counts at all, I'd say CoC LCG which probably stands in for the Arkham LCG.

I'm not sure what this Trashdome is going to say apart from which genre is most popular - long epic dungeon-crawl type, dice game, or story driven card game.

I have owned (still own two of them) and played them all - the one i traded on, the LCG Game, was a very clever and well designed game but it didn't click with the two of us who played it and I wasn't keen on having to buy expensive content to get a new experience, I like the suspense in the story so once I knew what was going to happen after the first play trying it with different character decks wasn't really that appealing to me. Elder Sign is a fun and clever game if you like the theme and rolling dice, I like both. Arkham Horror is a slow, epic, sometimes a slugfest, dungeon crawl type of game (buff up for the final fight) that I enjoyed when having time and lack of choice to get it out, these days I have too many other long games to play and it gathers dust as I can do another long game followed by Eldritch Horror (more of an adventure game) to get the same itches scratched,

Vote: Arkham Horror (but Eldritch Horror swapped in when no one is looking)

There is no way in 2018 that Arkham Horror wins this. It's a game whose time has come and gone. Twice, technically. 13 years ago, there wasn't much like it and it was a return to a kind of gameplay that had fallen out of favor and was largely forgotten. 13 years on, there are any number of games that have stronger narratives, stronger gameplay, and less fat. Eldritch Horror would be one such example, but it is heading toward bloat itself at this point and it does have some irritating elements, such as the whole "remove a progress marker that took you 20 minutes to achieve" thing. Elder Sign is garbage except as an app game.

However, Arkham Horror LCG is a phenomenal game. It has a TON of narrative, moreso than Mythos or COC LCG ever did. The character development- which is depicted in deck construction- blows away getting a +1 will token or whatever. The game is dynamic, the scenarios have a ton of variety, and there is such a strong sense of atmosphere, setting, and cohesive storytelling. It's also one of the more balanced co-op games I've played (at least so far) in that I have yet to feel screwed by a bad shuffle or an untimely draw.

There is no contest here- Arkham Horror LCG is the most developed, refined, and modern game out of this lot.

Arkham Horror is fucking stupid and a pain in the ass to play. Playing with someone who knows how to run it cannot save it as it’s still a chore to sit through. It’s one of those “RPG in a box” thing before anyone had any idea how to make one. It suffers from every imaginable bad design choice a co-op game can have. I tend to dislike all of the longstanding giants of AT gaming, but I just might hate Arkaham Horror the most. I want nothing to do with it.

It’s 2018. Why are we still talking about Elder Sign? Why Elder Sign and not the excellent Eldritch Horror?

Arkham Horror LCG, on the other hand, is a masterpiece. It doesn’t do anything new but it does do everything it does so damned well. It’s also a rare case in gaming of being excelptionally well written. For a series of games based on one writer’s body of work, it’s the only one that makes something genuinely coherent out of it and is quite literary in its own right.

Vote: Arkham Horror LCG

Several F:ATties publicly renounced Eldritch Horror last year, including Barnes. So maybe that's why it doesn't have a place in this Dome.

I have looked at Arkham Horror LCG on multiple occasions at the store, but I really hated the Pathfinder cardgame and this seems too similar. And the reviews that I have seen have often been neutral or somewhat negative about the LCG.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the cost of the Arkham LCG. For a game with scenarios with limited replay value, it seems structured like a conveyor belt that delivers money to the Asmodee/FFG bank account.