Arkham Horror The Card Game: the greatest deck construction introduction of all time… if you can get there.

I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. I have to agree 100% that purchasing the 5 investigator decks really cracked this game open and made so much more fun. Like probably 300% more fun. The investigator cards added with each cycle keeps the deck building and "character development" interesting.

When we hit the 3rd cycle, with all the cards from the investigator packs, plus all the cards from the core and 3 cycles, is when I hit the WOW! point. Now I really want to go back and replay the earlier campaigns with different investigators.

If you are doing the math, it took $300+ for this game to really shine. It was a worthwhile investment for me, because I spent the money over a 3-4 year period, $15 at a time, so it was almost painless. But more importantly, I have a built in partner to play with, and we go through periods when we will play multiple times a week. So it is probably my most frequently played game.

Another thing to note, is that organizing all these cards also requires an investment of time and/or money. You are likely to end up purchasing the "Return To" sets, or some other card box storage solution + dividers. I just recently spent an entire rainy day printing and laminating dividers, and organizing cards in order to get our enormous collection under control, and streamline set up/clean up and deck building. And we only own 3 of the cycles.

Another thing, the rule that you have to pay experience points to swap out zero point cards also makes it hard to get into the game as a new player. We threw that rule out the window for the first campaign or so, because it really sucks to be halfway through a campaign and realize that you screwed yourself by making uninformed choices at the very start. It gave us the freedom to flail through the deck building, and learn by trial and error.

So I would certainly advise beginners to ignore that rule and tune their deck between scenarios as they get a better handle on how things work.

Gary Sax wrote: Incidentally, I was talking about this on discord, but I think it's good for the "why would I play a scenario more than once?" question that naturally comes up when people think about how friggin expensive this game is.

Oh, gosh. Yeah we play through scenarios multiple times. Particularly the the first few in a campaign, when trying out new characters. We not only have to figure out how our characters and decks work and interact with the scenario/campaign, but also make sure the two characters work together. I don't use other people's deck lists, because it is more fun to figure that out for yourself. I mean, to me, that's the biggest part of the game. So we will often play the first scenario or two a few times to get everything working. We have even played the first couple of scenarios and decided that our characters don't work together at all, and started over from the beginning with new ones.