Advice Requested: Arkham Horror

[ralphmelton]

My web-searching skills have not helped with this question, so I request the advice of my gamer friends: what is the most fun combination of expansions and rules for Arkham Horror?

I picked up Arkham Horror last summer, because I'm attracted to cooperative games and I was in a mood to splurge. Since then, we've played three or four times. Each time, the game has been decent, but I've had the feeling that it could be better.

Here are weaknesses I'd like to overcome:

Slow play
Our last game lasted from about 7:30pm until after 1am. That was long enough that I was getting bored by the end, though others were engaged enough to lose track of time. The best fix for this would be to get more experience, so that we can play without pondering the rules so much.

Lack of drama
We haven't yet had a game in which we felt much uncertainty about the outcome. Most of our games have been fairly straightforward wins, with one loss that was inevitable for a long time. This might mean that we're doing something wrong, or it might mean that we haven't played enough to get into close games. But we've gotten lots of very close games of Pandemic, and I'd like for Arkham Horror to have similar white-knuckle potential.
One part of the issue is that once you seal a few gates in key locations and get some good equipment, the game ratchets down in difficulty. Compare this to Pandemic, where the infection rate increases as the game progresses, so even as you become more able to handle diseases, the diseases get harder to handle.

Uneven distribution of drama
When you do not have plenty of weaponry, it makes sense to specialize: you give most of your weaponry to one investigator to make him able to reliably kill monsters, and send him out to do the monster-killing to let others move freely. While this is good strategy, it's kind of boring for the other investigators. In our last game, Mike was just using his trust fund to buy things which he would then give to other players to use—an effective and useful tactic, but boring for him personally.
In the same vein, it often seems that the game ends with one player setting off through the last gate to seal that gate, while the other players are mostly twiddling their thumbs and waiting to see if that expedition is successful.

Little identification with characters
I'm not sure whether this is really a bug or not, but I don't feel any connection to my character while I'm playing; I just think of the character as a collection of statistics, without any sense of story there.

So, my Arkham Horror-playing friends: how have you overcome those issues? What play combinations do you find most satisfying?

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

I wasn't bored with what I was doing. I was feeling like I was wasting turns running around and gathering stuff rather than trying to do something. But, I felt a lot better about it when you reassured me that it was useful. You have some good critiques of the game. In any case, I'd be happy to play again sometime.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

That's good to hear. You were definitely helping us win with your dedicated shopping—but in your shoes, I would feel that I had gotten relegated to a supporting role.

[cellio]

You've summed up my experiences with the game pretty well. I hope some of your readers have some advice for us.

[echoweaver.livejournal.com]

I'm a dedicated Arkham player, and I noticed your reaction to the game when we were playing it at our place. Some of this is, I think, a matter of taste. I have never been bored doing the same thing every round because the game is collaborative, so my "role" is a very small piece of the pie. I don't identify strongly with my character any more than I identify with my role in Pandemic. In both games, I find the interesting part to be working with all the other players to form a strategy best using all the available resources.

We won a lot at the beginning. Then we started discovering fringe rules that we hadn't noticed before, and our success rate went down. Games where success or failure becomes clear early on, but the results take forever to spin out, do get pretty boring. It would be worth figuring out how to deal with those situations.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

Thanks for replying. I was particularly hoping to hear from you.

Part of the reason that I had that reaction when I was playing with you is that I didn't know the game well enough to strategize. The cure for that is to play more, and playing more has helped.

What's your favorite combination of expansions and rules?

[echoweaver.livejournal.com]

There's definitely a sweet spot in number of players and expansions to maximize tension while still making the goal possible. We attempted one epic game with 11 players and all the board-extending expansions, which is technically within the rules because adding a board should increase the maximum number of players by one.

This was fun, but only because it was a fun group of people who knew they were engaging in an experiment. The game itself was a disaster. We died in four rounds, and those rounds took all afternoon to play, including the obscenely complex board setup.

Additional experiments indicate that you should select ONE board-extending expansion per game. Probably ONE cards-only expansion is also doable in addition. Optimal players are 4-6. Since the enemy acts after every turn, adding more players actually reduces your chances of success.

As for specific expansions, I think that all of the board expansions have something to recommend them, though I think Innsmouth is my least favorite. I'm not as wild about the card expansions, though we haven't played with the last two.

[(Anonymous)]

When you say "Since the enemy acts after every turn, adding more players actually reduces your chances of success.", you lead me to believe you are playing all phases during each players turn(eg. Upkeep, Movement, Arkham Encounters, Other World Encounters, and Mythos). Instead of each player completing a single phase of the turn before moving on to the next phase as the rules indicate. If that is the way you have been playing, that will make the game exceedingly difficult.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I've played it with Echoweaver, and we played it phase-by-phase as the rules said.