Boardgame: Arkham Horror
In our continuing quest to become ostracized by society, some law school friends and I have picked up the activity of playing boardgames. Think Settlers of Catan minus the resource management. The game that we played was Arkham Horror (pictured below).
The game is set in a Lovecraftian city where all sorts of portals to unknown lore related extra-dimensional locations spring up. The point of the game is to close the portals and kill the monsters that come from those portals before the countdown timer runs out. Oh, did I mention there was a countdown? At the beginning of the game, you randomly draw an ultimate evil and, depending on which you draw, the instant game will be limited by the corresponding number of rounds. To “win,” you either have to seal all portals before you run out of rounds or you can simply fight the “ultimate evil” or you simply lose if you pick the wrong ultimate evil. Strategy-wise, your group is basically working together and has to decide to either attempt to shut down portals or to bulk up with the intention of killing the ultimate evil. There is a lot of long term thinking involved due to the round limitations. Luck is also factored into it in the form of rolling dice and drawing random cards. For example, one of our party members was completely debilitated by a curse that he could not remove for the entire game. That curse he had basically lost us the game.
Overall, a rather complicated game with complicated mechanics, but really easy to pick up and learn while you play.
January 20th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Settlers of Catan is better, where the “ultimate evil” is monopoly, collusion, and communism. It can only be defeated by strong competition and free trade! HAIL AYN RAND!!!!!!!!
January 20th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
David isn’t nerdy enough to handle the harder core games. I tried to show him Tigris & Euphrates and it was a disaster.
January 21st, 2009 at 7:33 pm
The rules in Tigris and Euphrates aren’t logical.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
That’s an interesting claim. What was illogical about them? What makes the rules of Catan logical in contrast? In any game system which relies on arbitrary rules (which is almost every game on the planet), so long as the rules don’t contradict (ie, CalvinBall, even then, they are conforming to the rule-less rule), I don’t think they can be described as illogical.