Arkham Horror Strategies and Tricks

In an effort to talk more about games and less about Italian meat products I figured I'd start a weekly thread to generate ideas on how to make Arkham Horror a better place.

Over the last 3 months I've played Arkham Horror in California, Minnesota, Dallas, Maryland and Pennsylvania and with about 20 different people. I've noticed slight differences in how everyone approaches Arkham Horror. Personally, I was taught how to play Arkham Horror by American Megafuna Dan and Uba. From Uba, I learned to place the highest priority on quickly getting clues and sealing gates but from playing with other people I learned that other people take different approach to Arkham Horror.

So what I'm going to do is submit a question every week about one aspect of Arkham Horror. If you have an idea for question send it my way and I'll add it to the list. If we run out of ideas about Arkham Horror we can switch to a different game.

Possible Future Questions:

What's your favorite thing to spend gates and monster trophies on?

What's your favorite Arkham Location for encounters?

If somebody handed you $10 in Arkham Horror where would you spend your money?

Are there any little trick you have to make the game run more smoothly?

When are you willing to use clue tokens?

I always have my Luck, Fight, Will, Sneak Slider in the wrong place at the wrong time. How do you decide to adjust your sliders?

Week #1 question. What do you do on your first few turns in Arkham Horror?

Uba's East Coast Strategy: Get clues. Once you get 5 or 6 clues start jumping through gates and seal gates. This seemed like a logical strategy based on the fact the objective of the game is to seal 6 gates. The idea here is that at the beginning of the game there's a lot clues and not many monsters in your way so you want to grab them up before gates open up and up all the clues.

Minnesota Strategy from Shellhead and Thaad: Get gear up. Get weapons, spells and stuff. Then you're ready to kill some stuff. This also makes sense because there's nothing worse than being stuck in woods or somewhere else with a difficult monster blocking your way and all you have to fight the monster with is a cross and a lantern. Also, you want to make sure you get to the General Store before the Terror Track hits 3.

So how do you like spending your first couple of turns in Arkham?

KingPut wrote:

So how do you like spending your first couple of turns in Arkham?

At the risk of sounding like a total asshole, "it depends."

It depends (in my opinion) on what characters were chosen. i feel that it's really important for people to play to the strengths of their characters.

But all other things remaining equal, I say GATHER CLUES is the priority. You save up money and work that stuff out as you gather clues and do other stuff but have in mind that you gotta be spending most money trying to buy Elder Signs at some point.

It's true, unless I start with good gear, I hit the stores first, starting with the General Store. By good gear, I mean both a physical weapon and a magical weapon, ideally one-handers giving at least +3 damage each. Oh, and some money, ideally at least $5 for a couple of train rides and maybe a trip to the Asylum.

A lot depends on the other characters and their starting gear. We tend to label each other at the start. You're playing the trumpet player? You're a sealer. Michael McGlenn... you're definitely a monster whacker.

So if I'm already set for combat, then I check to see how the other players are set up. Is there anything that I can give them? Or trade? Is there somebody with a Find Gate spell who should be grabbing clues and sealing?

So maybe I'm running over to trade with somebody. Or running interference by whacking that first monster out of the way.

Alternatively, maybe I'm starting with a character who already has at least three clue tokens. In that case, I rush to the less active unstable locations (like Hibb's Roadhouse) to grab clue tokens and hopefully not stumble into an extra gate.

All other things being equal, my first move is usually to the General Store.

You should definitely gather clues in your first couple of turns. The clues on unstable locations can all to easily disappear, and at no time will you have as many available clues as in the beginning of the game.

However, my wife and I usually play four player games and if one character is closer to 5 or 6 clues, we'll usually let him/her go for the places with several clues.

The idea behind Stormknighst variant (which we've discussed elsewhere, but basically it's: place doom token when you'd normally have monster surge) is to make closing gates without sealing something you'd actually want to do. We usually play with it (but are ready to return to the original rules, I think), but actually rarely go for closing sans sealing anyways.

Black Barney wrote:

But all other things remaining equal, I say GATHER CLUES is the priority. You save up money and work that stuff out as you gather clues and do other stuff but have in mind that you gotta be spending most money trying to buy Elder Signs at some point.

If you're playing with more than a couple of expansions, fishing for Elder Signs is a big waste of time. There are only four in the game, and every time you go shopping, you are required to buy one of the three items if you can afford it. Camping out in the Curiositie Shoppe was viable before, but now it's a money pit.

I generally spend my first turns gathering clues or hoping into gates to close them. I figure the fewer gates on the board you can keep things under control while other players take the time to get enough clues in order to start sealing gates.

Great idea for an ongoing thread! AH is currently my favorite game but I don't get to play it often because of the time it can take.

I guess we kind of do a combination of the two opening strategies. The people near clues try to gather them up and the people near a store go shopping first. It's kind of a rush to do both, depending on where you are.

Every time I play, I wish that FFG had made this a big box game bursting with plastic. It just cries out for minis. Monster chits just don't cut it. You need them to randomly draw, but I want a fig to place on the board.

Oh, and future questions I'd like to see:

How the heck do people store the game and the expansions? The lid on my base game won't even close all the way now.

Has anyone tried the league scenarios posted on the FFG website?

SusanR wrote:

Every time I play, I wish that FFG had made this a big box game bursting with plastic. It just cries out for minis. Monster chits just don't cut it. You need them to randomly draw, but I want a fig to place on the board.

There would be a problem with scale for the miniatures. A ghoul would be about the same size as an investigator. A dhole would cover your table.

Good point. And we might go insane if we actually saw what they really looked like, right? It would be nice to have plastic minis for the player characters, though.

As many of you said what you do the first few turns depend on a number of variables such as the character you're playing, the other investigators in your group, what kind of stuff you start out with and which expansions you are playing with.

I just finished playing base game + Innsmouth with 5 players. I was playing the ex-con so my personal story said if I collect 5 clues I would pass but if only 3 clues were left on board I would fail. So you can guess what I did my first 5 turns.

With Innsmouth, I think it's a good idea to send one investigator up to Innsmouth right away to start dropping clues to get ready for the Federal Raid.

When you play Dunwich or Innsmouth I think it's a good idea also to send somebody through a gate right away to close it even if they can't seal it. I've seen a few games with about 4 investigators that end pretty quickly when there's 7 or so gates open on the board. When playing with Dunwich or Innsmouth you're more likely to end up with too many gates opening because there's more unstable locations than just playing the base game alone.

Shellhead wrote:

SusanR wrote:

Every time I play, I wish that FFG had made this a big box game bursting with plastic. It just cries out for minis. Monster chits just don't cut it. You need them to randomly draw, but I want a fig to place on the board.

There would be a problem with scale for the miniatures. A ghoul would be about the same size as an investigator. A dhole would cover your table.

Never mind the Cthonians...

I like the game much better with cardboard than I would plastic, I think. The monster tokens are easy to decipher and the investigators match the colour scheme of the game much better than would gray plastic. And the drawings also hold lots of details which would potentially be lost with plastic.

Don't get me wrong, I love plastic as much as the next guy. But for this game cardboard is brillant.

I generally agree with getting clues first. It's also not a bad idea for someone to run up to the Newspaper to try and get a job. The easy money from a retainer ensures that someone will be able to move about between the towns without getting stuck. All in all I tend to value clues above gear, since a lot of encounters can end up getting you spells and items and you usually don't need more than one souped-up combat machine in a game anyway.

We usually pick one guy to be "combat tank" and the others go hunting for clues and closing gates. In a 7 or 8 player you might have two tanks. A few of the other characters dictate other roles... like the doctor, or "no monsters or gates can appear on me" scientist girl, who sort of get stuck doing what they do.