Arkham Horror: The Card Game

I’m fortunate enough to have the space to keep the prelude map up on my next run through, but it’s not my first choice. I’d probably prefer a text tree, but I get why they didn’t do it.

The Mythos Busters podcast hosted their second BusterCon this weekend. Fun to see how hard people went on the game. There were custom chaos tokens and Lego mini-figs instead of investigator cards, and 3d-printed cups for holding enemies and their damage.

Epic multiplayer scenarios on the first day. All fans should try Labyrinths of Lunacy once for Arkham-does-Saw, but it crawled, so Machinations in Time could run. MJ just got so much better at massive scenarios in the interim. The interactions between tables are more interesting, the setting is more fun and it just runs smoother. Highlight was seeing Rita Young the track star, maligned for years since her release, finally coming into her own. Her player single-handedly managed a 12-health mini-boss on his own for two rounds and managed plenty more fighting beyond that.

Saturday was the Edge of the Earth Ironman. The full campaign in one day. Half of the scenarios are optional, but we settled on six for xp purposes. I as Kate Winthrop the scientist was the only member of the team to not lean hard into bless, but I took Ravenous Myconid because I figured it would be no problem to consistently top him up if I were pulling +2 tokens. Parallel Zoey and Father Mateo kept our bag topped, and Tommy Muldoon put the tokens to good use on his “The Only Gun is Shotgun” build. It was a five-card combo, but one set up, the bullets never ran out. Eliyah did not succumb to madness because he was reminded the dogs needed him. Obviously because that’s his one personality trait. The campaign was an absolute grind by six in the evening with another four hours still to go, but we wrecked it up pretty good. Only one investigator ever failed to finish a scenario, and everyone got out alive at the end.

Ironman next year is Scarlet Keys. Pretty sure I’ll skip it unless I can convince a team to just run standalones in lieu of the actual campaign scenarios.

Six hours of Arkham on Friday and twelve on Saturday is a lot. I don’t know how the Thursday and Sunday players managed it.

Hey folks, any advice on this appreciated. With the great 'retirement' looming which Investigator Expansions should I prioritise purchasing? These are what I'm missing. (* indicates I own the campaign.)

The Forgotten Age Investigator Expansion *
The Circle Undone Investigator Expansion *
The Innsmouth Conspiracy Investigator Expansion
The Dream-Eaters Investigator Expansion
The Scarlet Keys Investigator Expansion *
Hemlock Vale Investigator Expansion


FA is top of the list as that's the oldest, most likely to disappear soon and I love that campaign. SK & HV are my low priorities as they'll likely be around for a while. Much as I'd like to get Drowned City to be part of the "forever changed" hype, I'm thinking my next campaign purchase will be Innsmouth.

What means "great 'retirement'"?

Last week FFG announced changes to the LCG model. They'll be "retiring" everything before the last "2-3 years" in both Arkham and Marvel Champions.

This will be the model moving forward. The lifespan of new sets will be that loosely defined "2-3 year" period before they are "retired". Once sets are 'retired' - or rotated out - they will no longer be reprinted.

Retired sets will now be considered 'Legacy' so you can still play with your collection, while new sets will be considered 'Current'. Designers on both games will only be balancing the new content for Current.

Here's a link to the official article at FFG's site that explains it:

www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2025/...legacy-environments/

I completely understand the dilemma from their end, it must be impossible to design non-broken stuff. But I'm annoyed not about older stuff being unplayable in their current system, I can still go ahead and play it, who gives a shit. What I'm annoyed about is the corpus of cards I'm going to have to buy that's going to have replicate core functionality of retired cards taking up like half of the boxes you buy.

I don't even know if it's that good for newer players is the thing, this is confusing and you're still bopping in late with a giant mess of cards in the psat other people might have. I think overall they should have just rebooted a 2nd ed.

Kmann wrote: Hey folks, any advice on this appreciated. With the great 'retirement' looming which Investigator Expansions should I prioritise purchasing? These are what I'm missing. (* indicates I own the campaign.)

The Forgotten Age Investigator Expansion *
The Circle Undone Investigator Expansion *
The Innsmouth Conspiracy Investigator Expansion
The Dream-Eaters Investigator Expansion
The Scarlet Keys Investigator Expansion *
Hemlock Vale Investigator Expansion

I would definitely prioritize Forgotten Age and Circle Undone investigator expansions first. I find they have a lot of generally useful cards that different investigators can use. Innsmouth is a lower priority because it leans so heavily into bless and curse and is very self contained, but if you like the mechanic, Hemlock Vale really pushes it and is an easy purchase. Dream Eaters is solid with three of the most busted investigators in the game. Scarlet Keys and the customizable cards are fine.

I'd probably go earlier first too, they tend to be have more generically useful and flexible cards since they were still filling out the card pool without gimmicks.

Thanks! That's really helpful. I'll grab FA and Circle this month. Appreciate the advice.

When I originally posted I was in no rush and there were no stock issues. But panic buying has obviously hit down here as stock levels were either low or sold out on both the FA and CU Investigator packs.

In fact, no stores had both packs. This sucked as shipping to NZ had to be added, as well as the unfavourable $$ exchange rates. So Friday night was spent tracking them down and trying to calculate the most affordable deals.

The CU Investigator box and two scenario packs (Fortune & Folly and Midwinter Gala) are coming from Amazon US. I hadn't been too bothered about missing out on the scenario packs but I needed to boost my cart to qualify for the free shipping so I grabbed them. Annoyingly the FA Investigator box wasn't part of the free shipping promo so I couldn't do a one-stop shop here.

I ended up getting the FA Investigator box and a couple of Marvel Champions hero packs I'm missing from Zatu in the UK. It was worth throwing in the MC packs as I was paying for the shipping anyway and they were on sale and cheaper than I could find elsewhere taking shipping into account. They didn't have the CU Investigator box or I would have got that instead.

So it was all a bit more than I was ready to spend really, but after seeing stock disappearing so quickly I realised time wasn't on my side. And I am happy to have got them both while I could.

Once these arrive I'll have five boxes of Investigator cards (plus the core investigator cards and the Winnie and Harvey Starter Decks) which feels like a fairly generous selection of cards to deckbuild with.

I'm not sure where I'll go from here. I'm more inclined to buy Campaigns over the Investigator boxes going forward.

Yeah, I get the inclination. The card corpus is really well filled out as it is, so the campaigns ar ethe more attractive thing.

I'll be like totally honest, I had not considered how intense my FOMO would be with all the lost *investigators* to this switch in content style. I had been just focused on the player card deprecation thing, which I'm like open to but unsure, but I would be kinda annoyed if I didn't have the investigators from the previous sets which are going OOP.

I went through what you are going through with star wars armada last summer. I spent way too much money but it's pretty nice to have all the stuff from one of my favorite minis games except for one thing that no one has (venator star destroyers) which you can 3d print if you have to.

MPC/Artscow makes pretty excellent proxies if you want to fill in gaps in your collection and you can't find something. Getting the files out of the TTS mod in print quality shouldn't be too hard.