As previously mentioned on this blog, we’ve purchased Arkham Horror but had to wait until we got new tables to actually be able to play it. We finally got around to it last Sunday. We knew that it was going to be a long game so we planned on it taking the whole afternoon. For the first test game, my wife and I opted to take only one character each, chosen at random, but a hand-picked Great Old One, Nyarlathotep, that I’d been told would make for a shorter and slightly less challenging game. Four hours later, we gave up in disgust without completing the game although it was clear that we would eventually lose.

Being such good sports, we tried again in the evening, this time taking two characters each for a total of four characters. We did play this one to completion, though we had to leave the board as it was overnight and continue on Monday evening. Total playing time was around five hours and we lost, but only just barely, during the Final Battle. I’ve written a fairly extensive post on our experience over on QT3 so I don’t feel like repeating myself too much here. The subsequent comments from others are worth reading as well. Summary: my wife felt that it was like being tortured the whole time. In my case, it felt like a game in which things happen to my characters rather than my character actually doing things.

We’ll probably try again another time, and this time, we’ll have a better idea of how to play to beat the game, but probably not too soon! For my wife, it’s a novel experience as it’s the closest we’ve come so far to a more traditional RPG, but to me, the game mechanics feel too archaic and clunky. We probably can enjoy the game, but it just takes too long and is too arduous to play.

On a lighter note, here’s a photo of our session at CarcaSean last Saturday where we spent a little over two hours playing Agricola. Amusingly enough, there was another person there who wanted to play the same game and had friends coming but we eventually decided to join together for a four person game including the friendly shop owner Sean. As expected Sean ran away with the game but I don’t think I did too badly. Agricola is a wonderfully elegant design and that I’m tempted to buy just to experiment with possibilities but it plays quickly enough that it’s probably a better idea just to play it at the cafe.