Hey everybody,
After an exciting December of gaming, I have (among other things) concluded my Scarlet Keys campaign for Arkham Horror LCG! Overall, I do feel a little bit like this one was a let-down, and I will explain why shortly. I want to start with a brief overview of what this campaign is about, though, and how it works differently from other campaigns.
It’s a globe-trotting adventure, as I think we all know, and involves the investigators forming a loose alliance with the Foundation as they attempt to track down “keys” that seem related to some mysterious disappearances. They are also being hunted for by the shadowy Red Coterie, an international syndicate of figures who seem to be nefarious at best, outright criminals at worst. The investigation takes us across all seven continents, and along the way we come into contact with others looking into the strange temporal goings-on around these keys.
The principal game mechanic here is Concealed, which involves mini-cards of some key enemies who are, surprisingly, hiding during the scenario. You need to test your strength or evade against the shroud value of the location to turn over a mini-card, which is either a decoy or the enemy itself. This can be quite interesting, though as time goes on, it gets a bit annoying. As more enemies enter the shadows, and more mini-cards are placed in the scenario, you can end up with a small stack of the things to chew your way through.
Travelling around the world will also mark time in your quest, and you only have so long before there comes a reckoning with the Coterie. Depending on where you have been before, and how much time has already passed, can depend on what you can do when you stop over. Not every space on the game map will have an actual scenario associated with it, and most will just be a choose-your-own-adventure thing with a few paragraphs that will change the story based on where you are in the campaign. A lot of people online took issue with the fact that the game needs you to spend probably as long reading these things as you’ll spend playing with the cards.
Personally, playing solo, I didn’t really mind the reading, and I mentioned in a previous post how I’d gotten into a rhythm where I was playing a game then reading however many it took until I got to the point where I was ready for the next one. It worked fine, until I got to Marrakech, and evidently had arrived too late to play the scenario, in terms of time passed in my journal. So I basically skipped the whole thing and clocked up a bad result, overall!
Now, the not-so-new model of campaign-in-a-box allows them to design a campaign where you can miss a scenario entirely, whereas the six-pack model could never have done this, or else you’d run the risk of people buying something they can’t play with. But it still left a bit of a sour taste for me, as I had been planning to stop there before heading off for the final showdown. In the end, I think I just went off in a fit of pique to that showdown, and kinda rushed through the finale. I didn’t really enjoy it, and so the campaign ended on a bit of a sour note, if I’m honest.
Overall, I think it was fine. It wasn’t the great experience that I had been hoping for, though, and I think the rushed ending is only partly to blame for that. There is a lot of reading, there’s no getting around that fact, and the preamble to the finale involves reading around four pages of text, and checking off whether certain conditions were met – it took around 20 minutes to work out everything before I even got to the actual setup. There’s definitely a lot to keep track of, but if you’re a fan of the game then it can be quite rewarding when done right. I suppose I was just on a bit of a downer because of the way in which I had arrived at the finale!
Something that has really bugged me about the campaign, and something that I haven’t seen mentioned a lot, is how haphazard it all seems to be. MJ, in her concluding thoughts write-up for the campaign, mentions how Eldritch Horror was her favourite Arkham game back in the day, and she designed this campaign years ago as a homage, almost. Eldritch Horror does see the investigators rushing all over the world, but it does seem rather abstract overall, and so it’s never been too much of an issue for me to suspend my disbelief to the extent that the travel mechanic makes sense in that game. Given that Arkham Horror LCG has always tried for more immersion and stuff, being able to shimmy up the eastern seaboard with impunity, and criss-cross the globe in a frantic search for keys and roaming professors seemed to drag me out of the story a little bit. I can appreciate what the campaign was trying to do, but I think it went too wild with this travel stuff, and I think I would have preferred to have something that lets you either go one way around the world, or the other. Being able to go pretty much anywhere, and double back on yourself more than once, did feel a little silly, and I ended up really not enjoying it because of that.
Sounds a bit over the top, when I put it into words, doesn’t it?
The way I played it, I think I had a total of six games overall. I definitely missed a couple of scenarios, not sure how I missed one or two of them, but I suppose that helps with the replayability? I did enjoy a couple of them – the Alaska scenario was good, for example, and I did like the Istanbul chase through the market, as well. I’m not sure, of course, but I might one day go back and replay those scenarios – well, sometime in the future, I’m sure to re-try this whole campaign, after all! But given the random nature of the scenarios taking place in multiple parts of the world, with multiple different characters, I think the lack of a strong unifying theme has led to me thinking of this as being a string of standalone scenarios, with a loose thread of red fabric being strung through them all.
It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong – the game overall is too good for it to have a bad campaign. But I don’t think it’s currently sitting too high on my rankings list. But it’s the first time something like this has been attempted for the game – Edge of the Earth was still fairly linear, when you think about it – so there are bound to be missteps. They may well try something like this again in a few years, but I hope they keep it more on-track rather than going too open-world. It is set in the 1920s, after all – the amount of global travelling I did probably meant the campaign took place over six or seven years, really…
Anyway. The decks are away, and new investigators are poised to take on the horrors of Carcosa once again! I wasn’t entirely sure about my last play-through with that campaign last year, so I want to try it again with a new pair of investigators, and see how far I can get!
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