Arkham Horror: The Innsmouth Conspiracy

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 9 out of 10

   halforange

   Review of just the Deluxe as an expansion: Scenarios: The Pit of Despair and The Vanishing of Elian Harper are great scenarios. The Pit of Despair includes the new flood and key tokens in cave escape scenario. It feels different from other Arkham scenarios and has a clever design. It is highly random, so it will feel very swingy. It’s tough, but interesting and very thematic. Vanishing makes you run around the town of Innsmouth ruling out locations and suspects for who kidnapped Elina Harper. This is very well designed scenario and that leads to a lot of replay ability. It is worth having in your collection as a standalone scenario and could reasonably work as a side scenario in a campaign. I highly recommend it. Player cards: The player cards are almost all centered around the new chaos bag mechanic, bless and curse tokens. They give you a +2 or -2 modifier on top of what you would normally draw from the bag. There aren’t enough cards in this deluxe expansion to form an entire card suite for this mechanic, but many of the basic cards (all are level 0) are interesting. A few cards like Faustian Bargain and Promise of Power will find their way into “non-bless/curse” decks as they are just generally helpful despite using curse tokens as a cost to play. In my opinion, there are more bless cards included so that Sister Mary can function without needing to buy the Innsmouth mythos packs. Investigators: There are three 5/2 (major/minor) class investigators and two investigators with access to main class and some traited cards. I think the investigators are interesting, some more than others. Silas and Trish seem to have fan clubs. Dexter unlocks cards that don’t make the table normally due to being too slow. Amanda has a fun twist on changing base values from round to round, and Sister Mary is the bless-centered Guardian. Note that Silas and Dexter were released in novellas with other signature cards. Value: Deluxe expansions are the best value in FFG’s 2016-2020 business model. You get 5 or 6 new investigators, two scenarios, and a few cards to add to your collection. For any cost conscious Arkham player, I recommend any of the deluxe expansions. However, I think Innsmouth is the best value out of all of them. The scenarios are both very good. You get new bless and curse tokens that can be used in any campaign, and there is a good set of investigators. I highly recommend this particular deluxe expansion.

2. 9 out of 10

   guzmo

   I was first a bit reserved about the new curse/bless mechanism to slow down the game if chaos bag is constantly altered. In reality after playing the two first scenarios it felt like natural part of game. Everyone liked the new tokens and fun of my rogue character drawing four curse tokens in row to fail an easy test. The "game value" of this cycle's main box might be more than others as it also introduces keys and flood tokens. New investigator cards are heavy with curse/bless theme, so this might also not be for everyone. Especially for those to improve their core collection of solid player cards. First two scenarios are both really good while more on the hard side what comes to difficulty. On first try we failed both of them and cant remember other cycle that had started with double failure. This makes even the dreaded FA feel easy in comparison ?

3. 8 out of 10

   Desiderata

   This campaign has the investigators dropped into the town of Innsmouth with no recollection of how they got there or what they're doing. The townsfolk are queer and distrusting of outsiders, and the investigators discover that they are not wanted there. Gradually, the investigators regain memories to piece together the full narrative and try to escape the town of Innsmouth alive. Because this is a harbor community, there is a lot of flooding in this story. Many of the enemies do some kind of damage or horror or discard at the moment they engage with you, and there are a lot of enemies. Also includes "keys" that investigators can find during scenarios that represent different story items. Recovering memories are beneficial, and sort of work like side-quests; great to complete if you can, but it's hard to get them all. Some scenarios are flashbacks, and so you can't spend experience in between each scenario, but more like after every two scenarios. Overall, I enjoyed this campaign, although I found it difficult to keep up with the fractured narrative.