Arkham Horror

We played this yesterday, and had lots of fun. You play a group of investigators who rush around in H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham and try to push back the gibbering horrors from beyond the stars, before they swallow the world. The game itself is quite old, its first version was published in 1987. The new version is from Fantasy Flight Games.
A few things stand out:
- The game is cooperative: Everybody wins, or everybody loses. A bit like real life. I like this a lot.
- The game is complicated. There is a veritable cloud of counters, about a dozen card decks, a subrule to every subrule. Counters and cards are packed with info. Monsters move, or they don't, or they vanish. You might lose sanity, or not. Nothing is simple. The group has to take great care, or you will miss some details, making the game too hard or (in our case) too easy. It would be useful to have at least one certified rules-lawyer in the group.
- It takes about four hours with two new players out of five, just as advertised.
- After a few rounds, the mechanics and the make-up of the turns becomes quite natural, and you get a feeling where the certain areas of the board are and what they do.
- The game is quite gorgeous.
- The German rules are for wimps. True men use the English rules with their higher monster count.
- Being blessed is good. Being the deputy sheriff is better.
- A psychologist with a shotgun can take down ANYTHING.
- In retrospect, I thought that there would be more cooperation. In Battlestar Galactica, the cooperative element can be downright fierce, as everyone who is not doing their utmost and cleverest to save Galactica is suspected to be the traitor, and then it's off to the brig, doing the Galactica perp-walk. So everybody is very aware off his contribution to the common cause. Here, nobody starts to point fingers if you do your own thing for a few turns. But then, in last night's game the outcome never seemed to be in doubt.

Yesterday, we turned the tide against the unnameable horrors. But then, we missed a special feature of our main opponent, which would have changed our gameplay a lot. Turns out you can't just waltz down the French Quarter, killing Yig's cultists left and right without any repercussions. We'll take that into account next time.