The Great Lilah Catch-Up Post Part 2: Arkham Horror The Card Game

26 Nov, 2025

It's now been two whole weeks since my last installment of THE GREAT LILAH CATCH-UP POST TM SPONSORED BY BEARBLOG: A SERIES. Clearly it's taking a bit for me to fall back into the posting habit. But I'm here poking my head up again so now it's time to bring back some of that cohost posting energy with:

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

In my last post, I talked about my newfound obsession with boardgames. After that kicked off, I quickly discovered I liked solo board gaming - it's a nice, high-focus activity for me that lets me indulge in my love of systems and my board game hyper fixation at my own pace, without needing other folks around to match my enthusiasm. So of course I started spending way too much time reading about solo board games, and pretty quickly became interested in Arkham Horror: The Card Game.

To give a short high-level overview, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a cooperative, narrative-based horror card game. Players build decks representing investigators, and pilot them through scenarios - each with its own objectives, its own "game board" consisting of location cards placed on the table in front of you, its own encounter deck full of enemies and treacheries that gets drawn from regularly, and a doomsday clock that counts down every turn. Scenarios are in turn organized into 8-ish scenario campaigns, each with its own overarching narrative playing out through the scenarios themselves and a campaign book. Scenarios also grant XP, which players spend between sessions to upgrade their decks with more powerful cards.

My wife got me a copy of the core set and the first campaign for my birthday, and in the last 7 months the game has grown into a major hobby and easily my favorite tabletop game. I play it solo pretty regularly and have completed 8 full runs across the first 4 campaigns. I play semi-regularly with a group of even bigger Arkham sickos at a local game shop, where we're tackling the newest campaign. And I've managed to pull at least two friends down into it with me (to the rest of you, watch out!!!). When the majority of the game went out of print last month to pave the way for a soft relaunch from a new design team, I went on an unhinged eBay buying spree that's ended with us having a dedicated Arkham shelf and a near-complete set of cards (I'm only missing this year's campaign and player cards!)

I love Arkham for a lot of reasons. At its most basic mechanical level, it's a game about optimizing actions and card plays, and I enjoy that a lot - there's nothing more satisfying than leveraging an investigator's unique ability and some real meaty card combos to get out of a sticky situation or accomplish an objective really efficiently. I love that it's a card game that has a board, which gives the game a weighty feel that's missing from pure card battlers while also giving it a genuine sense of place via location cards. The game was designed to be robust and flexible, and the fact that you play through specifically designed scenarios means there's lots of built-in variety and often really interesting twists on the game's underlying systems.

And to top it off, I love the campaign structure. The way you earn XP and level your deck gives the game a really satisfying power curve and also lets you get to know and get invested in your investigator over a long period of time, while also letting you tweak your deck on the fly in response to what's working and what's not. And I'm a big fan of the fact that this game has narrative, and decisions to make as you follow along both within and outside of scenarios that affect the course of the story and how later scenarios play out. I've been playing "progression style", moving through campaigns sequentially in release order, and this game does some really interesting and ambitious things with structure as the team becomes more and more willing to experiment with the format. This is also a game that, for most of its lifetime, had a trans woman as lead designer and it's very nice to engage with Arkham knowing she's behind so much of the design (MJ Newman, you're almost certainly not reading this but if you somehow are I am a big fan of your work!)

So far, I've played a whopping 4 (okay, technically 5) campaigns, multiple times each:

Night of the Zealot

This is the short, 3-scenario campaign that comes with the core set. I played this a whole bunch of times to learn the game and the first set of investigators. IMO it's just okay - a decent enough intro to the game that's too short and unambitious to really show you the heights this game can reach.

The Dunwich Legacy

This is the first full length campaign and it's a great first go. It's clear the design team are still figuring things out so it's simpler and more straightforward than later campaigns, but it also has some real highlights. I'm particularly fond of the opening scenario set in a gangster-run casino, which reconfigures core mechanics within a gambling framework, and a tense mid-campaign scenario where investigators make their way up a train that's slowly being pulled into a destructive vortex. Playing this campaign was where I really fell in love with Arkham. I've played it three times on my own, and am currently taking a friend through it to introduce her to the game.

The Path to Carcosa

This is perhaps the game's most universally loved campaign, and wow it's good. It's based on The King in Yellow and designed around the idea of the player as unreliable narrator, and the first campaign to do something really interesting with structure. It's got one of the game's very best scenarios in "The Pallid Mask", which turns Arkham into a dungeon crawl in the Paris catacombs, as well as a very cool and tense scenario adapting "In the Court of the Dragon", one of the original stories from The King in Yellow. I've played this twice and gotten two of three different versions of the final scenario. It's been a few months, but I'm excited to eventually get around to playing it a third time and doing the "fucking up constantly" route.

The Forgotten Age

This is the "Indiana Jones" campaign, themed around pulp adventure fiction. I say that even though Indiana Jones would not be able to handle this one because there are so many snakes. This one has a unique "exploration" mechanic - in many scenarios, instead of a static board, you draw locations from a deck that's also filled with encounter cards to simulate the experience of exploring jungles and ancient ruins and all the traps and dangers that comes with. This is another fan-favorite but I'm still getting to grips with it. It's a campaign where your decisions matter a lot in interesting ways and has a number of fantastic scenarios but it's also so hard. I just finished my second play through and both times I've gone through it it's been absolutely brutal, but I know it's one I'll be returning to.

The Circle Undone

This is the "Halloween" campaign, built around ghosts and witches and haunted houses. I'm currently a little ways into my second play through and I'm still getting to grips with it. The sense of place and atmosphere in this one is unmatched and I love that it gives you two major factions to side with, a rich people cult and a local coven of witches. I kind of sort of accidentally sided with the cult the first time so on this go I'm very deliberately going to hang out with the witches instead because they're way cooler.

As I mentioned, I've managed to snag all the campaigns so I still have several ahead! I'm looking forward to some of the more recent campaigns, especially The Scarlet Keys, an open-world globe-trotting adventure with a really dense campaign book that sounds so cool. Knowing me, I'll be tuned into Arkham for a long time to come.

And...that's it! Tune in sometime for the next installment of THE GREAT LILAH CATCH-UP POST TM SPONSORED BY BEARBLOG: A SERIES. I don't know what it's going to be about yet but I'll be back with it soon!