Adults Say:

“I have never actually read an H.P. Lovecraft story, but everything about supernatural horror pulp demands to be adapted into a board game. Arkham Horror was our temporal fissure (The Lovecraftian term for a gateway game) into this genre, but there are a bunch of games based on Lovecraft’s freaky mythos. Maybe that’s because the literary corpus of H.P. Lovecraft is now part of the public domain. That’s right, we all own a piece of Cthulhu. But there are so many Cthulhu-themed games out there, and many of them have spooky buildings on the cover. Our friend Adam doesn’t bother calling them by different names. He just refers to them all as ‘House on House on House.’”

"Arkham Horror is a cooperative game that combines creepy storytelling, character building, and a whole lot of dice-rolling. Players walk around, clean up little bits of doom that keep popping up, and occasionally beat up on cultists, demonic frogmen, and the occasional Servitor of Yog-Sothoth. Every player ends their turn with a micro-adventure tied to the location they happen to be standing in when they stop moving. These adventures usually require rolling some dice to either win a nice treat, or suffer physical or psychic damage. (You know, either a sprained ankle or the ceaseless dread that replaces your fractured reality with ravenous nightmares the corporeal world knows not of.)"

"A game of Arkham Horror is a 2-3 hour venture, but the individual turns move fast. More often than not, the players find themselves more powerful at the end of every round, even if the world around them is falling more and more into darkness. This sense of progress is very satisfying. Even when the die rolls weren’t going our way, we found the game a little easier than expected, especially after watching a video review that touted the game as an exercise in random punishment and inevitable failure. That review must have been referring to a previous edition, because we played through all four scenarios, and never found ourselves in real danger of losing, even as anomalies opened up in neighborhoods, and lamprey-faced daemon sultans spawned on the gabled rooftops of Arkham.”

“I would put Arkham Horror in the top third of long-form cooperative games. If ‘plumbing the void’ sounds like your kind of euphemism, or if you just want to bear witness to the profane rituals of the Worshipers of Umordhoth the Devourer Below, Arkham Horror may be the game for you. Even without any experience with the graphic pulp of Howard Phillip Lovecraft, this one has still gotten plenty of play in our house (on house on house.)”

Kids Say:

“This game reminds me a lot of D&D. There are lots of dice and fun characters who specialize in different things. I played a wild-eyed bearded man named Norman Withers. Norman has seen the many horrors of Arkham and, although he is not very strong or influential, he uses his arcane knowledge to rid the neighborhoods of existential threats and save the day.”

“Look people, this game is fun, but it takes way too long to play. An hour and a half into it, we were just finishing the first of three missions. If you start this game at 7 pm, don’t expect to be going to sleep anytime soon.”