A Curious Tome
An Updated FAQ For Arkham Horror: The Card Game Is Now Available
"What do we know […] of the world and the universe about us? […] We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos…”
–H. P. Lovecraft, “From Beyond”
A new version of the Arkham Horror: The Card Game FAQ (pdf, 8.4 MB) to accompany the game’s latest cycle, The Path to Carcosa, is now available for download!
Arkham Horror: The Card Game transports you and up to three fellow investigators to the dark world of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, where strange mysteries and horrors unfold as the roaring twenties swirl to a dizzying height. In this latest cycle, The Path to Carcosa, your investigations into The King in Yellow have drawn you across the city and across the globe to uncover the origins of the mysterious play and hopefully bring an end to the maddening occurrences that follow every performance. As you follow every lead, we hope to provide you with all the tools and understanding you need to ensure that your investigations run as smoothly as possible.
Here is the master of madness himself, designer Matt Newman, to tell you what to expect in the latest FAQ for Arkham Horror: The Card Game.
Matt Newman on the Newest FAQ
Greetings, brave investigators!
It’s a great time to be a player of Arkham Horror: The Card Game. While Arkham Nights 2017 has come and gone, there is much to look forward to. The Path to Carcosa campaign is underway, with several Mythos Packs remaining and exciting stories yet to be told, and there are even more surprises to come in the future. As always, our goal is to continue telling these stories for many years. To that end, it is sometimes necessary to issue errata to unclear or problematic cards in order to ensure that scenarios are easy to play, and the game environment is healthy and vibrant. For these reasons, we have once again updated the game’s FAQ in order to answer some commonly asked questions, clarify a few rulings, and issue several errata.
Most of the errata in this edition of the FAQ fix cards with incorrect or unclear language, so that the cards function in line with players’ expectations. That means that much of the errata in this version of the FAQ should be fairly intuitive for the community. For example, The Gold Pocket Watch (Lost in Time and Space, 305) should have been printed with reaction icons, Dr. William T. Maleson (Lost in Time and Space, 302) now only triggers when drawing an encounter card from the encounter deck, Corrosion (The Path to Carcosa, 102) only allows you to discard Item assets in your play area (rather than any Item asset in play), and the Historical Museum (Echoes of the Past, 130) makes it so that your intellect cannot be “increased,” rather than “modified.” In addition, a number of cards from The Dunwich Legacy have had their traits changed from “Human” to “Humanoid,” in order to remain consistent with the rest of the cards in the game.
Finally, each of the agendas in Echoes of the Past have had their first line of text re-written. The intent was to prevent doom from being placed on the agenda each round during the game’s typical framework effect, but the way the agenda was previously worded, it also prevented certain treachery cards from placing doom on the agenda! Now, each of these agendas reads, “Skip the ‘Place 1 doom on the current agenda’ step of the Mythos phase,” which should cause them to function as intended. Similarly, players found that the language on several of the act cards in The Unspeakable Oath unintentionally made traveling to Patient Confinement (The Unspeakable Oath, 176) locations quite a bit easier. We have removed the Arkham Asylum trait from each of these locations in order to prevent this from occurring in the future.
Cracking the Case
We have also issued an erratum to the interlude found at the end of The Unspeakable Oath in order to help clarify which of the three stories should be read depending on your actions during the scenario.
For the majority of players, most of these changes should feel natural and intuitive, and probably will not affect the way that they have been playing the game in the past. For the most part, these changes are meant to ensure that scenarios play the way you would expect them to, and to clarify certain card effects for future players who have yet to stumble into the rollercoaster of insanity that is The Path to Carcosa.
In addition to these errata, we have also added a few rulings and clarifications in order to maintain the long-term health of the game. For example, we have added a section briefly expanding upon the variant introduced at the end of the Night of the Zealot campaign which allows you to carry investigators over from one campaign to another, and we’ve also clarified how limits pertaining to play areas should work (for example, “Limit 1 in play”).
We hope that these updates will improve everybody’s understanding and enjoyment of Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and as always, we look forward to the game’s exciting future. Thank you for being a part of this wonderful community!
-Matt Newman
Arcane Secrets Revealed
Now that this knowledge has been pulled from the tomes of Miskatonic University’s Orne Library, you are more prepared than ever to confront the dangers that approach from beyond the reaches of our reality. Download your copy of the Arkham Horror: The Card Game FAQ today and make sure you have all the information you need to overcome the monsters that lurk within the realm of madness!