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For some nicely set out rules for Arkham Horror (and the expansions) see here.

Pages 2, 3, and 12 are the most useful for the base game. I'll bring a print out on Monday.

Could be worth a quick read through for those that haven't played before.

David,

One can also go to the official website then go to the support link and get the PDF of the revised (or re-) edition.

This link is direct to the PDF.

I have printed this twenty-four pages rulebook. I have begun to read it last night. This is a hell of a complex game! I certainly hope it plays naturally, because the rulebook, three column per page, is definitely dense. This seems interesting though.

This reminds me of when I read the book for Tannhäuser, which we have yet to try.

Like Tannhäuser is seems pretty close to the "RPG on a board" formula.

Laurent,

True, the handout I linked to is perhaps more useful for playing along with as a reference sheet rather than the actual complete rules which are obviously more suitable for understanding the overall game.

Fellow Arkham Horror players,

As mentioned in an earlier post, the rules are available online.

There are also a very good series of YouTube videos on Board-game Geek.

I am giving you the direct links here.

Set-up
Upkeep
Movement 1/2
Movement 2/2
Encounters
Mythos phase
Outskirts and investigator status
Final battle
Play 1/3
Play 2/3
Play 3/3

The game seems so complex that even the courageous guy who offers these had to put some errata text during his videos.

Laurent,

Fellow Arkham Horror players,

Very good game last night, I was expecting a slow and painful session but was happily surprised at the way Arkham Horror actually plays.

As we realised, we cheated for the first game, we did not have enough gate tokens to seal the victory conditions, but we also cheated for the second one. In the rules, it is stated that when playing with five or more players, two monsters appear at a gate when (or if) it opens during the Mythos phase. Therefore we should have had more monsters to play against and potentially the Horror track progression should have been quicker. Matt mentioned something about this progressing far faster in a game with two players than last night with five, well, if we had drawn more monsters... To be fair, with all the monster surges we had to go through, due to the random draw somewhat focusing itself on two locations only for opening gates, that mistake may not have had a huge impact on our victory.

I am still quite annoyed at having had my character "devoured" after realising too late that I could not (at least not in a realistically probable way) win against it. Oh well, that allowed me to find that the photographer, for some weird flavour reasons, is nails when it comes to clear monsters. I can understand the mobster being good at wiping out stuff, the nun good at pulverising undead, but why would a photographer have a fight value of five and a lot of movement to boot is hard to guess.

There is an F.A.Q. online too, the first half is an errata - already included in our versions of the rules - but the second half indeed has some interesting clarifications.

In passing our misunderstanding about when to go through a gate was not really worth the trouble asking ourselves the question. Gates are always put at "locations", locations are always at a dead-end, so there is no point for anyone to walk to a gate then move back. Even for fighting monsters as no-one can move after entering a fight (successful or not). So it makes sense to "end the movement" at the gate and indeed wait for the next "Arkham encounters" phase to go through the gate.

I have put a board-game event for January 9th, 2012. Please discuss here what we should be playing.

Laurent,

Fellow board-gamers,

We have had a couple of "private" sessions at Vague Connections over the Christmas holidays during which we played the original Arkham Horror and its Curse of the Dark Pharaoh expansion. Three wins and a pathetic "writing on the wall no need to play" wipe-out against Yig as those with Speed could not a single die and the others with weapon would have been dead within two rounds anyway.

Did you know?
There is an Arkham Horror the board-game wiki.

I have updated our game page with the art from the Curse of the Dark Pharaoh expansion box.

On Monday we shall be playing a game of Blood-bowl Team Manager.

As usual, everybody is welcome to join us for a game.

Laurent,

Will likely be joining you for some Bloodbowl Team Manager around 8. Going to see the Artist at Cineworld first.

Matt

Fellow board-gamers,

Now this was a session!

Braggart.

A game of Braggart was on before the official time. Sadly a couple of players had to leave, but we got some reinforcement later.

Then we split into a group of four and one of three for respectively:

Chaos in the Old World.

I was not playing there but it sounded like people were having fun. Chaos in the Old World seems to take a serious amount of time with the full complement of players (four).
Those who played are invited to give their views.

Bloodbowl Team Manager.

As expected a good game of Blood Bowl Team Manager, I mean what can go wrong when Skaven, Human and Orcish managers get to send their players bashing one another, cheating and running with the ball? Indeed some people seem to suggest that violence is not everything in a game of Blood Bowl and that there is a ball somewhere...
As usual, it was down to the luck of the dice and the cheat tokens, but it is hard not to have fun with this game, even for the losers.

City of Thieves.

After the Blood Bowl Team Manager game, Andrew and I ended-up playing a quick game of Cadwallon, City of Thieves. I got that for Christmas, nice game, great art and great concept, but somewhat missing something as in the rules sounding too simplistic. The game rules, being simple, are also easy to adapt. There is the feeling that there is a great game here, once some sound house-rules can be devised.

Next week.

We can discuss the program here or at the shop. I shall post a couple of suggestions later if none none are forthcoming.

The game page has been updated.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game players,

Regular event.

As of late, nobody has been volunteering to run a game in "a system we do not generally use" on Mondays, I have therefore posted a series of at least six board-game nights. This is not set in stone, so if anyone wants to run something or make a plea for someone else to run something so that they can play in it, they only to speak up and the slot can be cleared for that.

Thursday event.

I have posted an event for Thursday. This is a bit short notice.
We should receive The Dunwich Horror expansion to Arkham Horror on Wednesday at Vague Connections thus break open the box and play a game of "expanded" Arkham Horror on Thursday.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game players,

Another win at Arkham Horror this time expanded with The Dunwich Horror, we came close to losing though.
The Dunwich Horror did not appear as we successfully managed to limit the number of monsters slipping into the vortices.
Ian got extremely lucky, collecting all that money and generally all the positive outcomes on all sorts of cards. A so-so result for me, I think I should not have given away that flame-thrower after all, I closed and sealed a gate, then that was sort of it as I did not have weapons big enough to really go monster hunting, not enough money to buy them, and no actual luck in collecting card-event generated clue tokens; still my character did not spend his time at St Mary's Hospital or the Arkham Asylum as had happened before.

My wife enjoyed the game, but she was indeed a bit tired, she had just driven back from London.

I think we should have mixed the mythos cards from the two games, even if it would have meant separating them later. This might have made the expansion-board a bit more threatening, the new cards were fun though. I like the concept of injury or mania, tough cards but a good idea. Next time, all the players should "read" the board, as, apart from me, players were not aware of potential strategies from the new locations. Darke's Festival for instance has some creepy cards in it and fit perfectly the horror theme with weird carnies and all. I went through the deck, some nice cards... and some curses of course.

At some point we should try the humongous expansion set-up, with as many as we can get, and why not add to it the herald mechanic? And no... I am not a masochist.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game enthusiasts,

Next session.

The games most probably on offer for Monday are:

• Citadels.
• Last Night on Earth.

Of course, one can bring whatever they want.

Near future option.

James is mulling running a Heroes game on a Monday night. We can discuss it further and set-up a date later. I will ask him for a quick overview either in this thread or another one dedicated to his game.

On this topic, if anybody fancies running an RPG session in a system that we do not usually play, make yourselves heard!

Laurent,

Fellow Ruinous Powers,

Chaos in the Old World

Reversals of fortune, massed battles, missed opportunities and a nail-biting finish... all of the ingredients for an epic tale.

Nurgle started out well, single-handedly demolishing the fine nation of Kislev in short order. Then Slaanesh, who had been busy seducing innocent Princesses in one corner of the board, nearly snuck by with an early victory – but his nefarious plans were thwarted at the last minute by a massive dogpile on Tilea, giving the rest of us time to catch up. Finally it went right down to the wire, with Khorne, Slaanesh and Tzeentch all triggering Victory conditions on the final turn of the game.

Thrilling stuff - even despite a few ‘Rules Hiccups’ which I hope didn’t dent anyone’s fun.

So should any Masters of Destruction, Decadence, Pestilence and Forbidden Knowledge fancy putting the World of Warhammer out of its misery then speak now...

Blood for the Blood God!

Tim,

Welcome to the boards.

Nice avatar, it goes nicely with the new game you have uploaded on the game page. I have added the image for it.

In the future, you could upload the image file yourself. My usual modus operandi is:

• Go to Board-game geek and save the thumbnail to be found on the game page, save it to your machine. It is usually 150 by 150 pixels, which is a good size to use straight on our wiki-page.
• Rename the JPEG file.
• Upload the image, using the "Upload file" option under the quick menu "File Galleries". To keep things organised, upload it in the "Board-games" file gallery.
• Click on "Additional info" after the upload and check the fileId number. "Doom the board-game" is 521 for instance.
• Edit the game page as you have already done but insert {IMG(fileId="521")}{IMG} near the top. This will of course refer to the 521 fileID, which is the Doom JPEG. Be sure to have the proper number of brackets and {IMG} tags.

It seems a bit convoluted, but a fileID is better than a file location. The file itself can be moved anywhere on the website, without having to update it everywhere it is used when doing so.

Coming session.

I thought Last Night on Earth was to be the main game on Monday, with Ian bringing his copy of Citadels but earlier today, Matt seemed interested in City of Thieves. And now we have Doom the board-game, so I guess we shall decide when people show-up as usual.

Laurent,

Laurent,

Hello and Thankyou

I had a quick look at uploading images when I added the text entry. On the File Upload form: I'm assuming that 'File Title' should be the human-readable text that is displayed on-screen, and apparently 'File Description' is mostly left blank...? Or is 'Title' the system filename and 'Description' the web-displayed text?

Anyway I wasn't sure so I left it.

While we're on the subject, is the site hiding these images from non-logged-in persons on purpose? Or is there something missing from some Permissions on the Folders?

Monday 16th

I have not had the time to run through the rules for Doom so that will have to wait for another night. I have heard good things about Last Night on Earth, however. Count me in for a game on that.

Tim,

Technicalities.

I hardly ever use these boxes myself. TikiWiki has a lot of options, customisation, etc. personally, I only use the filename, which I rename, you can also put a tag on your file (the 'File title') and indeed comment as much as you want on the 'File description' box. These are never visible for all I know and only work as archiving title/comments. Hint, "Doom the board-game" is better than "0345hjkkl007.jpg", so in the case of filenames being generated automatically, putting a good title tag helps. Leaving both boxes empty will of course default to the filename for storage purposes.

This is a very good question and of course, since I never look at the website without being logged, I had not realised until your noticing it. Note that I am a programmer, but not a web-thingy guy, I have looked at editing the permissions of the page, but there is nothing that looks like barring the non-members from seeing the images, yet, they cannot.
I will mention this to Len or Alan.

Game tonight.

I quickly had a look at the Doom the boardgame entry on Board-game Geek and watch a quick video. It looks pretty easy to learn, like the computer game.

But yeah, bring whatever you want, the same applies for everybody. Depending on how many people show-up there could be more than one game on offer. We have had a good attendance so far, and are now having two tables, thus two games, on a pretty standard basis.

Laurent,

(Edit: Removed boring waffle)

Fellow board-gamers,

A good attendance tonight again, with two "full" games.

Citadels.

A game had already started before the "official" 7.00 p.m. start. This was played with a lot of people, so only one character a turn I guess. Fun seemed to have been had aplenty.

Last night on Earth.

The zombies won, I think we should have made a run for the pick-up truck or coordinated our searches and moves a bit better. Good game overall.

Cadwallon: City of Thieves.

Andrew and I having played the game before, we decided to add some new rules, and it transformed it to a "so-so" game to something actually gripping. Four players, thus the maximum possible, led to a very good and balanced game. Turning the treasures upside down and adding the random but somewhat straight "run away from" rule has spiced-up the game a lot.
We shall try to find ways of altering the statistics of the thieves a bit in order to make things less generic, but I think the obvious solution, such as merely giving more dice to roll to fighter types could end-up being too simplistic and breaking the game flow.
That being said, we could play the other scenarios and other optional rules from the game's official website too.

In-fighting.

Because Citadels and Last Night on Earth did not finish at the same time, the Citadel group ended-up playing a "quick" game of Inn-Fighting.

Games on Monday.

Conservatively we can announce:

• A super-expanded Arkham Horror, for the devoted only!
• Another go at Chaos in the Old World

If we have the same kind of crowd as we had today, there could even be a third game!

As usual, people are invited to voice their preferences.

Laurent,

Fellow Zombie Apocalypse Survivors*,

(*Or not, as the case may be. )

Last Night on Earth

I guess the Human player's first priority must be searching, then evasive movement - using ranged weapons to tactically open holes in the zombie picket line. As it was we didn't have much in the way of artillery, and the zombies always seemed to be positioned in ways to control and restrict our movement. I mean I know that zombies are just mindless, shambling automatons but sometimes I just got the feeling that there was some dark, malevolent intelligence directing their every move...

So in retrospect: mistakes were made. Sally could have fuelled the truck immediately, the Sheriff could have conserved ammo better and maybe we could have made more use of that 'Heroic Resolve'?

On a slightly brighter note, a re-read of the rulebook shows that when a new Hero enters the game we can choose to start them in the central area with a Hero Card. This means that the 'Church Guy' could have appeared in the nick of time to help Sally in her desperate 1 vs 4 attempt to fuel the truck, and then Sheriff Anderson sprints from the hangar and our 3 Heroes make their getaway...

... leaving Jenny to be hunted down and killed in the cornfield...
(but such are the dangers of wearing denim hotpants I guess)

City of Thieves

Interesting stuff. Reminded me a little of an Assassin's Creed Boardgame concept I was toying with at one point in time.

Here's an idea for a House Rule: "If the owner of this game steals two Rubies from a first-time player, he is heavily penalised in all subsequent games."

Anyway... both games I would play again, so that's a good night in my books.

RPG Sessions

I was wondering... what with the 'Monday Night Boardgaming' being consistently popular so far it might be a mistake to just jam in an RPG night all of a sudden? Do we have another night available once or twice a month?

Would it be a good idea to start up a separate 'Exotic Adventures at Vague Connections' thread as a centralised area for GMs to entice people with a short overview of the system / scenario they could put together - just as a means of sparking a bit of interest / enthusiasm should a potential free night turn up at some point in time?

Or perhaps people would prefer a 'one thread per system' sort of thing as we have so far done with Serenity and B5 ?

Fellow board-gamers,

Another good attendance with two games running.
Let's begin with the one that humble me participated in.

Arkham Horror with "Curse of the Dark Pharaoh", "Dunwich" and "Innsmouth".

Well, to be honest, it felt a bit like work, a bit over the top.
I may be wrong, but I do not think the game is designed to handle that many locations. The Dunwich part never really kicked-in and the Innsmouth bit remained at best sedate. Matt was hovering there with his character, but it felt like he knew which places to visit with not much to handle really.

Granted, the cards from the expansion did show-up and messed up the traditional game, with "gate bursts" from Dunwich and a bit of Curse of the Dark Pharaoh having some nasty rumours and environment cards; but overall the game was not as hectic as usual. In fact, The Dunwich Horror has yet to appear and I am thinking about getting a refund!

Still, there were some good times, with a lot of employment opportunities for new investigators during the game.

The case of Mark Harrigan:
Now this character had grit! I think I have set a record there: Four madness cards and one injury card and all this without getting those that would have got me devoured!
True, after the third madness card Harrigan was pretty useless to the team. He could stay neither in a street nor in a location beside the asylum. So unless he was in another world he was losing sanity, and his max was only three; hence he was very likely to go mad, thus get another madness, by just taking the time to cross the traditional Arkham board!

Chaos in the old worlds.

Only three players this time, a report on the game would be welcome.

Last Night on Earth.

Because the Arkham game went on forever the Chaos in the Old World players went for a game of Last Night on Earth.

Next session.

The Arkham Horror game had to be stopped, then nobody mentioned what to play next week. Surely we will come-up with something, as usual, this can be discussed here.

Laurent,

On one table we had a group of people attempting to save the world from an arcane horror from beyond time and space. On the other table we had a group of people playing arcane horrors from beyond time and space attempting to destroy the world. Plenty of material for everybody’s therapist.

Chaos in the Old World

Despite rumours to the contrary this was a 4 player game. We decided to mix the Upgrade cards from the Expansion and Base sets - according to the rules this is strictly Verboten but it didn’t seem to cause any problems (so far). I also mixed in a few new Event cards without telling anybody but as it was none of them came up anyway.

Once again it seemed that Slaanesh was the one to watch as the decadent elites of the Old World fell into the abyssal embrace of the Prince of Pleasure. And once again the other Ruinous Powers joined forces in a bid to foil his pernicious plans. But this time it was just too little, too late (6 attacks and only 1 hit? Unlucky, guys, unlucky... ) and Slaanesh stormed in with a Special Victory on Turn 5. Tzeentch was on track for a victory in turn 7, but the big surprise was Nurgle who, through an efficacious combination of Domination and Ruination, nipped in with a Standard Victory also on turn 5.

After spending the last game being pounded on by Khorne, this time Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch adopted a new combat doctrine of Enhanced Indirect Tactical Manoeuvrability and Evasion – occasionally also known as ‘Running Away’. As a result Khorne was unable to engage in an effective long-term military campaign and, as victory began to slip away from his blood-soaked claws, had to entertain himself by declaring Open Season on peasants instead.

As per usual if anyone is interested in a game they need only say the word. Done in such a way as I might hear it would also be useful.

Last Night on Earth

A quick 3-player session of ‘Defend the Manor House’ which started with a bleak outlook for the Human players (just for a change) as the board filled with a seemingly unstoppable number of shambling coffin-dodgers. Our diligent searching paid off, however, with Sally finding a chainsaw and Jenny finding a pump-action shotgun* - and suddenly the shoe was on the other foot. The non-rotting foot. ‘Hero of the Night’ Award must go to Church Guy who, armed only with his Faith and a baseball bat, cut (or bludgeoned) a swathe through the undead rabble.

When the Sun rose we had successfully held off the zombie hordes - but had lost 4 Heroes in the process – so technically still a zombie victory...

-* All we needed then was some pumpkins to smash into small piles of putrid debris.