Customer Reviews

Arkham Horror: Innsmouth Horror Expansion

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4 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(1)
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My son and I have purchased all the Arkham Horror expansions. This is the latest one. It is a big expansion, with lots of materials and an additional game board.

A person needs the base Arkham Horror set to go with this expansion, in order to play it.

We set up the game with the base set and this new expansion, but put away materials from other, earlier expansions. This gives the new expansion more of an opportunity to be fully appreciated.

Generally, this may be the toughest expansion yet. Every game has players battling a Great Old One, as is always the case. The new Great Old Ones that come with this set are very challenging. New features include a private challenge for each investigator, which adds interest. There are also about 275 new cards to be added to the original game deck. The price for this expansion is a bit stiff, but Amazon prices it with a major discount compared to other sources. And you do get "lots more stuff."

Anyway, we have been having great fun with the new Innsmouth Expansion. We only win about half the time -- that adds to the fun.

The art work and creative imagination of the game designers have paid off in a terrific game.

Note: The website associated with this game encourages that players create "house rules." In other words, players can get together and agree to modify the official game rules in various ways. So if the game seems too difficult, it is easy to make a few adjustments, thereby ensuring success at least part of the time.

Those who own the original Arkham Horror game will probably get great fun and entertainment out of the new set.

For any interested, the new Innsmouth Horror expansion is based on a novelette by H.P. Lovecraft, entitled "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Some of you may enjoy checking this out of the library and reading it. It is included in most collections of Lovecraft's short fiction. This reading will enrich the game experience for you.

As I write this, Halloween is only a week away. What a great fun project for Halloween! ! !

Finally, your Arkham Horror play can tackle the horrors of Innsmouth! It was well worth the wait.

Firstly, naturally the board, pieces, and card art are well-done and evocative. The investigators draw from the usual Lovecraftian tropes, and the Ancient Ones added (Ghatanathoa, and Cthugha, among others) are suitably scary to tackle in-game.

One interesting new mechanic is that now all Investigators (from AH and all the expansions) can have personal story cards that affect the game experience. I can't wait to try this out!

Note that his is a 'city' expansion and so includes a board you set up next to the AH board (like Dunwich and Kingsport), and so can make for a more drawn out game. A new rule is included that actually takes into account this extra board space, and changes the limits the game places on the game for the number of players.

Overall this is another worthy addition to Arkham Horror, and is well worth the investment!

First of all Arkham Horror is one of my favorite board games and this is probably my favorite expansions. The Innsmouth board is will done and adds some great cards to the game. The board features lots of locales familiar to any Lovecraft fan like the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

The Innsmouth look cards will have you cringing every time the game forces you to draw one and even more so when you get the unfortunate honor of drawing two at once. Its a great deal of fun just watching another players face when they draw the card that instantly kills their character.

The Deep Ones rising track adds a whole layer of difficulty to the game and I've lost several games because of my groups inability to fill the fed track within the time limit. Basically you have to use clues to fill a track called the fed raid innsmouth before the deep ones rising track is filled or else the old one is immediately summoned.

The only complaints I have with the expansion are that Mother Hydra and Father Dagon are basically the same card, they have the same stats and mechanics and have little reason to both exist. The other complaint is some of the characters have some really bad goal cards that give them little reason to ever try to complete their destiny. For example when one character succeeds at his destiny he dies and becomes a monster.

Overall though this expansion is well worth purchasing.

This review primarily revolves around the Arkham, base game, Innsmouth Horror expansion. For those that came across this game and have never played Arkham Horror, well be aware that this is the third "board" expansion of the Arkham Horror series. Arkham Horror, the base game, is a complicated board game filled with many kinds of pieces and a book of rules. The Innsmouth Horror expansion adds several more elements including a new town to visit, Innsmouth, with several new locations and an additional track that causes the investigators problems if it fills. The track is somewhat similar to that of the Dunwich Horror.

All in all, I personally enjoy this expansion. Furthermore, I tend to play the Arkham Horror base game, Dunwich Horror board expansion and Innsmouth Horror expansion. I would add that my other gamer friends are quite frustrated with the expansion as they tend to complain that they game is just too big. The "too big" comment refers to having more problems to solve in order to win the game. I, however, find the expansion to add another complicated dimension and that increases the fun factor for me. Additionally, there are new investigators, monsters, cards and rules. I enjoy having more complications and don't mind losing and descending into some unspeakable horror. Again, my friends do not appreciate these additional problems.

For those of you new to this series of games, this review is probably not helpful as you should read the reviews for the Arkham Horror base game and start from that point. For those that are interested in purchasing this expansion, Arkham Horror only becomes more complicated and harder to win. Again, several of my gaming friends find the game to be too difficult with this expansion. I would add that it does increase the difficulty and I find that we lose more games. However, if you enjoy a wider array of characters to play, new bad guys and more location cards, I would recommend that you buy the expansion. If the game is too complicated, you can always just mix and match the parts you want. Good luck and don't let the horrors of Arkham get you down. It is, after all, only a game.

Add more madness to the game with the inclusion of the deep ones.

Plus, now your investigator could discover that they have "the Innsmouth look" which means that they are part of the problem.
New cards, add-on map, and of course more ancient horrors to unearth and prevent from ending the world as we know it.
One additional thing the game brings is a special story for each investigator, based on their personal story. If they can complete the mission, they gain some extra bonuses.
If you like the other Arkham Horror games, you'll love this one.

As someone who usually plays Arkham Horror at least once or twice a month and has played all the previous expansions, I think this one is a good addition. I like it better than Kingsport, and even a bit better than Dunwich, though that might be because it's still new (only played it 2 times so far). The added characters are interesting and the new character goals are fun and give you something to work toward during turns when there's nothing else for your character to do. This board doesn't add any new portal locations, but instead just has two tracks. If one of them fills up (tokens are added when gates fail to open due to elder tokens or when monsters move into holes like the ones in Dunwich) the ancient one awakens. You can clear that track by filling another track with clue tokens (you must be in an Innsmouth street or location during upkeep to put up to 2 clue tokens on the appropriate color. There are 3 colors so you need a total of 6 clue tokens, taking at least 3 turns to fill up this track, so you want to partially fill it before it becomes a problem).

It also adds some interesting gate cards for the base set portal locations, several of them doing something crazy if you're in a specific location (example: there was one that you kept and after a certain number of gates opened, your character got devoured, but in the meantime it gave you good bonuses).

I haven't yet played this expansion with either of the previous large expansions, so I can't really comment on the interactions.

The Innsmouth expansion is an excellent addition to the Arkham Horror base game, based on one of my favorite elements of the Lovecraft mythos, the Deep Ones who live under the sea (except when breeding with humans)! Hardcore Arkham Horror fans are going to buy every expansion anyway, so they may safely stop reading here.

Let me now address owners of the base game wondering if this is the first (or next) expansion they should buy. The answer is yes, if you routinely play with 4 or more people and The Shadow Over Innsmouth is one of your favorite stories. Groups of 3 players or less will need to play with multiple investigators each to have any conceivable chance of beating the game (or even making an attempt worth setting up the board for) due to multiple elements designed to delay investigators and RAPIDLY awaken the Ancient One.

When my wife and I play by ourselves, most of this expansion stays in the box. We have incorporated the encounters and monsters into the base set to good effect (adding greater variety without skewing things significantly) and have enjoyed spicing things up with new investigators and personal stories, but - all things considered - we should have bought Dunwich first.

I had high hopes for the basic game, Arkam Horror. I tried to play it with a friend who loves Cthulu stuff and is a big time gamer. At first we thought it just wasn't that much fun for two, but playing two characters each didn't improve the game. Even though both of us enjoy complex games, the randomness and repetitiveness of the actions, complicated by the vague rules and numerous negative cards, killed our interest.

When I saw that they had released an expansion set, supposedly one with a better rule system, I bought a copy to surprise my friend with for his birthday. I sent him home with both games and we agreed he would study the rules and bring it back a week later so we could play with another long time gamer.

When we met to play the game, the news was not good. My friend had found the rules to be no better and the cards even worse than the first edition. I had to agree. Determined to have some fun, we struggled through the long setup process (around 30 minutes to separate everything out which should give you an idea of how difficult play is!!) and began to play. Immediately the same issues surfaced.

The characters were just as weak as in the previous games. My character spent all of her time running and could never use her powers because her initial spells all required other spells to work. Another character got very strong and we kept feeding him spells and other items so he could defend us, but even his character was killed because there were too many cards that brought multiple monsters to the gates. I have to add here that this form of working together is NOT fun. There isn't enough strategy to handing over cards and clue markers to make the process enjoyable. For instance my character had to give all of the clue markers she'd picked up over the last 5 turns to remove a bad card from the table that would have slowly drained everyone's stamina and ended the game. While the action was noble on her part, it just added to the drudgery because there was no feeling of accomplishment. The next card in play could do the same thing or something worse.

Many of the cards are also way too vague, hard to understand or complicated. All three of us have masters degrees and yet we had to read many of the cards two and three times to come to a consensus of what they meant. This was partially because the cards were either too unrelated to each other or too interrelated. There was also the problem that some cards controlled movement on the whole board and remembering all the limitations that could be on play was a headache and not a challenge. The cards also dealt with random events rather than creating any flow of action toward a common goal. All the places from Cthulu are there, but also all the monsters. This is part of the problem.

Rather than concentrating more on campaigns like the role playing games, it does not contain any real storyline. You go from place to place with no real motive other than to kill monsters and close gates. This simply isn't entertaining enough to make the learning curve worth your trouble. Where is the pay off for the learning curve and complexity? We kept saying..."Where is the fun?"

We ended the game because everyone was dying, as usual. Only one character even made it to the small expansion board that featured Innsmouth (BTW it is about 1/4 the size of the original board and you need a long table to set the board up...Add all the cards in and you need a HUGE table to play).

If it weren't for the beer and pizza I provided, I doubt we would have played as long as we did. This game needs a completely reworked expansion set with a more integrated card system that favors strategic play and fewer, less fragmented story lines. The constant flow of monsters doesn't engage the players enough and it quickly turns into a dice rolling competition complicated by an onerous rule system. I hope they do something to streamline play and post it to their website. I've got an investment of over $90 in this game and would really like to see it become playable...I may end up writing my own rules. The game's creator would do well to introduce some short campaign sets that ditch most of the rules and cards and allow people to have a little fun. We all agreed that playing it was like spending a very bad day at work. This was not how we had hoped to spend a Sunday afternoon.