I first played Arkham Horror when I visited Karl, my uncle, in Tampa earlier this year.  We had been cruising the local game stores in the area, with Karl letting me pick out my Christmas present.  (Less exciting this way, but at least I know I'll like it.)  While I was selecting Mississippi Queen, a game I had my eye on for months, but hadn't ever purchased, Karl nabbed a copy of Arkham Horror for himself.  Later that night, we broke open the game, admired the high-quality bits and hundreds of cards, and decided we had to play that night.  What followed was an awkward 2-player, 4-investigator game that was full of rules questions, FAQ references, and turn summary referencing that got in the way of an otherwise great gaming experience.  Despite the initial overhead, we had a blast with our first game.  The theme totally sold me, and I decided I would purchase it myself.

I had some early misgivings about my purchase.  My usual game group, the Friday night Lumbersmiths, generally prefer elegant Eurogames, with their light theme of Egyptian pyramids or Renaissance Italy.  Arkham Horror would be a hard sell.  Fortunately, three of us (me, Joe and Jay) have really enjoyed the game, and we've been able to play it several times over the last few months.

Up until Friday, our games had been relatively easy.  There was the 20-minute win, where it actually took longer to setup the game than play it, immediately followed by the multi-hour game where we won by battle with the Ancient One.  And there have been the other games - where hard work and smart play were rewarded by some gate closing victories.  In each of these games (except the 20-minute win), we felt pressured and in danger, but we always came through in the end.

Last Friday, all that changed.

Joe and I showed up at Jay's house and had a quick Magic booster draft with the new Coldsnap cards.  While I won't go into the details, Joe had an awesome draft being the only one taking red & green, and he mopped the floor with us, taking 2 games out of 3.  My creature-light black & white deck (with a smattering of blue to accommodate a legendary creature) didn't win a single game.  Ouch.

After Magic was over, we decided to take a stroll through Arkham.  I had just received the new Curse of the Dark Pharaoh expansion, but since I hadn't read the rules, we opted to play the vanilla game.  The Ancient One we drew was Yog-Sothoth, which I only knew from my casual listening of the Yog-Sothoth.com podcast.  This didn't seem to be too bad - Yog made Cultists and Witches a little harder, but we could take them.  For investigators, Jay drew Monterey Jack, who gets extra choices when he draws cards from the unique item deck.  I forget the name that Joe drew, but his special ability was to heal sanity loss from himself or another character at his location.  His plan was to pair this ability with sanity-reducing spells.  My character was Jenny Barnes, the dilettante, who was a jack-of-all-trades with a lot of money and a $1 per turn income.  My goal was simple:  buy lots of monster-smashing equipment.

It looked to be that luck was on our side early.  For starting equipment, Jay had a gun and an axe, and I had a gun and a spell, meaning we could both use both hands to deal out monster punishment.  Joe drew a couple of good spells, including 'Withering', which could be cast for zero sanity.  In another boon, Jay drew an Elder Sign as his starting equipment, meaning we could immediately seal the first gate.  Things were looking good.  Luck stayed on our side for two turns, as we all rushed to the Curiosity Shop to buy some unique equipment.  In two turns, Jay drew two more Elder Signs, giving us a huge head start to the game.  Unfortunately, that's where our luck ran out.

For our first two mythos cards, we drew two rumors.  Rumor cards generally have timers associated with them, giving the players time to meet some requirement before something Really Bad happens.  For one rumor, one player was required to discard three spells.  No problem, Joe already had a couple, and could easily gain another.  For the second, one player had to discard an ally card.  There's a problem.  Allies in this game are tough to come by, especially early in the game.  Generally, you had to close gates and kill monsters for trophies to turn in for an ally.  We had 5 turns.

Outside of the mythos card draws, our first big blow came when Joe got surprised by a monster and sent to the hospital, causing him to  discard half his items, including the spells we needed to sacrifice to the rumor card.  This, coupled with our inability to find an ally to discard, meant that a few turns into the game, we were drawing two mythos cards per turn, with a 33% chance of having to add another gate to the board.  This meant there was a good chance of two gates opening per turn, with the possibility of three gates per turn.

As if that wasn't bad enough, a string of bad die rolls caused Jay and Joe to lose combats they should have won.  In one epic battle, Jay had enough combat value to be rolling ten dice against a lowly Gug, needing to roll only a single 5 or 6 to kill it.  He didn't roll any.  Despite sealing two gates on the board, we only drew a sealed location once, meaning gates and monsters were spawning like mad.  Joe managed to get 'Lost in Time and Space' once, which meant instant devouring by Yog-Sothoth.  After a quick reset of his character, the end game triggered and he didn't have any gate trophies, meaning Yog ate him a second time, leaving just me and Jay to do the final battle.  We managed to remove only two doom tokens before running out of gate trophies, and eventually life.  Yog invaded and Arkham fell.

For the first time since playing Arkham Horror, we lost.  And we didn't just lose - we lost bad.  The game chewed us up and spit us out, leaving us stunned at just how badly things can go.  Despite the utter defeat, the game was still a ton of fun.  We fought hard, we shook our heads and laughed at our own dumb luck, and we looked forward to next time.