Looking into the Arkham Horror

It looks more complicated than it is...

Games are a wonderful way of exploring rules and regulatory systems. Lately I've been playing The Arkham Horror, a fun cooperative board game that raises a lot of issues for me in terms of regulatory theory. Sure, this may be taking the fun out of it, unless you are a rules theory geek in which case it adds a whole new layer of enjoyment.

The original version of the Arkham Horror was published in the early 90s and seems to be the very first cooperative board game. Rather than competing with each other, players are united towards a common goal. Opposition comes from the rules system itself which sets challenges and imposes setbacks. It is an intriguing exploration of how a set of rules can encode ideology, set an agenda and be developed with proactive strategic intent. That is the rules create an environment that must foresee how actors and objects are going to react in the environment and response to the regulatory structures themselves.

The game is set in the pulp writings of HP Lovecraft, who wrote in the early 20^th century about alien horrors trying to break into our dimension and destroy the world. The game is set in the 1920s around the fictional town of Arkham, home to the Miskatonic university, the library of which is filled with dread tomes of unspeakable knowledge. Yes the writing is purple and that is half the fun. In the fiction, and in the game, you are just as likely to go insane as be eaten by an unnameable monster flailing innumerable numbers of unspeakable tentacles. The players take on the roles of different investigators, each with their unique skills, to investigate disturbances, find clues and attempt to seal the gates through which their nemesis seeks to break into our world. Each turn one player takes on the role of the nemesis and draws a card from the mythos deck which describes what it is doing that turn (causing the dead to rise, plagues, murder rampages and so on). This is very neat and streamlined and the 'mythos deck' provides for both a logically consistent set of challenges and a degree of unexpected menace.

The idea of a cooperative game was clearly derived from tabletop roleplaying games (the original publishers also published the Call of Cthulhu RPG) but a board game, which runs without a referee balancing the challenges, is quite tricky to develop for the cooperative mode. You can't adjust difficulty on the fly, nor can you rely on the level playing field, where players compete against each other and are all equally disadvantaged by your rules flaws. There has clearly been a lot of work done in creating a balanced, simple and engaging rules system.

There is a lot more to discuss which I will return to in later blogs. Arkham Horror has been expanded by several box sets and the ability to create an open ended system for expansion into new areas has clear importance for regulators. It should be reasonably easy to pick up without much gaming experience. If you are in the vicinity of my law school let me know and we can have a game over lunch.