Games Review

I've been thinking about Arkham Horror lately, and trying to decide if the town is cursed, or if I am. Every time I show up, people die and monsters drop out of the sky. I kind of wonder if it's like Murder She Wrote - everywhere Angela Lansbury ever went, someone died, and somehow, it was never her fault.

Of course, in my case, nobody actually dies, because it's just a game. But if it were a real place, you can bet your ass I would be on some kind of official no-fly list. Last time I visited, Azathoth tried to wake up and eat the world, and some crazy goat thing was setting up shop out in the woods to help him. Why, I don't know, because that crazy goat thing was just as dead as I was if Azathoth popped up from his nap with a rumble in his belly and turned the whole world into a gigantic unhappy meal.

The reason the goat was helping the Lovecraft version of Galactus was because I was playing The Black Goat of the Woods, in which a thoroughly twisted cult is working with a totally screwed-up supernatural entity to release a completely malevolent ancient being of unimaginable power. It's a cool expansion for Arkham Horror that adds new monsters and cards and stuff to make Arkham Horror even harder than it already is, just in case you were winning too often and having too much fun.

Actually, Black Goat of the Woods was a lot of fun. We infiltrated the goat cult, and then things went from bad to downright nasty, as we started gaining corruption cards that hastened the coming of the planet snacker. We met new monsters and killed them. We wandered in and out of gates to alien dimensions, closing them as fast as we could, but those damned cultists kept screwing us by busting out more monsters and hustling up the clock timer.

Black Goat isn't the most flexible or universally applicable expansion for Arkham Horror, but it did something we've been needing - it made us lose. We had reached a point where we were almost guaranteed to win every time, using our idiot-proof formula of getting a blessing and then succeeding at everything with almost no effort. Black Goat makes the game harder, and it screws up the winning scheme we were following, which means that Arkham Horror gets interesting again.

The reason Black Goat of the Woods makes Arkham Horror more difficult is because of a few different elements. The cult of the Thousand Knuckleheads is interesting, and the corruption you get tends to snowball pretty quickly and is pretty fun. You'll have all kinds of horrible encounters as you infiltrate, and it turns out this is a pretty nasty cult. They don't even have any of that free love you used to hear about in 70s cults, just gross monsters and stuff. I was hoping to join up and then get three subservient wives who would walk around the house naked and cook all the time, but all I got was creepy people in robes who kept summoning horrors from alternate dimensions. Talk about a letdown.

The herald (which would be the black goat mentioned in the title) is really mean. More monsters will be popping out, and some of them will make the sleeping giant wake up faster. People in town get scared faster, and bad stuff generally happens all over the place. It's a great way to accelerate the clock and goose the big bad bogie to get out of bed. Which is great if you're good at the game, but really problematic if you always end up waking the big bad guy and then getting eaten.

The story for Black Goat of the Woods is not as interesting as the Dark Pharaoh expansion, and you probably won't want to shuffle the new cards in with the old ones. But if you want to try something new, and you want Arkham Horror to be as difficult as you remember it being when you first learned how to play, you really ought to give it a whirl. It's a fun expansion, and it adds more to the game, and that's what expansions are supposed to do.