Nuketown

Game Day: The King in Yellow, Constant Sentinel Updates

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 07/27/2007 - 11:06am

The King in Yellow Expansion for Arkham Horror I missed out on gaming last week, which makes me overly eager to throw some dice tonight. We'll eschewing our normal role-playing campaigns in favor of a a round of the most excellent board game Arkham Horror, this time with the very cool-looking expansion, The King in Yellow.

We have one, maybe two role-playing sessions left before we go to GenCon, and we'll be focusing on finishing up the current leg of the Khalez-Mar campaign. Meanwhile, my Mutants & Masterminds campaign continues to simmer, and should be returning to the front burner sometime in late August or early September.

The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow has a short, but memorable history in our gaming group after our Delta Green agents ran through the "Night Floors" scenario. It the scenario, the artistic inhabitants of a New York brownstone begin circulating the pages of the King's namesake play, driving each other made and opening doorways to the Night Floors, otherworldly levels of their apartment building that lead to mind-warping realities.

That session ended with the agents' foray to the Night Floor, where one of their number went mad and started shooting at the monstrous minions who had begun hunting him through the strangely twisted corridors.

Of course, those monsters were his fellow agents. They managed to seal him into one of the Night Floor's rooms, and he proceeded to fire at them blindly through a wooden door, nearly killing his friends, who promptly fled, leaving him to his fate.

Now the King returns with the The King in Yellow expansion for one of our favorite board games, Arkham Horror. Fantasy Flight Games explains:

This expansion introduces a major new mechanic to Arkham Horror - Heralds, who prepare the way for the Ancient One to arrive. In addition, old familiar faces will be turned against the investigators in ways they never expected. Featuring over 160 new cards, the King in Yellow heralds a darker age for Arkham Horror fans.

Combined with some music by Midnight Syndicate and a stash of Mountain Dew (because, you know, it's yellow this should be one great night of gaming.

And since I know we'll need them later, here's the PDF of the rules for The King in Yellow.

Heroes in the Background

I've been steadily working on Volume 1 of Infinity Storm, our superheroes campaign, as we wrap up Khelez-Mar and prepare for GenCon. I've outlined Issues #1-#4, though I'll admit that I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with #5, which will be the campaign cliffhanger.

I've posted a number of new entries to The Constant Sentinel, and a bunch more ready to go to keep things slowly moving forward as the summer winds down. New posts include:

  • ROCK FIGHT!!!: A fan's eye view of the events of the first Freedom City session.
  • The Unfab Four: The supervillains known as the Factor Four are back in Freedom City; InfinityLord blogs about their history.
  • Downshafted?: Has the time-slowing supervillain Downtime returned to Freedom City?
  • We're sending you ... BACK to the FUTURE!: Weird weather equipment from Freedom City University just showed up in Hanover, and the nerds at HIT aren't happy about it.
Kenneth Newquist said,

Sat, 07/28/2007 - 12:28pm

Last night was probably one of our best games, if not the best game, of Arkham Horror we've ever played. We faced Nyarlathotep for the first time, which meant we got to go up against his various Mask -- aspects of his unholy personage that manifest throughout Arkham as horrors (though for some reason, the one we kept going up against was the Dark Pharaoh.

We weren't a particularly combat heavy party, though by the end of the game we'd accrued a few magic swords that let us slash through most lesser creatures, but we had a good mix of characters and a few lucky breaks that let us quickly close a bunch of portals and/or prevent new ones from opening.

Damon, who is infamous for his bad luck, probably had his best game ever last night (and by "best game ever" I mean of any game we've ever played with him in nearly a decade of gaming). He made almost every roll he needed, picked up a horde of weapons, magic, and allies, and was a near-unstoppable force in Arkham.

Evil Genius ... well, less so. He made the clutch roll that allowed his character to cast a spell that stacked the Mythos deck (thus allowing us to cause gates to spawn where they couldn't open) but he blew almost every other roll.

Ultimately, we were able to close all the gates and actually win the game, which is probably only the second time we've accomplished that feat.

What made the game all the more fun was that we royally screwed up in our first attempt at playing the game. it had been a while, and we misread the directions when we started playing; we were having gates open after each person's go in the turn; not after the turn itself was completed. That caused four gates to spawn in about four minutes, and we all sat there scratching our heads and wondering why this seemed so much harder.

We played the lower-impact version of the King in Yellow expansion, shuffling the new cards into the existing decks. This gave rise to occasional Yellow encounters that added a nice bit of suspense to the game -- would this card be the one that advanced the play The King in Yellow to Act I (thus terrible consequences in Arkham)? Or would some other unexpected horror befall us?

All in all, a great session, a great game, and a great expansion. I can't wait to play again.

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