Quote:
Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II
So we sat down to play this twice - the first time with only about an hour, we knew we weren't going to get a full game in just wanted to get a feel for it. Second time, we got our asses completely handed to us within 45 minutes. My group is a little daunted by it, and while I have one other person who is itching to play it again, the others are balking at it. Between the complexity, length of time and apparent difficulty, any ideas on a way to make this game a little more accessible to convince my friends that we should give it another go?
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It's hard for me to say really. I think we first started playing Arkham back in 2006 when it first came out. In many ways it feels tailor made for our group. The majority of us tend to prefer co-op games and we're all big Lovecraft/Call of Chthulhu fans, so the game is right in our wheelhouse.
The length is the biggest issue for our group. The game takes a long time to play and you have to add a good 30 minutes to it for setup and take down given all the various cards and pieces. We played a ton of Akrham, but over the last year or two, we really have only played it a handful of times, because we have so many other boardgames to play and if you play Arkham that tends to the be the entire evening, whereas if you play some other games you might be able to work 2-3 different games in one night. For example, the game we played on NYE involved 5 people, one who had never played before. I think it took us about 5 hours or so to play. It was a pretty long game, because we had trouble sealing some gates and had a couple of gate bursters.
Peregrine's ideas sound solid.
You may also change some things for initial setup. For example, let people pick 2 skills instead of 1 if they get a skill and choose the one they prefer. Small things like that to make players more effective and, therefore, more active in the game.