For Christmas, Gary and I bought each other board games.
The latest edition of Arkham Horror has been out of the box for two days. Here is my review.
I spent 90 minutes unpacking it, sorting, shuffling, organizing, learning fifteen different types of cards and boards and tokens, and I swear to you, building a little cradle that a certain type of card can sit in (there it is at the top middle).
Then we gave up because it was too late to play.
Yesterday morning we sat down to play. We had to do the final setup (15 minutes), then we got ready to play, and then we read step 1, then we had to research all the steps in step one in the rulebook. Then we lost interest. We spent an hour doing that.
“They told you this version is easier than the old version?” Gary squawked. “What was the old one like?”
Last night we each took a rule book and studied for an hour, and after we got our advanced degrees in Arkham Horror, we rolled the dice. After the study sessions, it went pretty well. Gary didn’t like it too much the first four rounds because he had a run of bad luck, but then we kept going after the dice favored him, and soon we’d been playing it for six hours.
I wish I could tell you who won, but I can’t. Neither of us had won. After six hours. “Oho,” you say, “Something is wrong here.” Nope. It’s hard to win when only two of you are chipping away at it, but we’ll get there eventually, especially since we invested all that time getting up to speed.