Sure, but in the case of these games, the length compounds the fact that the gameplay is superficial. Shallow games like this are fine for shorter periods of time, but a 3 hour game that is the equivalent of eating rice cakes is just too long.

@@EclecticCamel Very much agree. Strangely, in modern cinema, in particular the tasteless rice cake movies (like Last Jedi) take way longer, then they should.

@@EclecticCamel Arkham Horror games are very challenging and hardly a mere passtime.

This reviewer has a strong preference for shorter games.

@@Steve-yd9ki there's hardly any strategy involved, let's not kid ourselves.

It's on the box by the UPC which edition it is. Not obvious I know, but it works

I must say I am finding your comment incredibly useful. I own EH and like it a lot and am considering AH3ED but this gave me pause.

@@MazariPL Thanks! Don't get me wrong, Arkham Horror 3rd edition is a fun game, so who knows, maybe you'd like it better or at least enough to own both it and Eldritch? If you can find someone else who owns it and play a game with them first that would be your best bet if possible.

I have acquired both EH and AH3 in the last 3 days. Haven't played either one, but I am a bit more excited to try out AH3. Mostly because, from what I gather, it seems to do a better job with the storytelling. Either way though, I also appreciated your comment. I'm excited to try them both!

@@keving82383 hey Kevin, could you please share your experience with both games? I'm considering purchasing one of these to move away from AH 2ed and would like to know your opinion.

Sorry I'm not Kevin but given this was posted recently and having played E.H. since it's inception and also doing research on this Arkham Files game and considering picking it up, I thought I could help. First, it depends on two main points. 1. How expandable do you want it to be? So how much replay and variety do you want your game to have and 2. Do you want more story and narrative or more gameplay and kind of a build your own story around a main mystery and Ancient One? Eldritch Horror is expandable to a point where you can consider it "done." As in you will likely *never* play the same game or build the same story twice. However, since it's done it's not growing from here. (It doesn't need to in my opinion.) Arkham Horror 3rd Ed. is just starting and can go anywhere from here, but currently is kind of limited as a result. Another upside to that though is that it makes it far more manageable *currently.* This is FFG. That *will* change and both of these games will be giant beasts before you're done. To my second point Eldritch Horror is a game where you have more freedom and it feels like you have more agency and there are multiple ways (adventures, expeditions, even dreams) to solve an adventure while the story still revolves around a main mystery/Ancient One, while Arkahm Horror 3rd edition is more focused, and local. Less freedom but more will happen around the main story as a result, and it has a defined, read ending and not just "We solved the last mystery! Hurrah suck it C'thulu!" So 3rd edition has a less open and potentially surprising (see also occasionally flat out nuts) narrative, but is more serious and has what some will find to be a tighter, more defined resolution. Again, it all depends on what you like, both games are great experiences in my view. Hope this helps, please let me know how you find it whatever your choice may be. :)

Nick Rossell I was just gonna say that

I don't think Sam is interested in this kind of game (horror). Zee tends to be the one to like Chachooloo games.

@@chrismusix5669 Sam doesn't seem to mind horror games. In fact he had Eldritch Horror at #20 on his top 100 in 2014 and had Mansions of Madness in his top 100 in 2016 and 2017. He also has other horror games on his top 100 in 2018, for instance in his top 50 he has Zombicide Black Plague #7, Fury of Dracula #48, and InBetween (aka Stranger Things the board game) #50 So yeah, Zee hates Eldritch Horror and the earlier edition of Arkham Horror but I'm surprised Tom and Sam didn't take part in reviewing this new Arkham Horror game.

@@Bodyknock Sam doesn't mind Horror in general. However, he feels uneasy, when there are cultist for anybody or anything else then Jesus Christ or Viking goods are involved.

It could very well be they didn't think it was that big of a release. I don't think Sam's faith has anything to do with it. The guy is tired of Cthulhu games so I don't blame him for not wanting to review another one.

"Modular" board😉

I bought this very game and I didnt play any other Arkham or Eldritch game before. I didnt regret this at all. It's like Zee said: it's easy to pick up the rules. I've read several times now, that the scenario, the rulebook recommends being played first is one of the hardest, so you might want to look out there when starting. But I can safely say, this game is frequently being played in our house and got me into the whole franchise now :) Guess a little interest toward the theme didnt hurt either for me :D

No. I doubt Sam would play it.

I couldn't agree more...

Yes you can. Its coop so easy to play solo with two characters if u want as well.

That's actually impossible unless you did something wrong. The clue cards only come into the decks when clues spawn there, and only in the amount of clues there are. You could also think about the clues in the neighborhood as reminder, that there are clue cards in the deck.

As for game length, yeah it's long, and that makes it more difficult to get to the table, but I think the length does help to really add to the story and theme, if you'd cram this much story and an epic investigation and quest into 90 minutes, it would feel too quick and there'd be a disconnect; if you'd cut the story short, it would feel like you suddenly get thrown in at the end of a story, or only get to do the setup for a story. The only way I see a game like this be 90 minutes without ruining theme/story is if it was a mini campaign style where every play trough is as if you're playing trough one part of the story, to eventually get to a climax, and even then, the amount of set up and clean up a game like this requires would probably make it a bad ratio of set-up to clean up, to a point where ideally you just want to play multiple sessions in a row as to be more efficient with your time.

Because he doesn't like Arkham games, heavy games, fiddly games, or long games.

Indeed. I find myself playing 3-5h long games or playing short games multiple times - in essence also taking about 3-5h, just more games in this case :P

@@MazariPL Exactly!!

This might not be the exact same comparison, but I have over 200 games in my Steam library. If each of my games was 5 hours long (which is short for a video game), that's like playing for over 40 days straight with zero breaks to get through them all. If someone has many games to get through, short games are most certainly preferred.

@@trollking99 dunno man. I have a game in which I have over 400 days played and many with 100-500 hours per. Then again, I've been a gamer for the last 26 years :)

@@MazariPL The number I gave was lowball, but also meant for games that actually have an ending. For open world games like Skyrim or MMOs, it's a whole other story lol

There is player agency during encounters as you describe, but not really during mythos. I didn't realize for a while that everyone draws TWO Mythos tokens, and that does a take quite a bit of time.

Robert Dullnig ok, I guess I can live with that. I made this post because it took me up to he middle of my 2nd game of EH to realize that the real action is in the encounter phase and not the “action”. Now, about drawing 2 mythos tokens, I’ll have to say I have no idea how these work, so... we’ll see...

The scenarios are more thematic. It's not realistic in the setting for you to encounter Cthulhu or Hastur at all much less *win* and walk away from it. Most stories written by the creators and even with FFG's approach end with the spell casters or the one who sees the GOO driven irrevocably insane, and either killing themselves, living the rest of their lives insane, or just dying in the encounter.

Comment edit: the Call of Cthulhu game Dark Corners of the Earth has you dealing with one of the most minor of the Old Ones, Dagon and even with you driving him back down, you *still* wind up insane and killing yourself.

I prefer modular board because that automatically means more replayability.

@@All_Ice117 Fair enough. I do have some games with modular boards. But it's not my preference if I have the option to chose.

It's 100% pandemic.

Well he liked it except for player involvement and game length. He says it's a good game.

It's pandemic because... its cooperative? There's almost no other similarities. Pandemic is simple with one bad thing a turn, four good things, and a goal that is not at all similar.

Kyle Martin the way the doom and anomaly tokens happen is straight cut and paste pandemic

@@keel1701 Almost no other similarities? Doom shows up around the board, you have to go clean it up. If too many appear in a spot, they burst into something bad happening. It's pandemic. Everyone I played it with thought it was pandemic. Reviews out there have said the same thing.

The video you linked is the second edition. The review is for third edition. The card game is the best but it's expensive and hard to get into. For someone new, I'd recommend Eldritch Horror.

I played it twice with 3 players and also had less than a 2 hour game.

I don't see it going 3 hours either but I did think the bag drawing mechanic where everybody draws two tokens and does their effects was a bit lengthy, and that was with only a couple of players. I can only imagine how drawn out that gets with 4 or 5 or 6 players or whatever. Compare that to Eldritch Horror, for example, where you draw a single mythos card and that card does whatever it does to the board or the players and that's it. MUCH faster!

Doug Rosengard I hear you, but my beef with Eldritch (a game I love) is that the mythos phase starts low maintenance then just gets longer and longer as the game goes on. In Arkham 3rd edition, it stays pretty much even throughout. Which I don’t mind. At least it’s predictable.

Spoken For Media, Inc. If you mean the mythos is longer because you have more monsters on the board to look at during the mythos phase later in the game that’s true in Arkham 3rd too. (If not I’m not sure what you mean, there’s only one card per mythos phase in Eldritch and it’s always exactly two or three things to do and one random event. Versus Arkham 3rd is two things per player.)

Doug Rosengard I guess I meant the reckoning. Phase. Monsters, elder god, rumor, possibly lots of player cards with significant effects, etc. You’re right, mythos itself isn’t terrible. But reckoning can slow things down. Reminds me of horror checks in mansions of madness. Not my favorite thing.

As others have shared, probably not a game Sam would like.

@@Steve-L Sam had Eldritch in his top 100 a few years ago and Mansions of Madness in his top 100 in 2016 and 2017. He doesn't have a problem with these games.

@@Steve-L "as others have stated" - Sam doesn't seem to mind horror games. In fact he had Eldritch Horror at #20 on his top 100 in 2014 and had Mansions of Madness in his top 100 in 2016 and 2017. He also has other horror games on his top 100 in 2018, for instance in his top 50 he has Zombicide Black Plague #7, Fury of Dracula #48, and InBetween (aka Stranger Things the board game) #50

Well, you could play twice, since AH loves killing unaware gamers hahahha (and I love when it happens)

"What am I supposed to do with my original AH?" ... play it?

Just keep playing it! I have the 2nd edition Arkham Horror with expansions and it’s one of my all-time faves. So...I feel no urge whatsoever to purchase this. But someone who never had it now has an available, in-print reimagining of it. ‘sall good.

All true...

Well for one thing they're completely different games mechanically. Elder Sign is essentially an amped up version of Yahtzee (i.e. every turn roll dice three times, pick the ones to keep and roll the rest) with very little encounter text (or at least very little text people ever actually read out loud.) Eldritch Horror and Arkham Horror are both games where you travel around a map, reading random encounters in each space you visit with less involved combat mechanics and more involvement with story text and item or condition collection. I'm not saying Elder Sign is bad or good, I'm just saying it's a completely different style of game. Personally I like Elder Sign but I like Eldritch Horror more, it's a longer game but my friends and I have a better time playing Eldritch Horror because of the huge content variety and the globetrotting motif. Elder Sign is a game I played more on my iPad (Elder Sign: Omens) and that seems to be the most fun way to play that particular game. Obviously Zee is the opposite, he likes Elder Sign with the Gates expansion better than Eldritch Horror. So it's all a matter of taste.

Elder sign omens of the pharoh will send you home wimpering like a whipped dog to your mommy

Michael DeVries Yep! Some of the Elder Sign Omen dlc campaigns are INSANELY hard. 😳 I beat the Cthulhu scenario but never managed fo beat the Wendigo. I never played the Egypt one but it’s rated at least as hard as Wendigo so I can only imagine it’s plain ridiculous.

Can you justify that? My sister asked me what I want for my bday that it’s near and I was thinking about getting EH. I already own 3ed with both the expansions out. Are they different? Why EH is better? Is it cool with expansions?

Thats the first thought I had when I saw the game.

I thought so at first but Its really not bad. I like it! tight fit is a true. but i can see them adding in like Innsmith or dunwich pick your expansion tiles Adding them and loosing others so the board is always a bit different. It kinda plays like AH with a bit of Pandemic. Replaying is a bit like a different game. Oh and the clue cards are diffrent in each scenario so each game has a little different rules and cards monsters and 13 random headline's

It does seem cosmetically unappealing but I guess as you play, it will hopefully become transparent and the story pushes that aspect to the background.

Why does the board look like a "mess" and "horrible"? I think it looks fine. I'm excited to play with that modular system. And, it takes up way less space. Expansions should will be able to plug right in. No sideboard hogging space. The new map is different and interesting.

I always find it amusing when people present their aesthetics as objective imperatives.

Pandemic is a very different game, isn't it? It has in common the dealing of escalating threat across a board, but lacks the roleplaying and wonderfully zany and unpredictable stories that develop. Plus thematically 2nd can really drag you in to its theme with all the encounters and flavour text. I like pandemic, but for different reasons. Though both have that sense of the game having its own logic and, in 2nd editions case, its like a lovecraftian god itself - growing and spreading disaster and genuinely trying to beat you down as the fragile human being you are. 3rd seems to have over powered characters, and the monsters (so far) feel weak, which is disappointing, but maybe some scenarios are different. I do miss the otherworldly encounters and am not sure the stories are any better than 2nd editions advancing elder god, but time will tell.

I think FFG decides that ;-)

Arkham Horror 2nd edition is nothing like Arkham Horror (1st ed) either. The game has evolved and been modernized from the 13 year old 2nd edition.

Ok. We’ll call it Elder Terror in Small Town Americana. Now will you buy it?

@@pantognost They could've called it "______ Horror". I worked with Eldritch Horror. I'll probably still buy it, but it doesn't look much at all what most people associate Arkham Horror with.

Sweetestsadist I’m not sure what to make of your sentence “I worked for EH”. If you were employed for it 1) power to you and 2) you might remember the flak that this game got from the “purists” of the 12hour-studio-apartment-sized-full-expansion-board AH. If not then trust me, I have heard before.

It's not his job to sell games.

@@keel1701 I know, but it obviously not his cup of tea, but his review does not match his enjoyment of the game, idk. Thats my opinion, and I respect yours :)

@@Monly That just means he's trying to be as objective as possible. It's like... I'm not a fan oc Codenames, but I see the appeal and could recommend it to people that might like it based on their tastes.