Arkham Chronicles: Season 2 review

As mentioned in the last episode of the season, I liked Drowning City a lot, and I am looking forward to playing it again. It will probably happen towards the end of the Summer, with my two coop buddies for their first run. We still have one last scenario in our current campaign, Scarlet keys, to play first. I've collected a few thoughts on the campaign that I share below.

Campaign

I liked the campaign overall. Its focus on different location mechanisms felt different from other campaigns. The difficulty seemed appropriate and fair, there was plenty of XP to collect, which is always a nice bonus as it allows to experiment more with your decks.

The Inescapable

That's a pretty cool idea to have as an encounter set. This enemy keeps reappearing in every scenario until you find away to block this permanently. He's not too difficult to defeat each time, and can respawn within the same scenario, but he will definitely slow down your group.

Encounter cards

Limited usage of the basic treachery is appreciated. We have seen these cards often, it's a nice change of scenery to rely on them less frequently. No one likes Ancient Evils anyway! It makes me wonder if that's something we'll see more going forward in whatever the new format will be, more self-contained campaigns

Tasks

I'm hesitant about the Tasks system. I like the concept, but overall, it felt like a choice of a trauma during the campaign or a trauma for the final scenario. Maybe even both! I know, this is Arkham, everything must be harsh, and we must suffer at every corner, but I don't feel like it's necessary to add another penalty for the last scenario on top of all the other you probably gathered during the campaign. We're dealing with Cthulhu here, I didn't expect it's possible to win the campaign, but could we, maybe, not kick the players while they are already down?

My decks

I absolutely loved Agatha as an investigator and am already looking to play her again, this time in her Seeker version. It wasn't smooth every time, it still a card game and sometimes you draw poorly, but it was definitely fun. After reading about advanced strategies, I'm currently trying to lean less on stat boosting assets. I might be fully competent yet on that front, which probably affected my performance. As I mentioned a few times during this journey, I ran out of ideas on ways of spending XP which might be a good thing. Resources were tight in this deck, it would need to be addressed in a second version.

As an investigator, I definitely liked Marion, even though I built her initial deck wrong. I used too many events with narrow trigger conditions to fully use her ability of playing two events back to back. The card draw was still strong though, it can be a common issue in Guardian decks. I slowly corrected this mistake with XP, it greatly improved her efficiency by mid-campaign.

Hopefully, you liked the new format I used for this second season of Arkham Chronicles. Leave a comment below on that effect! Please also share your thoughts about the campaign; how did it go for you?

This post might be the last one for a few weeks. Things are always slow during Summer, it's very short in my part of the world! I'm also going on a vacation for a few days. Thanks again for reading my musings and I'll see you in the next one.