I am not intending for this to be an exhaustive review, as the expansion does play identically to the base game in a lot of ways. I really just want to let players like myself, that bought Elder Sign on day 1 and were very disappointed, know that it's safe to come back now. The game is fixed.
Firstly I would like to share my thoughts briefly on Elder Sign as well as Fantasy Flight's Arkham games line, as they will provide necessary context for the positives and negatives I state later. My first real game eight years ago was Arkham Horror and I have been madly in love with it ever since. I have since bought everything from said games line and play them religiously, although lately it has been easier to get my wife to play Eldritch Horror than Arkham. When Elder Sign was first announced, I thanked the Ancient Ones for this gift. Arkham Horror the dice game with a fraction of the set up and rules complexity? I followed the game diligently, pre-ordered and broke it out immediately after receiving it.
Elder Sign was and remains my single greatest gaming disappointment since I started collecting. The game lacked flavor, and more importantly it lacked soul. I had no connection with my character, much less what was happening to them, and even worse I effortlessly laid a beat down on every beastie and nightmare to come out of <PERSON>'s glorious head. After ~10/10 wins the game sat on my shelf until Unseen Force came out. Hope sprung anew. I also bought it immediately and rushed home to play it. It felt like artificially inserted difficulty, which was still pretty easy, and the game still lacked soul. And so back to the shelf it went.....till a couple of days ago.
Gates of Arkham is less an expansion than a complete reworking of a base game. You still get to keep your investigators and ancient ones (in fact you get more). You get to keep your items, spells, and allies too (more of those as well). It is worth noting you get to keep your Other World Adventures. The core gameplay is also identical. Your regular Adventures are gone though. Don't worry you won't miss them. What really changes is your approach to Adventures. 304
The Arkham Adventures deck which replaces the Adventures deck is filled with two sided tarot cards. The front of the cards will be very familiar to anyone familiar with Elder Sign. The backs however, tell you the specific area of Arkham the Adventure takes place in, occasionally a special action that can be taken when you travel there, sometimes a Midnight effect, and the difficulty of the Adventure. With the exception of three cards at setup all of these Adventure cards enter play face down, meaning you know nothing of what will happen when you go there besides the location's special action. This is the game changer. Pun.
You can no longer perfectly plan out all of your moves. You can't be low on sanity and simply avoid Adventures with a sanity cost or sanity fail penalties. A lot of Adventures also have Event icons on them which will require you to draw an Event card as you resolve the Adventure, so even face up Adventures will often contain surprises.
Other Worlds also function entirely differently now. They enter play face down like everything else, but they also enter play with a gate token. Every Other World Adventure card in play is linked with an Arkham Adventure card in play of your choice. You are unable to interact with the linked Arkham Adventure card while the linked Other World is still in play. This creates some interesting decisions, as usually I keep the gates off of the face down At Midnight effect Adventures, so I can resolve them when I need to, and instead opt to put them on easy cards like the Asylum Adventures. Problem is that now when I want to go to the Asylum to use the special action to regain sanity I can't. It is also worth noting that when you "close the gate" by solving the Other World Adventure, you place a seal token on the linked Arkham Adventure card so another gate cannot appear on that card. Which sounds great, but if you ever need to place a gate but can't because all of the cards have gates or seals on them already, a gate burst happens which removes all the seals and advances doom. This is a decently thematic feature, but I thought it served best to add more complicated strategic decisions to the game.
Another new feature is the addition of faction affiliations. Through several game effects you can join the Sheldon Gang or the infamous Silver Twilight Lodge. These will provide you with assistance on certain Adventures, additional rewards, and occasionally surprise penalties. This feature actually created my favorite moment with the expansion thus far. I had joined the Silver Twilight already and was completing an Adventure when an Event card required me to place a monster on the card. This turned out to be a Gug, which would have made it unbeatable for me, but the Gug got placed on a monster space I could ignore as a member of the Silver Twilight. 558