Hello everyone,
after a long day at the Spiel 2013 in Essen (Germany) I was randomly wandering around and passed the playing area of Heidelberger Verlag (the german distributor of the FFG games) where my eye fell on a poster of "Eldritch Horror". My first thought was: "Probably only an advertisement". But I took my chance and dug into the rather crowded playing area. And yes, at one table there was a full copy of Eldritch Horror. The session was about to start and one place was open. Of course I could not pass up the opportunity to have a go and was able to play a couple of turns and get a first hand experience on the "Arkham Horror 2.0/Arkham Horror Light". And after coming home today I thought I could share my impressions here.
(Disclaimer: I was pretty tired at the time I discovered the game, so I may have some facts wrong. Sorry for that in advance).
(Also much of the stuff I am going to write about has already be made public by FFG but I will repeat it anyway)
(Moreover, I am not a native english speaker, so please forgive any weird sounding phrases.)
EDITs: Typos, oh so many typos. And some really weird phrases. And sentences ending suddenly. One should not write when tired. Hope it's better to read now.
General Overview
So, <PERSON> (dude in charge of teaching us the game, who was very nice and patient with our questions) asked if i knew Arkham Horror. I said yes, and he responded: "Good, then you will feel right at home here". And indeed I did. The basic setup was the same: An Ancient Evil is going to awake from its slumber and our job is it to prevent that. 504
For this we have to collect clues about the mythos, combat monsters, have encounters and close gates that could open in various places and try to win before the Old Evil awakes. All that with mythos cards making our life hell and a doom track, spelling our approaching...doom. Until there I really felt right at home. But from there on things developed rather differently from the good old Arkham Horror, that I came to love so much.
The Ancient One, conditions to win and loose
As one could have guessed we were set up against the "Beginner" Ancient one: <PERSON>.
He did come with, a cool Artwork, an instruction on how to build the mythos deck (more on that later),something about cultits getting some other stats (but that never came up, and I did not pay attention to that) and a rule about under certaing conditions you decrease the Doom Track depending on a number of open Gates (more on that later). We were explained that in order to win, we had to solve 3 missions (out of 4 available in total), which were tied to Azathoth. And each of the other Ancient ones got their own set of 4 individuall missions. The mission we got said something along the lines of: "Whenever you close a gate you may spend 1 clue token. If you do this a number of times (I think it was 3) we solve this mission. My first thought was "Hey, like in Arkham Horror, but 1 clue seems to be rather easy". Well, until we tried to get some clue tokens, but more on that later.
As loosing condition we got the Doom Track. <PERSON> explained, that if the Doom Track ever reaches 0, we would have to flip the Ancient One's Sheet over and read on the back what would happen. Being Azathoth all the guys at the table with Arkham Horror experience of course knew what we would read on the back of his sheet...but I found it awesome, that one does not know right away, what happens if we loose, and what the conditions of a possible final battle would be. So at least in the first session against <PERSON>, preparing for a final battle would be rather hard.
Also a major change: You don't loose by default if too many gates are open. Still, too many gates being open is not so good, as I will explain farther bellow.
Anyway, this were the informations we got on how to win or loose the game.
Investigators
The investigators were recognizable, with known faces but new artworks. They all again had a number of health and sanity (which was generally higher than in Arkham Horror) special effects, starting items, and a set of skills.
The skills worked like in Arkham Horror: Roll a number of dice equal to the number of skill points, modify this number by effects on cards and items, every 5 and 6 is a success. Clue tokens do not add additional dice, but allow you to reroll. 755