Arkham Horror session and Arkham companion app

We dusted off Arkham Horror this Wednesday, it had been over a year since it had been played last time - mainly due to the setup time, playing area requirements and everything else that increased with the involvement of the expansions. This time however I had been tipped about  the free "Arkham Companion" app for tablets/smartphones - and downloaded it for my Android tablet before the game.

It's a great tool, which allows you to save a lot of table space and hassle by providing you with digital versions of Location and Other World cards. What's even more great is that the companion app features all the released expansions for Arkham Horror and you can sort the content of your game accordingly. For instance, I marked "Arkham Horror" and "Innsmouth Horror" for our game and would thus have all the necessary locations related to the core game and the expansion.

The only thing really missing was the Mythos deck- if that too somehow got incorporated it would be fantastic. The way the app works is that you simply click on the locations or other world location deck - picking the appropriate one depending on where your character is located on the board. The app will then shuffle and give you a new card each time you click on that location. The cards provided are the exact same that can be found in the game. I really liked this app and how it saved a lot of table space for us, so I highly recommend it!

As for the game itself, we played Arkham+Innsmouth horror with Azathoth, 4 players. It was a good thing we had Anders with us since Daniel and me had not played  Arkham for over a year and had forgotten half the rules - and David had not played Arkham Horror at all.

We didn't use any of the Heralds from Innsmouth as we thought the myriad of other components was enough to keep us busy in this first game after a long hiatus. We had access to all the extra stuff from Innsmouth, Dunwich, King in Yellow and Lurker at the Threshold - meaning we played with personal "relationship cards", "the insanity/injury deck" and "personal stories" as well as the full array of characters that can be found in those expansions.

Azathoth himself is not that much of a pain in the ass to play with since he does not add any real effects to the game but rather instant kills everyone when he appears and has the game end a automatic defeat. The game however proved very difficult, absurdly so if I have to be honest. First half of the game we got our asses handed to us by strong monsters apearing with gate markers combined with very poor combat results and at least twice did investigators end up having to spend their clue tokens in Other world locations not to get killed which meant that gates never got sealed (think we sealed a total of one gate!). We also lost investigators to "Lost in time and Space" at least 4-5 times which set up back greatly and made things increasingly difficult as the game progressed.

So the game ended a defeat for the investigators.