One way ticket to Innsmouth [Arkham Horror]

Has been a long time since we played Arkham Horror in our group, so I brought  Arkham Horror and the Innsmouth expansion to my friends house and we played a game that was very brutal and in a sense very Lovecraftian. The "generic" components from Dunwich Horror, Lurker at the Treshold and King in Yellow were also part of the game - as usual. We only used the Innsmouth Horror "Mythos" cards though to have a strong Innsmouth theme as always when playing with one of the expansions.

You know the game is going to kick your ass when during the first turn one characters gets cursed and another one breaks her hand! The streak of bad luck would persist throughout the game, the mythos was overwhelming for this group of hapless investigators as they struggled to sweep the board of the clue tokens only to lose them in insane amounts of failed re-rolls in fights against powerful monsters or to important skill test. At one point my character needed only to inflict one more wound in order to kill a monster - or get smacked so hard so that she would go insane and lose all her valuable gear. I ended up discarding no less than EIGHT!! clue tokens to pass that single reroll. All I needed was a 5+ !!

It was insane, when not having bad encounters throwing us into fistfights with monsters, then we had crazy bad luck during the Other Dimension phase with 2 investigators going insane and becoming Lost in Time and Space. And once the Old One had more than half of his Doom Track filled up, walking around in Innsmouth turned into a manhunt, our investigators were repeatedly thrown in the Innsmouth jail. Environment and Rumor cards inflicted crazy penalties and kept speeding up the awakening of the Old One - this gang were pretty much destined to die a horrible death or go insane from the start it would seem. And as we geared up for the inevitable last stand against the Old one he had become so powerful - boosted by cultists that he wiped his behind with our investigator stands and laughed in our faces.

It's not very often that the game offers such a brutal experience, in a way it's good not to always win in a a co-operative game like this. But damn it was hard.

Below are pictures from today's session: