YMMV / Arkham Horror: The Card Game

• Anti-Climax Boss: Seth Bishop, The Dunwich Legacy campaign's Big Bad and the boss of the penultimate scenario, is a complete joke compared to absolute hell that the investigators had to face in the previous scenario. Despite being a boss, he deals pitiful 1 damage and horror, and his health is below that of the bosses you can meet in tutorial scenarios (especially on low player count), which makes him very easy to put down by experienced and well-geared team; he even gets easily overshadowed by some generic enemies you can meet. That's assuming you fight him at full force, or event fight him at all, as, depending on your prior actions, he may be wounded, or even neutralised altogether, before you even make it to him.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: In the Night of the Zealot campaign, cultists claim Umôrdhoth is a just god who claims only the dead and the guilty, and notably it does willingly leave if you deliver the one who destroyed one of its lairs to it. Lita in contrast claims that the cult is sacrificing innocents to sate it and the ghouls' hunger, and while we only have her word for that they're clearly willing to strongarm civilians like the mortician into aiding them and kill anyone interfering in their actions.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Every class has certain cards (especially the level 0 ones) which are commonly considered to be "must-have", resulting in these cards showing up disproportionally often, overshadowing the other cards. Several popular cards were hit by "taboo" rules specifically for that reason, particularly low level ones, mostly by increasing their experience cost (but not level) to encourage the players to consider other options, and preventing certain cards from showing up in starting decks. Amongst the most infamous cases are "Machete" (Guardian-class Weapon)^note this taboo was eventually lifted however and "Mr Rook" (Seeker-class Ally).
• Demonic Spiders: Enough to warrant a separate page to list even the most dangerous and hated cases.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Rather infamously, third and final scenario of the Night of the Zealot campaign, "Devourer Below", significantly ups the difficulty compared to the first two scenarios, in what's supposed to be a tutorial campaign. And since you only had two easy levels before it, you'd likely be very short on exp to actually prepare for it.
  • When it was originally released, The Forgotten Age campaign was nearly universally acknowledged as much harder than anything prior to it, not in the last turn due to emphasis on (previously underused) Agility stat, and new Poison and Vengeance mechanics which forces the players to adapt or die. It's telling that Return to the Forgotten Age expansion actually toned down much of it to more reasonable level. While other hard campaigns were released since then, none had as much of impact in that regard.
• Goddamned Bats: Enough to warrant a separate page to list all the ways the game can make the players suffer.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Some investigators are commonly considered to be weaker than their colleagues from same class:
  • Carson Sinclair (Guardian class) is a Support Party Member, with all his abilities, including signatures, being geared towards helping the other players — the others, but not himself; his main selling point is the ability to trade his actions to the other players. But, unlike the other support characters, he's also crippled by having no stat above 2, which makes him fall behind his colleagues, both in and outside of his class. To add insult into injury, effectiveness of his main ability drastically diminishes at low player count, as Carson can't buff each player more than once per round, meaning that it only reaches full potential in full groups.
  • "Skids" O'Toole (Rogue class) fell victim of his Jack of All Stats design, which doesn't synergise well with him having Guardian as a secondary class and doesn't let him do anything other Rogues can't. His main ability (turn resources into actions) was actually good at release, but suffered the Uniqueness Decay over the years, as the cards that grant the player extra actions became so widespread in Rogue card pool, they're one of the class' selling points now. It's generally believed that he would've worked better with Survivor as a secondary class, which is more or less what was done to his "Parallel" version (which was received generally positively).
  • Amina Zidane (Mystic class) has average 3-3-3-3 statline, in a class that is dependant on Willpower to fuel their magic, and has few means to boost or benefit from other stats. She's restricted in deckbuilding, as her only off-class option — the Charm assets — generally occupy the precious accessory slot. But the most glaring issue is her core gameplay: she's intended to represent "Doom control" archetype of the Mystics, but to be effective, she requires lots of tools that cost lots of exp to purchase, and lots of time and resources to put into play, while her ability to get discounts by putting Doom tokens on assets may drain your precious time, as it doesn't come with the means to remove it by default.
  • Calvin Wright (Survivor class) has interesting concept of initially-weak investigator who grows stronger over time. But the time is exactly what team has in short supply, while 6/6 Health/Sanity and the weakness that randomly drops traumas on him makes it hard to actually keep him alive (especially in long terms), given that his entire playstyle is focused around trading health and sanity for stat boosts. For a long time, he was also very restricted in his deckbuilding (due to Spirit not being very common trait), but that was gradually rectified.
• Magnificent Bastard: From The Scarlet Keys: The Red-Gloved Man is the most mysterious member of the Scarlet Coterie, having evaded the Society for years. After being rescued from his kidnapping and supplantation by the Outsiders, he thanks the investigators before setting out on his own research. He later interrupts the investigator's trial, sneaking behind his impostor and shooting it in the head, proving that the Coterie had been infiltrated while its members were focused on the wrong priorities. After calling them out, he gets them to join forces against their doppelgangers, following them to the City of Remnants, their home dimension, to settle the score.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: For years, Father Matteo was suffering from inability to get almost anything outside of his own class, due to Blessed cards (his only off-class option) being virtually non-existent on The Forgotten Age release, which was widely mocked for not giving him anything useful. It changed with release of The Innsmouth Conspiracy expansion, which introduced lots of non-Mystic Blessed cards, opening up new options and synergies; subsequent releases reinforced it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • "The City of Archives" scenario from The Forgotten Age campaign takes away your investigator, forcing you to play as a Yithian with overall terrible stats and not very useful abilities (they do contribute towards main objective, but little else)... and also takes away all unique Items, including signatures. Some investigators gets completely crippled by that, as it ruins their preferred playstyle and takes away the cards that are the core of their gameplay. While overall alien aesthetics of scenario can be memorable, few players have fond memories of this particular restriction. And then there's a risk of staying this way permanently if you don't perform well enough on the scenario.
  • The "Haunted" mechanic from The Circle Undone expansion wasn't well-received; as it triggers negative effects whenever investigator fails skill checks in "haunted" locations, it discourages investigators from trying anything at which they don't specialise (eg., not risking investigating if you're not a Seeker).
  • While generally liked expansion overall, The Innsmouth Conspiracy has one design decision which very few would defend: that at several points, the game forbids the players to spend their experience between scenarios, seemingly arbitrarily. Besides obvious issue with the players getting stuck with low-level deck for longer than they would prefer, on initial release, there was another issue, related to "Mythos pack" release model: that each pack comes with new flashy cards, but you may not be able to actually use them if you're unlucky and your last scenario is one of those where you can't spend experience.
• Solo-Character Run: So-called "true solo" runs — to start and finish the campaign playing by alone as one specific investigator, and keep them alive right until the end. Such runs are very popular, and it's not uncommon for the players to share their "true solo" decks.
• Spoiled by the Format: In most scenarios, it's easy to tell how close you are to the end of the scenario simply by looking at how many agenda or act cards are left.
• That One Boss: Umôrdhoth has a big health pool (6 plus 4 per investigator), high combat stats and deals a monstrous three damage and horror to every investigator on its space at the end of the turn. Players in turn will have likely expended resources surviving and trying to prevent its summoning (which is all for nothing if it fails). Players will need good gear and defensive tools if they aren't able to prevent the summoning.
• That One Disadvantage: Some basic weaknesses are more devastating than the others. One of particularly painful to deal with is "Silver Twilight Acolyte"; whenever it attacks, it causes the Doom to be placed directly to the current Agenda (which means, you just got one step closer to losing), and it has just enough health to survive one attack unless you're prepared for fight. It's also not so easy to run away from, as it has decent agility and would keep pursuing its prey, being a Hunter.
• That One Level:
  • The third scenario of the Night of the Zealot campaign, "The Devourer Below", is infamous for its unforgiving difficulty (challenging enemies, little time and brutal final boss), especially since it comes right after two mostly tutorial scenarios, in a campaign which gives little chance to stockpile experience and gain higher-level cards.
  • "Undimensioned and Unseen" scenario from The Dunwich Legacy campaign has you pursuit several monsters that you can't hurt by anything but one scenario-specific card, and who're all to eager to kill you if they run into you. The most annoying part is that the monsters you're after keep moving around erratically, forcing you to waste time on pursuing them. And you want to kill them all, as letting even one to slip away would cut your time on the next scenario (failing which ends your entire run).
  • The Forgotten Age is considered a very hard campaign in general, but couple of scenarios are particularly disliked, both for being harder than average even by its standards, and for being very mean to the players:
    • "Boundary Beyond" makes progressing very tedious, as you have to stand in location and keep exploring it, hoping that the exploration deck would actually send you a matching Ancient location, so it would swap and let you start to actually gather clues: you need to fully clear 6 locations before you even reach the Act 3, which lets you do your actual objective. If you draw location with the wrong symbol (or worse, an encounter card), you would waste that exploration. And then you can get a treachery dropped on your head, which threatens to either cut your precious time, or undo all the progress for your location, cutting even more time. Unfortunately, winning this scenario is one of conditions for the Golden Ending.
    • "The City of Archives" strips investigators of their abilities and any unique Items (signatures included) with no prior warning, instead giving them Master of None replacement they would spend the rest of scenario playing as. This scenario can completely disrupt carefully thought strategy that you've built throughout the entire campaign up until this point, and yet you still must somehow complete your tasks within the time limit, or entire campaign would end in a failure prematurely.
  • The Circle Undone is also considered one of the harder campaigns, alongside The Forgotten Age which directly precedes it, and much like it, has some scenarios that cross the line into being unreasonably difficult:
    • "Wages Of Sins" starts with all locations revealed, letting Investigator to gather clues from connecting locations if they have the tools to Investigate from a distance... And that's where the advantages end. Your objective is to "banish" the spirits of various Heretics, which can only be done by defeating them and then performing a time consuming task, while being hunted by various enemies and The Spectral Watcher in a very tiny map with plenty choke points where they can corner you. And if you fail to exorcise all Heretics, you will start the other notoriously hard level, "Union and Disillusion", with Doom already on the agenda for each spectre that got away.
    • In "Union and Disillusion", advancing through the forest is painfully slow, as it throws lots of difficult tests at you just to progress into next section, and frequently dumps the players with all sorts of treacheries to drain their health and sanity before they even make it to the site of final battle.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Revised core set replaced the art for some player cards, all five investigators, and for some encounter cards, as well as for Night of the Zealot campaign's Final Boss, Umôrdhoth. Not all choices for replacement art were received equally positively: some players prefer old art for investigators over new, while new portrayal of Umôrdhoth is viewed as a generic.

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