I played two games last Saturday night, with a couple of friend of mine. First, we played a couple of games of Munchkin, which was immensely enjoyable. Second, we played Arkham Horror, which was also enjoyable, but in a very different way.

*Munchkin:* This one’s great for any fan of D&D, period. The basic premise, for those who don’t know, is that you’re in control of a fantasy RPG character, and you take that character dungeon delving until you are the first one to reach level 10. It’s fantastic fun twinking out your character like crazy, and you get to come up with some pretty crazy builds. For example, I had a gnomish wizard with a vorpal sword in one hand, a flaming sword in the other, a mace attached to my leg, and a catapult being wheeled by my elven follower. Plus, the cards are funny.

*Arkham Horror:* This is a whole different kettle of mi-gos. _Arkham Horror_ is based off of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos”, and draws a lot of inspiration from the _Call of Cthulhu_ RPG, in all its incarnations. You and your friends play investigators in the fictitious New England town of Arkham, and your goal is to cooperate in order to prevent a Great Old One from entering our dimension. Our game started out with myself as a scientist, and my two friends a psychiatrist and a salesman; our goal was to prevent Azathoth from eating the world. In _Arkham Horror_, you get various items, skills, and spells to aid you in your quest, and you can even get allies to tag along. Despite this, it is a very difficult game. There’s a constant feeling of dread lurking over the game board, a feeling that you’re simply staving off the inevitable apocalypse. In the end, it turns out that that was exactly what we were doing; Azathoth did, indeed, eat the world after three hours of play. It was not, however, a dissappointment; in fact, I’m very much looking forward to playing the game again.

In other news, I’m tackling the Herculean task of reading my Gamecrafters’ email after a long period of inactivity. If you sent me email some time in the past that has not been answered, be patient. I’ll get to it eventually; it’s just that I’m going to have to sift it out from the plethora of spam.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 5:58 pm and is filed under News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.