Arkham Horror: Miskatonic Horror
1-8
12+
120+
A recent find at Miskatonic University has unearthed even more mysteries pertaining to the strange happenings in Arkham, Massachusetts. While the worshippers of the Ancient One grow in strength, the stalwart defenders of this sleepy town are put to the ultimate test.
Miskatonic Horror is a new type of Arkham Horror expansion that builds upon the materials found in the ample library of other Arkham Horror expansions. While the components and rules found in Miskatonic Horror can be enjoyed with only the Arkham Horror base game, the more expansions you incorporate, the more aspects of Miskatonic Horror you can enjoy.
Miskatonic Horror adds nearly 450 new cards and several new sheets, including:
- New Skill, Gate, and Mythos cards for the Arkham Horror base game
- Additional Exhibit Item cards for Curse of the Dark Pharaoh
- New Injury, Madness, Dunwich Location, and Dunwich Horror cards for Dunwich Horror, as well as an all new Dunwich Horror Herald sheet
- More Blight and Act cards for The King in Yellow
- New Kingsport Location, Epic Battle, Blessings of Noden, and Visions of Hypnos cards for Kingsport Horror
- Over 20 new Cult Encounter cards for The Black Goat of the Woods
- New Innsmouth Location and Innsmouth Look cards for Innsmouth Horror
- Additional Relationship cards and Reckoning cards for Lurker at the Threshold
- Plus new Player Reference sheets and a new Institution variant!
User Reviews (6)
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Miskatonic Horror is the eighth expansion, and fourth big box expansion, for the Arkham Horror board game. All appearances from FFG and MH itself suggest this is the final Arkham expansion, containing a vast selection of new cards that includes new cards for all the previous expansions, as well as the Institution cards.
The Pros:
Miskatonic Horror has a little bit of everything in it, and makes a nice rounding out expansion to the previous boxes. The Institution cards add a little something new and fun to assist the investigators, though their play value can vary drastically from one game to another. All in all, the cards in this box round and, update and flesh out elements from the other expansions in a really good way.
The Cons:
While not really a “con”, because Miskatonic Horror has cards for all the other expansion content in it, you won’t get the full benefit from this one unless you have already purchases the previous seven expansions. I’d recommend investing in this one last.
The only real negative point I can say about MH is that while it was issued as the fourth “big box” expansion, this almost feels like it was done out of an aesthetic need for balance (4 small expansions, 4 big ones). Unlike the other three “big box” Horror expansions, there is no new board with this one. The larger box might be justified because of the quantity of cards included (and there are a LOT of cards in the box), but for some it might seem overpriced or not as “shiny” as the Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport boxes.
Overall Opinion: Well worth it.
All things considered, I am glad I bought this expansion. The contents round out the Arkham Horror game well (and it satisfies my need to complete sets of my games). This is essentially the “wrap up” product for the Arkham Horror line from FFG. It has the feel of being the expansion into which they included all the odds and ends of ideas the game designers had for the game so that they could get them out there to the AH fans, and now it looks like FFG is moving on to other products (the most obvious being the launch of the new Eldritch Horror game to their Cthulhu Mythos lineup).
My first observation when I opened my copy of Miskatonic Horror was that there wasn’t a lot there. There’s some new cards, and some new counters, but really they didn’t need to use a big box for what was included.
The second thing that I noticed was that reading the new rules went pretty quickly, because this expansion doesn’t add a lot of new mechanics.
The majority of the components that came with this expansion are intended to be used only with one or more of the other expansions. They supplement or replace the elements that came with the earlier expansions. This means that if you don’t have the other expansions, then you won’t be able to fully utilize Miskatonic Horror. I would not recommend that you purchase this expansion unless you already have ALL of the previous ones.
Miskatonic Horror fleshes out the experiences that the other expansions offered. It adds new encounters to the locations in Kingsport, Innsmouth, and Dunwich. It adds new relationship cards, insanity cards, Innsmouth look cards, and nearly every other type of card that was introduced in other expansions. It gives you a replacement varient of the Act cards for the King in Yellow that makes the play a threat even when you have several hundred mythos cards.
In addition to the new cards, M.H. offers a few Human Agencies that help you out in a way similar to Guardians. In addition, you’ll get some wonderful little cheat-sheets that list all the variable rules for the number of players that are in your game. I love these things, and I don’t know why I didn’t make myself something similar a few years ago.
I wouldn’t call Miskatonic Horror an “expansion to Arkham Horror”. I think that it’s more accurate to call it an “expansion to the expansions to Arkham Horror”. If this is what you want, then I can recommend Miskatonic Horror as the best, and only option! Happy gaming!
Miskatonic Horror is a big-box expansion for Arkham Horror (from Fantasy Flight Games). Like the other bigger expansions for the Lovecraftian horror game, Miskatonic Horror can work with just the base game. How it works best, however, is tying multiple expansions together. So in a sense, it’s an expansion for the expansions. With this in mind, the box comes with some neat things to add to the game — but it also comes with some things that might just be neat ideas only.
What I like
New cards! Lots of new cards. Tons and tons of new cards. There’s basically a whole new deck of Mythos cards that you can use with the base game (or any other expansion). They give you the option of including gate bursts with the core game, which can make things more challenging. The flavor text and effects are both challenging and generally well-written. There are also dozens of new cards for the locations in the other big box expansions, and they’re quite good as well.
There are new skills tailored for almost every expansion, new madness and injury cards, new relationship cards, new Blights for the bigger expansions, new cult encounter cards for the Black Goat expansion (which are surprisingly good), and many more. The little things from the previous expansion get a boost across the board. The new Act cards for the King in Yellow are a highlight, as are the new Innsmouth Look cards and the new additions to the Epic Battle deck.
Institutions. The new institutions variant lets you add the help of an organization to the game. They work a lot like a human-focused version of the previously introduced Guardian variant. I genuinely like all three (which are organized crime, Miskatonic University, and the bureau of investigation), enough though they seem to work better in specific situations rather than help in a general sense. The feds, for instance, let you spend clue tokens to get agents to patrol the streets of Arkham and help keep the monster population down. In one game, this institution saw no use at all. In another game, monsters were around for only a few turns before the feds gunned them down. Your mileage may vary with these, but I think they’re pretty neat.
Reference sheets. The expansion also comes with handy reference sheets that let you know the monster limit, gate limit and so on for any number of players. I can never seem to remember these stats, so it’s nice to have these around.
The Dunwich Horror Herald. Though it’s free on the FFG website, it’s nice to have a nice, glossy version of this.
What I’m mixed on
Multi-expansion encounter and Mythos cards. Miskatonic Horror has lots of encounter and Mythos/Other World cards that are designed to be used with specific expansion combinations — Dunwich/Innsmouth, for instance, or Kingsport/Lurker, Innsmouth/King in Yellow, and so on. Trying to tie the aesthetics of these various expansions together is a really, really cool idea. It only works some of the time, though. Some of the flavor text is more generic than anything else, and this is kind of frustrating.
What I don’t like
The price point. You get more cards in this box than any of the other large Arkham Horror expansions, sure…but around $50 still seems steep once you actually look in the box.
Final thoughts
If you only have the core game, you won’t use much of Miskatonic Horror. If you have all of the expansions and like to play with only a few at a time, you’ll probably get a lot out of this. Personally, I’m a fan, and like some of the new additions…even if I think it’s a little bit too expensive.
Miskatonic Horror stands out from the other Big Box expansions in that it doesn’t include a new expansion board, which, of course, means no new locations, other worlds, or major new mechanics. Also unlike the other Big Box expansions, this one contains no new investigators or ancient ones.
What Miskotonic Horror does include is 450 cards to add the the decks of Arkham Horror and all its expansions. I had gotten only the other Big Box expansions because the Small Box expansions are a waste of money in my opinion. Because of that decision, 1/3 of the cards in Miskatonic Horror were unusable to me. The expansion also includes 4 reference cards to remind the players how the rules change depending on the number of players and which expansions are being used. The sole new mechanic included in Miskatonic is the 3 institution cards. They give the investigators options like buying agents with clue tokens to help fight monsters.
As for the additional cards, you barely notice the difference because all the decks are already padded with the extra cards from the other expansions. The only exception being the “Innsmouth Look” deck because that deck only had 10 cards to begin with, only one of which said anything but “nothing happens,” so the additional 5 cards really made a difference.
Overall, I liked this expansion. The Innsmouth cards and Institutions are a blast, and the other cards make a little difference when making encounters and getting items. Even so, it’s difficult to justify the $40 purchase, unless you are a very hardcore Arkham Horror fan.
I am a huge fan of Lovecraft’s works. When I found out there was a game based on it and that it was a co-op game, I was sold. A trip to the store and some willing people later we got our Cthulhu on.
Unfortunately, this game wasn’t all I had hoped. The course of action was readily apparent, and there was little-to-no room to deviate your actions game-to-game your only hope was to seal enough portals to win the game. While you were in another realm the events happening to you ranged from awful to impossibly hard. This isn’t a game you can win on skill. Sometimes the game kills you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Unfortunately the expansions don’t do much to alleviate this, they just add more ways to fail. The larger box expansions even make the already huge board even bigger with supplemental places to visit (often you’re forced to send some poor sot off to deal with each of the boards, or face the doom track).
While I like the idea of the game, the execution leaves much to be desired.
As a longtime Arkham fan, all the new encounter cards are a very welcome addition. I just wish the set wasn’t so expensive, considering that the expansion is mostly cards, and if you’re like me, and ‘pick and choose’ what additions you use from the numerous expansions, you’ll only use about half of them.
All in all, it’s about $10-20 overpriced, but that’s its only flaw.