Arkham Horror: The Card Game tries to distill the Arkham Horror board game into a campaign of 1 to 2 hour adventures for up to four people. Each adventure takes place in an area demarcated by location cards with connections. Each card has clues to find and often a special effect (e.g. Arkham University where you can turn in clues for something or vice-versa, I forgot which).

Each character has a custom deck. At start of game you draw five cards which are of various types:

• Resources - used to pay for other cards
• Items or Allies - which you pay with resources then go on your player mat
• Special Actions - which you tend to also pay with resources
• Drawbacks - each deck has two bad cards which are played when drawn and you usually have to spend time and resources to get rid of them (or live with the negative effects)

A turn consists of:

• Players move in any order (3 actions: move, play card, fight, search for clues)
• Players draw 2 cards and get 1 resource
• Monsters go
• Each player draws a Mythos card (usually a bad effect, sometimes can be negated with a skill check or resource spend)
• See if bad storyline advances

There are two storyline decks (usually 3 card each). The bad storyline advances when there are enough Mythos points in play (usually 1 per turn and maybe some on monsters, which you can kill to remove their Mythos points). The good storyline advances usually by spending clue tokens. A bad ending leaves the group with permanent bad effects and it's on to the next scenario. A good ending can have the opposite, though it's more like you don't get bad effects and by the nature of the good ending following scenarios are bit easier.

After an adventure each PC gets experience points which can be spent to upgrade cards or replace cards. In general each character has a limited selection of decks to choose new cards.

I've played this game with my brother using Tabletop Simulator. Even playing on TTS (which is fast for setup/teardown if you have the game pack but slow when the game is being played) a game takes two or three hours. Deck building is particularly slow with TTS.

We found that with two characters (the default with a starter set) it's a tough game. Once we switched to four characters it was more doable even though the difficulty scales. Characters can get stuck where they don't have the right skills to get out of a jam and with three other characters around there's a better chance that help is nearby.

I found this game fairly fun. It has enough RPG elements to make it interesting but not enough to make it engrossing. An adventure plays fast so even if things go horribly wrong it'll be over quick (though you then have subsequent adventures where you are handicapped -- not sure this is better than playing one long game). As usual for FFG production value is great and rules are a little ambiguous.

Overall it's a game worth playing, more so if you are a Call of Cthulhu fan.

(Note: as usual this review is from memory and I'm sure I got many things a bit off and most terms certainly so.)