Friday Fiction: Welcome to Arkham

Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORT is just that little bit more than a simple guide to the city at the heart of the H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. In one way it is a simple exploration of the city and its strange history and places as presented in the Arkham Horror family of games published by Fantasy Flight Games, including of course, the Arkham Horror board game and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and more recently, the roleplaying game Arkham Horror, and in another, it showcases the great artwork from the games. Seriously, the artwork is very, very good. Then in another way, it presents the city and its environs, including the towns and villages of Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, in a way that could be used with any horror roleplaying game. Which means that it could works as a companion to the recently released Call of Cthulhu: Arkham for Call of Cthulhu.

What it actually is though, is a reprint of the Arkham gazetteer that was originally in the Arkham Horror Deluxe Rulebook, published separate to the board game, along with expanded details of Lovecraft Country. Yet it is also more that than that. It is a copy of Welcome to Arkham, the introduction to the city published by the Arkham Historical Society after having been updated, revised, and expanded by the society’s curator, Reginald Peabody. Further, it is his personal copy, complete with notes that he compiled in order to update it, and then, now in hands of his niece, Myrna Todd, it has been annotated with her notes and correspondence with a friend in New York, after she begins investigating Arkham and beyond following her uncle’s disappearance. What this means is that there are multiple layers to this book, on one level a simple guide or artbook, on another a story and mystery. Which means that it can be enjoyed on multiple levels…

Published by Aconyte Books, also responsible for a series of novels set in the world of Arkham Horror, this outwardly guide to Arkham and inwardly the mystery of the disappearance of the guide’s author, begins with a letter to young Myrna Todd from the Miskatonic Valley sheriff, informing her of her uncle’s disappearance, and a letter to her friend in New York, before welcoming the reader to Arkham proper. Starting with downtown, the volume takes the reader from one district of the city to another, visiting in turn, its highs and its lows, its weird and its wondrous. The highs include Independence Square with its balmy tranquillity that contrasts sharply with the Gothic grandeur and tenebrosity of Arkham Sanatorium, with its patients receiving the very best care, but so many lost to a stranger madness. Similarly, the newly opened restaurant, La Bella Luna, offers the wonders of Italian cuisine brought to small town New England, but hides an entrance to the Clover Club, the city’s premier speakeasy, whilst the Palace Movie Theatre brings the best of Hollywood to its big screen on which some moviegoers have begun to see odd shadows at moments when the big feature is not show. The description of the Palace Movie Theatre is accompanied by a fantastic film that never was, Mask of Silver. Meanwhile, the Ward Theatre is going to stage a much-anticipated performance of The King in Yellow, following its premiere in Paris! In rougher Eastown, Hibb’s Roadhouse might claim to be ‘dry’, but it is where the city’s less than reputable citizens go to get a shot of booze, whilst Velma’s Diner, a classic railcar diner, might serve good food, but it where the patrons of Hibb’s Roadhouse go after it shuts for the night.

French Hill is home to the even stranger parts of Arkham. There is Silver Twilight Lodge, the meeting place of the Order of the Silver Twilight, headed by one Carl Sanford, known for its generous charity work, but suspected by some for conducting very dark rituals behind its closed doors. This is, of course, a pleasing nod, to ‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’ from Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. (These are not the only nods to the source material beyond that of H.P. Lovecraft, as Welcome to Arkham also draws from the pages of the various novels in the ‘Arkham Horror’ range.) Then there is the infamous ‘Witch House’, once home to the reviled witch, Keziah Mason, but now a series of poky apartments let to students at Miskatonic University who complain of strange rodent that stalks the building with its weirdly human face and hands. These are only the start of the strange locations to be found in Arkham, others including ‘The Unnamable’, a collapsed mansion in the Merchant District that Arkhamites strive to avoid, the Black Cave in Rivertown with its odd geology and fungi and the spelunkers often lost within its depths, and Ye Olde Magick Shoppe in Uptown, a cramped premises stuffed with mouldering books, maps, and artefacts linked to places that geographers have no knowledge of.

Of course, Miskatonic University gets a section of its own, including the Miskatonic Museum and the Orne Library, and as a bonus, a working draft of ‘Book of Living Myths’. This is almost a Mythos tome of its very own, penned by Miskatonic University scholar Kōhaku Narukami, which explores the parallels between classic folklore and the Mythos. Beyond this, Welcome to Arkham draws both the reader and Myrna Todd up and down the Miskatonic Valley, visiting in turn Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, for similar treatments as that accorded to Arkham. Throughout, the locations are given both a fantastic illustration and a description, but this is not the only artwork in the pages of Welcome to Arkham. There are newspaper front pages reporting on important events such as the widespread, horrific destruction that beset Dunwich and the raid by Federal authorities on Innsmouth. There are also photographs, official reports, tickets, business cards, and plain postcards, the penned by Myrna charting the course of her investigation in the disappearance of her uncle, destined for New York, but not yet sent. Some are illustrated as if to appear attached to the pages by a paperclip, but others intrude into the pages, cut off by the neatness of the pages of Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORTT. Their creation is so good though, that you wish they were real and that every one of them would stick out between the pages and make the book bulge with the many things, artefacts, and documents stuffed between those pages.

If perhaps, there is anything missing from the pages of Welcome to Arkham, it is a map. Arguably, a book which is ostensibly designed as a guidebook, warrants a map. Perhaps the modular nature of the book’s source material, the Arkham Horror board game, and more specifically, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, means that like the source material, the book needs no map. However, if not coming to Welcome to Arkham via either of those games, the conceit of it begs for a map.

Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORT is the chance to explore the familiar, but from a different angle, that of source material from a board game and a card game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, rather than a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Though all draw from the same sources, there is sufficient divergence perhaps that Welcome to Arkham is ever so slightly odd, slightly less familiar. That said, fans of the Arkham Horror board game, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and the ‘Arkham Horror’ series of novels, will much that they will recognise and enjoy, as will the devotees of the writings of Lovecraft and of Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying. Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORT is an engaging combination of enticing artwork and literary conceit that constantly hints at the dangers to be found in poking around in places and the doings of people that are best left secret.

Friday Faction: What Board Games Mean to Me

We are lucky. We live in a time when the hobbies we pursue and the things that we like are the norm. Not just the norm, but accepted. Science Fiction, fantasy, superheroes, playing games, all the sorts of stuff that would have been derided in our childhoods and got us labelled as nerds. Board games are part of that trend, a trend which has seen them grow from being seen as childish pursuits to being just a hobby, but is that all they are? Just one more nerdy hobby amongst many others? This is something that What Board Games Mean to Me: Tales from the Tabletop sets out to explore in a series of essays from designers and publishers, players and scholars, journalists and librarians. Published by Aconyte Books, it is part of the publisher’s ‘Play to Win’ line, which includes James Wallis’ examination of the Spiel des Jahres winners, Everybody Wins: Four Decades of Greatest Board Games Ever Made, this is a collection of reminiscences and thoughts about board games—occasionally collectible card games and roleplaying games—but mostly board games, that will take the reader around the world and to some interesting places and ideas and to experiences familiar and unfamiliar, before coming back again, to his own collection of board games on the shelf and to the table where he plays them with friends and family.

The familiar follows two strands. The first being of playing with family—siblings, parents, and grandparents—of family classics such as Monopoly, Scrabble, Whist, Draughts, and how that got the essayist into playing games and understanding not just the mechanics of play, but the social dynamics of play. Games thus became a way to facilitate interaction with the rules of the game and the rules of game play. This is followed by the second, the discovery of a wider variety of board games, opening the essayist up to different themes and styles of play, co-operative games being a notable common discovery. For gamers of a certain age, such as John Kovalic, Gav Thorpe, Jervis Johnson, and Sir Ian Livingstone. This would have been with titles such as Escape from Colditz, Diplomacy, and The Warlord, an experience which British gaming hobbyists would recognise and which such figures would use as springboard into careers in the gaming industry. Others would discover a similar path through modern classics such as Carcassonne and CATAN or collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

The unfamiliar at first takes the reader to Nigeria with ‘Picture a Scene’. This charts KC Obbuagu’s first encounter with board games with an African classic, Mancala, and then following a revelatory moment in which he saw his board game design played, his steps into the board game industry where there was none. This was in Nigeria, and creating his first games led to the setting up of the games company, NIBCARD Games, the first tabletop café in Nigeria, and AB Con, the first board games convention in sub-Saharan Africa. All of which would result in NIBCARD Games being awarded the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming in 2021. This is a fascinating story, shining a light on the spread of the hobby in unexpected directions far beyond its origins in the English-speaking world. Also, an unfamiliar area—at least for board games—is that of the library. Jenn Bartlett describes in ‘Ticket to Read’, how she, as a librarian, created a board game programme at her library, working with publishers and local games shops, to support local business and develop a library-using habit in the attendees of the games events that she ran. There is an uncomfortable moment when she encounters misogyny as a player, but she draws parallels between what the hobby does at its best and what a library does, which is to welcome people in and letting them explore what each of them offers without judgement.

Both Lynn Potyen and Edoardo Albert bring a personal touch when they explore a fascinating effect of playing board games. In ‘Brain Games’, Lynn Potyen reveals how playing board games can help with learning disabilities and dementia, whilst Edoardo Alberto shows us in ‘Learning the Rules’ how the rules and etiquette learned in playing games can be applied to ordinary life, not in neurotypical learners, but in himself as well. What is interesting to note here is that when board games are used as tools in this fashion, they achieve something that the eighteenth and nineteenth century designers of board games failed to do, and that is to create a board game that works as an effective educational tool. That though was to teach the young players to be good Christians and the values of the British Empire, but even the board games of today designed to help players learn are not necessarily good teaching devices. Both Lynn Potyen and Edoardo Albert suggest that modern boardgames work better because they are designed for play rather than learning first, rather than the other way around. All of the entries in What Board Games Mean to Me are very personal, but none more so than ‘Brain Games’ and ‘Learning the Rules’.

Other entries in What Board Games Mean to Me include ‘Playing by Design’ an interview with the prolific board games designer, Reiner Knizia, the only entry to differ from personal essays that make up the rest of the book, and two scholarly explorations of board games and play. In the first of these, ‘The Magic Circle’, Matt Coward-Gibbs explores the phenomenon of the space which we all enter when we play from a theoretical standpoint, whilst in the second, ‘Connections’, Holly Nielsen looks at the connections made in that space when playing. One of the points she makes is that after discovering games designed to highlight the causes of women against unequal treatment and misogyny, the examples given pointing the feminism movement of the sixties and seventies and the Suffragette movement of the early twentieth century, she came to realise that despite the rallying cry of “Keep politics out of games!”, there had always been politics in games. There is scope here for an essay of all its own, but Nielson is also interested in the other aspect of games that the contributors to What Board Games Mean to Me return to again and again, and that is making connections via game play. Both entries talk about board games in a way that the casual player might necessarily consider, but do so in an engaging fashion.

What Board Games Mean to Me is similar to a pair of books published by Green Ronin Publishing, Hobby Games: The 100 Best and Family Games: The 100 Best, which together presented a series of essays on what the authors thought were the best and most enjoyable games of previous one hundred years. A handful of the contributors to What Board Games Mean to Mee also wrote entries in those earlier books, but where Hobby Games: The 100 Best and Family Games: The 100 Best looked back, What Board Games Mean to Me looks forward as well as back. This can be seen in KC Obbuagu’s essay highlighting the spread of board games as a hobby into unexpected markets and in the essays by Lynn Potyen and Edoardo Albert that point to board games as means of therapy and socialisation. In this way, it enhances the respectability that playing board games as a hobby has achieved in the past few decades.

Physically, What Board Games Mean to Me is a very lightly illustrated, but very readable paperback. None of the essays are longer than a few pages long and each is accompanied by a biography of its author.

What Board Games Mean to Me explores a variety of experiences in how the contributors came to play board games and how they came to discover and explore the wider hobby, and in doing so, tell stories that, for the most part, we can relate to because we had similar experiences. Yet wherever these stories take us, they always come back to the fact that playing board games is a social activity, a space where when we play, we do so using a set of rules that enable safe interaction and socialisation, even as we compete and battle against each other. Overall, What Board Games Mean to Me: Tales from the Tabletop is an enjoyable essay collection whose entries are in turn not only highly personal and immensely interesting, but will also will make the reader consider their own experiences with board games, whether they are new to the hobby or have been playing for decades.

Friday Faction: Everybody Wins

Board games have got big recently, as just about any newspaper headline on the subject will tell you, so much so that the headline has become a cliché. Yet there is some truth to the headline, for as long as anyone can imagine board games have always been popular, but board games really, really have got popular—and relatively recently. By recently, we mean the last forty years, and definitely the last thirty years as the board game evolved from something played during our childhoods to something that could be played and enjoyed by adults, who happened to be board game devotees. Then from this niche, the playing of board games as a hobby gained wider acceptance and moved into the mainstream to become an acceptable, even normal, pastime. Pioneered by classic titles such as Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride, board games have got big in the last few years. What these three designs have in common is that they all won the Spiel des Jahres, the German ‘Game of the Year Award’ which recognises family-friendly game design and promotes excellent games in the German market. To win the Spiel des Jahres is the equivalent of winning the Oscar for Best Picture. It is a mark of recognition not just for the game itself, but also for the designer and the publisher, and winning the Spiel des Jahres can mean tens of thousands of extra sales as everyone wants to try out the new critically acclaimed game. So, the question is, “What makes a Spiel des Jahres winner a good game?” It is answered some forty or so times by James Wallis in Everybody Wins: Four Decades of Greatest Board Games Ever Made.

Wallis, has of course, already explored the history of board games in the company of Sir Ian Livingstone with Board Games in 100 Moves: 8,000 Years of Play, but in Everybody Wins: Four Decades of Greatest Board Games Ever Made, published by Aconyte Books, he delves into the more recent forty-three years of the hobby to examine and give his opinion upon every one of the Spiel des Jahres winners, from the award’s inception in 1979 to 2022. The majority of them are good, some indifferent, and a few disappointing. Along the way he charts the changes in the hobby over the period as reflected through the awards, although as the author makes clear, this is not an actual history of the Spiel des Jahres award, its jury, and the deliberations it makes each year and the decisions it comes to. Its focus is very much on the games themselves and its tone and style is lighter, more that of a coffee table style book than some dry history. Consequently, this is a book which can be enjoyed by the casual board game player as much as the veteran. Further, the big, bold, bright format means that the book can be put in the hands of someone who does not play board games, and they will not be intimidated by the book itself or the games it showcases.

Everybody Wins is divided up into five colour-coded sections which each explore the different eras of the Spiel des Jahres, including the themes, the changes in design, and trends in the hobby in that time, beginning with ‘Opening Moves’ of 1979 to 1985, and going through ‘The Golden Age’ of 1996 to 2004 and ‘Identity Crisis’ of 2005 to 2015, before finding ‘New Purpose, New Direction’ since 2016. Each section opens with an overview of the period. For example, ‘Opening Moves’ explains how the award came to be founded and what it set out to do, which was to highlight, if not necessarily the best game of the year, then the most interesting, the most playable, and the most fun game of year, which had been published in German in the last year, and in the process, to broaden the acceptance of board games beyond just the hobby. Later eras examine the changing fortunes of the award and game design, for example, ‘The Golden Age’ exploring the effect that Settlers of Catan, winner in 1995, had on both hobby and industry, and how the period would not only see the rise of classic game, but also several heavier, more complicated games would not necessarily appeal to a family audience. Each overview is then followed by the winners for that period, every title receiving an essay that details its background, gameplay, the author’s opinion, and more. Notes give both the publisher and current  availability, plus whether or not the game was a worthy winner and is still worth playing now. The occasional sidebar explains particular rule types or gives a thumbnail portrait of a designer and every entry concludes with a full list of the nominees and winners of the various awards the Spiel des Jahres jury has given out over the years, initially special awards, but more recently the Kinderspiel and Kennerspiel awards.

Everybody Wins does not look at the winners of the other two awards that the jury gives out— the Kinderspiel and Kennerspiel awards. Neither are quite as important as the Spiel des Jahres, nor do they quite have the same effect on the industry, but where Everybody Wins does come up short is in not looking at the ‘what if’s’ of the Spiel des Jahres. Only once does the author look closely at another nomination for the award, Matt Leacock’s Forbidden Island, a nominee in 2011 when Quirkle won. This is less of an issue when what is regarded as a classic won in a particular year, such as Settlers of Catan in 1995, Dominion in 2009, or Codenames in 2016, but what about in 2002 when the stacking game, Villa Paletti won? Wallis tells the reader that, “In no possible sense was this the game of the year.” It would have been interesting to pull the other nominees out and give them the space to explain why they should have won instead. For example, Puerto Rico and TransAmerica in 2002, but also for Niagara in 2005 and later, Keltis in 2008. Later, Wallis does look at ‘The Ones That Didn’t Win’, but this is only a brief overview, primarily highlighting the commercialism of a game or it not suiting the Spiel des Jahres criteria, but there are games here that do fit those criteria, and would have been worthy winners, such as Pandemic in 2009.

Physically, Everybody Wins: Four Decades of Greatest Board Games Ever Made is lovingly presented, with every entry very nicely illustrated and accompanied with an engaging description. One obvious issue with the presentation is the book’s sidebars. Done in white on colour boxes, the text is not strong enough to read without the aid of good lighting.

The response to Everybody Wins will vary according to how much of a board game player the reader is. If the reader is a veteran, this will send him scurrying back into his collection to pull out titles and try them again, checking them against past plays and the author’s assessment. Or scouring online sellers for the titles that he does not have. The more casual player is more likely to pick and choose from the range of titles discussed in the pages of the book, probably looking for the classics and the titles that the author recommends as worth his time and the reader’s time. Whatever way in which the reader responds to the book, Everybody Wins: Four Decades of Greatest Board Games Ever Made is an entertaining and informative primer on the past four decades of the board game hobby and the winners of its greatest prize.

Solitaire: You Are (Not) Deadpool

After coming to comics with You Are Deadpool, the solo adventures of the ‘Merc with a Mouth’ switches to the traditional format of text paragraphs with You Are (Not) Deadpool. This is the first entry in the ‘A Marvel: Multiverse Missions Adventure Gamebook’ series published by Aconyte Books and unlike almost every other Solo Adventure book it promises not to put you at the centre of the action. As the title suggests, you do not play as Deadpool in You Are (Not) Deadpool. Instead you are an innocent bystander approached by Deadpool who identifies you as ‘Six’ and asks you to help him. In effect, whereas you are not Deadpool, the character you play could actually be YOU THE READER if you were in New York when Deadpool bounds over to you like a happy puppy. With no mention of what happened to One, Two, Three, or Four, let alone Five, you find yourself accompanying Deadpool on his mission. For the most part he follows your suggestions, where to go, what to do, acting as both sidekick and conscience, much like his best friend, Weasel, or Dopinder the taxi driver from the film. However, there are moments where you shine and Deadpool definitely handles the fights—with relish, often his own—whilst you huddle in the corner, having rolled the dice to determine the outcome.

The plot in Deadpool in You Are (Not) Deadpool is this. Daredevil gives a Deadpool a mission. Alien guns—Chitauri guns—are flooding the city and Deadpool has to find the source and stop them. The investigation will take the pair of Deadpool and Six above, below, and across New York, meeting Bob the Hydra Agent along the way, up and down the USA’s eastern seaboard because the budget does not extend as far away as Hawaii, although it does take them somewhere else… As Six, you and Deadpool will also play the worst game of Jenga in the Marvel Universe, fight a Psychic Octopus, lie about having found a sledgehammer, and a lot more besides. They might even jump book to the next entry in the series—She-Hulk goes to Murderworld!

Mechanically, You Are (Not) Deadpool is more sophisticated than the average solo adventure book. Standard six-sided dice are required, no more than three. Deadpool has three stats—MERC, MOUTH, and FOCUS, which are to do with physical, social, and mental stuff respectively. Initially, they are rated two each with the reader increasing the value of one of them by on, but they do change over the course of the adventure. They come into play whenever you want Deadpool to take an action. This typically involves rolling a single six-sided die and adding a stat to beat a target equal to five or six. This varies though. Sometimes, the reader will need to roll two or three six-sided dice and beat a higher target to see if Deadpool succeeds, and even then, this may not be enough. In certain challenging situations, the reader will need to roll another round or two other rounds to succeed. In addition, Deadpool can acquire Qualities such as GUARDS, GUARDS, RESOURCEFUL, and CHAOS, but never, ever KUMQUAT. Really. Not KUMQUAT. Not once. Each enters play with a value of one, and again, can fluctuate in play. Deadpool can also carry up to five objects, some of which, occasionally, can be used to improve his stats. Along the way, there games and puzzles too, such as decoding a lock in an underground base or playing the slot at a crummy casino in Atlantic City, and both Six and Deadpool can pick a wide array of achievements. 

You Are (Not) Deadpool is well written, with lots of in jokes and nods to Geek culture (especially Lovecraftian Geek culture), but beyond the cover, it does lack illustrations bar entry ending silhouette clipart. As a consequence of being all text, You Are (Not) Deadpool lacks that dual sense of wondering what situation a piece of artwork illustrates and how to get there via the numbered paragraphs, but on the other hand, it does retain much more of sense of mystery.

In the comics and the films, Deadpool is known for breaking the fourth wall (and the Marvel Universe if truth be told), but in You Are (Not) Deadpool he never does that. There is the interaction between Deadpool and Six throughout, but since you as Six are directing Deadpool’s actions, there is a gap between the two, as if you are directing or roleplaying the actions of someone who is directing or roleplaying the actions of someone else. In this case, Deadpool. It might not be breaking the fourth wall, but it is breaking the immediacy of the roleplaying if you think about it. So do not do that. It would spoil the fun.

You Are (Not) Deadpool has three hundred entries, so there is lot to explore and multiple plot threads to follow and investigate, plus some tough challenges, puzzles, and fights to overcome. Deadpool is definitely going to need more than the one run at this—unless he/you/Six are really lucky, and if all three of you fail, then at least Deadpool can come heal and comeback. As for Six? Just cross out his name wherever it appears in the quest and write Seven (or Eight or Nine or…) instead. No one will notice. 

Not quite the traditional Solo Adventure Book—but than what did you expect, this is Deadpool, after all, You Are (Not) Deadpool is an entertaining often ridiculous romp alongside the infamous ‘Merc with the Mouth’.