Miskatonic University Student

I was going to wait until my next game of Arkham Horror to write this, but I decided to get in my first impressions of the new Miskatonic Horror expansion while it is still fresh. The idea of an expansion for the base game and all the expansions of Arkham Horror is a bit off-putting. In practice I think it actually works great and it is a fix for all the Arkham Horror expansions that have been out for a long time and are well known (The revised Dark Pharoah being the exception).


First I guess I will start out with the negative. If you have had the original Dark Pharoah expansion like me and love it, this has little for that expansion. Some new Exhibit items but most of the additions are for the new Ancient Whispers mechanic of the revised edition. I haven't played the new Dark Pharoah yet, but I'm not impressed by the list of changes as I am a fan of the old one and they did not go at all the direction I would hope a revision should. But this review is about Miskatonic, so enough of that!

For our first game we had the Lurker in the Threshold expansion combined with the Black Goat of the Woods expansion. We played with the Lurker as the Herald and Ithaqua as the Great Old One who's coming into the world we were trying to prevent. There were four investigators in the game: Kate Winthrop, Jenny Barnes, Professor Armitage, and Joe Diamond. One of the players was brand new to Arkham Horror and we played with the Organized Crime organization and thought this would all be a lot harder. Everyone choose the option to start off with a retainer as an option under the new Organized Crime organization, basically we were all working for the mob to stop the take over of the world... Ithaqua should have thought twice before taking on the Godfather. One of the bigger changes that was immediately noticed was that the Cult Encounters which rarely make an appearance were a HUGE deal in this game thanks to the Miskatonic Horror additions. One of our investigators started off with a membership and had encounters which gave her the option of recruiting a fellow investigator into the cult (and they had to take a corruption card with it) or suffering for it. However, in the end we were all able to get blessed as a result of having all investigators inducted into the cult. This basically fixed the Black Goat of the Woods expansion as in the couple years I've had that expansion we've only had people become cult members twice. The new Lurker cards unfortunately never really came into play as none of us felt pressured enough to need to ask for his help.

Our next game will be in two weeks and we intend to ramp up the difficulty significantly. The Dunwich board and Dunwich Horror Herald will be coming into play. I'm always excited to play Arkham Horror but the new Miskatonic expansion has me terribly excited to revisit old expansions like Dunwich!