Oh. The Horror. The Horror.

After a break of more than a month, I was delighted to get the chance to game with Jesse again. After comparing WoW notes and looking at Guitar Hero on X-Box, we decided to play Arkham Horror. I'd played at GameStorm and had the rules firmly in my head, so off we went.

Our special guest Elder God was Ithaqua, who takes a stamina off of you if you end a turn in the streets. Not a big deal for me as the doctor, as I got to replace a stamina free every upkeep, but it did hurt Amanda a bit (Jesse's character). This was my first two player game, so it was going to be interesting to see if we could win or not. With two, you need to have 8 open gates to allow the elder god in, or else get up to 12 doom tokens on his sheet.

We started out strong, with lots of clue tokens and sealing one gate right away - I wasn't able to seal mine as I had to use a clue token in the Abyss (or whatever other world I was in, they all smell alike to me), but I did get the gate closed. Jesse had just gotten another one closed, but it was clear that the gates were popping up all over the place and no clues were forthcoming, so we had to hope for some Elder Seals in order to get some closures. There were a few surprises, like me getting sealed into the docks for a turn, getting sucked into R'yleh and taking four turns to close it (not even sealing it). But the worst was the Rumors that kept popping up.

The first rumor was the Southside Strangler, who managed to kill every Ally in the game except the one I managed to score (the one that gives +2 Will). Next up was the one that puts a doom token on the elder god every time you roll a 1-2 in the Mythos phase. Which I did regularly. I did manage to seal one more gate before the Doom Track filled up and we were off to fight Ithaqua.

Ithaqua isn't that hard, and Jesse had two spells that allow you to roll +9 combat dice for the entire combat, and things were looking good. Until I biffed my attempt roll, leaving me with a single stamina, not enough to make the attempt again, so I was effectively out of the endgame. Jesse rolled valiantly, hanging on to the bitter end (he eventually ran out of dice to roll for Ithaqua's attack on Fight), with a single Doom token remaining on Ithaqua's track. And so the Earth became the domain of all sorts of slimy, horrible, shambling things. Just like Vegas.

A great game, quick (we played in about 2.5 hours), and good company.