What a merry, tentacle trip it's been. Jungles and snakes. Small New England towns and ghouls. Excursions into dreamland. Stuck in the middle of warring Masons and witches. And of course, witnessing a theatre production that may not have been theatre. To date, Arkham Horror: The Card Game has delivered a half-a-dozen campaigns that showcase the heights which the base system is capable of achieving. Something fresh, innovative, and new added with each campaign, it's time to see what the latest “The Innsmouth Conspiracy” (2020) has to contribute to the trip.
Unlike all the major campaigns to date, “The Innsmouth Conspiracy” forgoes back story. It throws the players into the frying pan on the first sentence with no preamble. Caught in a rocky basin as tide waters rise, the first scenario asks players to find a way out of their wet predicament before they drown. No time to spin a yarn, the need to escape is imminent. For players who do escape, a window is opened onto the setting, the small town of Innsmouth, Rhode Island. Strange things brewing in the watery underworld, it becomes the investigator's goal to find out how and why they were in the tidal basin before the threat consumes Innsmouth. Once they learn, they may not want to explore further, however. The fire proves to be just beyond the frying pan.
In terms of pure story, “The Innsmouth Conspiracy” may be the most satisfying yet. “Path to Carcosa” offered existential layers to ponder, and therefore was able to transcend its plot. “The Innsmouth Conspiracy”, however, offers players pure pulp, and it does it in a tighter, more cohesive fashion than “The Dunwich Legacy” and is at least on par with “The Forgotten Age”. As bits of backstory are added to the campaign, combined with the rising sense of urgency players experience with each new scenario, momentum builds toward an epic confrontation that will see players utterly destroyed or left alive sorting through PTSD. If story were extracted from game, this one might be the best page turner of the campaigns released to date.
In terms of new mechanisms, “The Innsmouth Conspiracy”, like all campaigns to date, has its own mechanisms, First and foremost are new chaos tokens called Blessed and Cursed. The former provides +2 and the latter -2 in skill tests. After drawing a Blessed or Cursed token, players continue to draw tokens until a base-game token is drawn. This +/- 2 swing adds an interesting degree of tension to skill tests. Another addition are key tokens. In some scenarios the keys are used literally: ways of unlocking doors or portals to continue the scenario. In others, the keys act as ways of unlocking pieces of backstory, and tied to these are certain bonuses best discovered in-game. And still a third new token can be found on location cards: flood tokens. As much of the campaign occurs at water level or below, the tides rise and fall, meaning sometimes certain locations flood. These locations tracked using the new flood tokens, players have an additional element to consider in their fight against the Mythos. Stay too long in a flooded location and you will take serious damage, if not outright drown. There are other mechanisms added specific to certain scenarios, but these are absolutely best discovered in-game. (One is vehicles—vehicles! Sorry...)
Continuing another trend of all major campaigns to date, “The Innsmouth Conspiracy” brings five new investigators to the fold. Dexter Drake is a stage musician with a deep desire to find real magic. With sleight of hand, he deftly slips allies on and off the table—but dipping into the Necronomicon has not had a positive effect on his personal life. Silas Marner is the macho man, a sailor. Good in a fight and quick on his feet, he has a little trouble with monsters and running away. But the sea calls, and its voices are deep under water. Sister Mary may be the truest guardian to date. A highly effective protector and healer, she is not as good at taking down monsters as guardians in the past have been, but she's damn good as a protector. Amanda Sharpe is a graduate student. While an excellent researcher able to unearth obscure details, her passions extend into art for which no explanations can be found in any known textbook. And finally, Trish Scarborough the spy. Once she's able to get into the shadows, she's highly effective at getting clues and evading enemies. But things from her past, shadow agents of their own, keep appearing to slow her down.
If you haven't caught this review's vibe yet, “The Innsmouth Conspiracy” is yet another stupendous campaign in the Arkham Horror: The Card Game world. I keep waiting for the designers to drop the ball, and I continue to wait. There are moments, particularly in the latter scenarios, that finding your way through a watery labyrinth feels overused. But overall, the flood mechanism adds tension highly relevant to underwater play, and the Blessed/Cursed chaos tokens add an element of unpredictability that people who min/max the chaos bag will love (or hate?). The story where the campaign potentially shines brightest, however, one hopes the game continues to get stronger and stronger with each new campaign.
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