Cardboard Corner: Review of "The Feast of Hemlock Vale" expansion for Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Note: this is a review of both the Campaign and Investigator expansions for “The Feast of Hemlock Vale”. There will be zero spoilers save story intro.

It was announced in 2023 that MJ Newman, original and long-time designer of Arkham Horror: The Card Game, would be handing over the reins of the game to two new designers, Duke Harrist and Nicholas Kory. A major waypoint in the game's history, there were multiple directions the game could have been taken, and fans waited with bated breath how the new design team would handle one of the greatest cooperative games ever made. In February 2024 these questions were answered with “The Feast of Hemlock Vale” Investigator and Campaign expansions.

You can breathe. Carrying the pun forward (in poor style), Harrist and Kory in fact bring a breath of fresh air to Arkham Horror. Zero sleight to MJ Newman and all that she accomplished in seven years, but you can tell a new set of eyes looked at the game and knew how to offer players something classic yet evolutionary.

In “The Feast of Hemlock Vale”, you and a group of academics travel to Hemlock Isle, a remote island off the coast of Maine, to perform a survey in the wake of the discovery of a strange specimen. The survey only uncovers more strangeness, however: mutated animals, glowing plants, a possible cult, and a palpable but invisible presence of something in the shadows. On top of this, family feuds bubble beneath among the residents for reasons of heritage, inheritance, and power. As the people of Hemlock Isle prepare for a festival, your job is to get to the bottom of the strangeness before it takes everything over.

“Hemlock Vale” contains several simple but effective scenarios that drip with theme. A haunted house, lost in a forest, a sandpit, a Mayday festival, a “tower defense”—these and several others ensure variety and engagement. But the glue holding the campaign together is the day/night structure of interludes between scenarios. These interludes effectively build both story and backstory through ten NPCs which feature strongly in the campaign. Players are able to build relationships (and enmity) with these NPCs, which in turn has an impact on scenarios, both advantageous and detrimental. This is a positive evolution of the NPC system of “Edge of the Earth”. That system had a blocky, forced approach to NPCs, as opposed to “Feast”, which integrates them from several angles. Beyond just scenario play, “Feast” comes alive through these secondary characters in a way no campaign to date has.

As is standard with all deluxe expansions to date, five investigators are included in “Feast”, one per class. Wilson Richards is the Guardian representative. A handyman, he starts with 3s across the board, but gets bonuses for Tool assets. Only trouble is when you need to fix something fast. Kate Winthrop is the Seeker scientist. Playing fast and loose with clues, she uses her microscope and chemistry set to shift clues from locations to her assets and around again, gaining incremental advantages in the process. Her only worry is failed research. Our Rogue is Alessandra Zorzi. Good at clues and evading, her real power is a silver tongue; once per round she gets a free Parley action (something particularly useful in this campaign). Haunting her from the shadows is a crime boss who gave her a start in the biz. The Mystic is Kohaku Narukami. Possessing his own bless/curse tracker wheel, his special abilities play with said tokens in the chaos bag. Truly for advanced players, his weakness is a ghostly geist chasing him. And our Survivor is Hank Sampson, the farmhand. Big and strong, he can take a lot of horror and damage. But for as burly as he may be, he still searches for a father he never really had.

The player cards which come in the Investigator box are likewise a breath of fresh air. But most importantly, they are thematic without resorting to the same desperate tricks as the Customizable cards of “The Scarlet Keys” or the dual-faction cards of “The Edge of the Earth.” Player cards like “Microscope”, for example, fit the faction, are costed reasonably, are thematic, and feel great to get on the table, all without breaking the game in one direction or another. I'm aware Arkham's design space becomes more limited with each new expansion, hence designers should be commended for finding novel content.

If there are any challenges to “Hemlock Vale”, one might be the amount of text to read. If “The Dunwich Legacy” acts as the 1 on a scale of 1 -10 and “The Scarlet Keys” operates as the 10, then “The Feast of Hemlock Vale” is a 6 or 7. Pages and pages of text (a la “The Scarlet Keys”) do not exist, but there is a substantial bit scattered throughout the campaign guide. Another potential drawback are the interludes between scenarios. Requiring a bit of setup (no deckbuilding), they can become tedious toward the end of the campaign for people chomping at the bit to get on with it.

The last potential issue is complexity. Where two-player scenarios in “The Dunwich Legacy” or “Path to Carcosa” took 1.5 to 2 hours, scenarios in “Hemlock Vale” can take 2-3 hours. This is due to more complex scenarios, more setup, and additional time reading. I personally enjoy the additional blocks of text, but I know not every player is a fan. And to be fair, added complexity just seems par for the course now. In other words, I doubt future campaigns can offer simpler campaigns while still delivering the experience most players come to the table for.

In the end, “The Feast of Hemlock Vale” is both a back-to-the-basics campaign as well as a toasty hot bit of fresh content. The new designers offer a unique campaign for players' tables entirely in the spirit of Arkham Horror but expanding the game in new directions. For players worried about the potential desperation inherent to the multi-class and multi-tool cards found in recent expansions, “Feast” goes back to good ol' straight-forward cards without sacrificing novelty or innovation. The new player cards feel classic and fresh. And for players worried that the recent, all-in-one expansions would somehow take away from linear storytelling and game focus, “Feast” again proves them wrong by offering a series of day/night scenarios with enough choice and variance to be replayable several times. It's not open world, but at the same time it's not a straight line. The big highlight for me is the integration of NPCs into scenarios and story. They make the campaign come alive in a manner previously unseen. I hope future expansions will evolve this further. And what else about the future? All the best to Harrist and Kory as they take the Arkham baton and run with it. They're already running at a good clip.