Just as Mondays are dedicated to “pick up and play” games, Fridays will be dedicated to games that you have no Earthly business attempting to play unless you have a vested interest in gaming.

The game is set in H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional city of Arkham where a nameless, unspeakable horror (as the title suggests) is lurking in the shadows and getting worse every day. The players represent investigators who must gather clues and put a stop to whatever is going on. As it turns out the force behind the unspeakable horror is one of the Old Ones, ancient pagan gods who slumber in the Earth. If the players fail in their investigation they’ll have to deal with one of those old boys (and they aren’t too easy to kill if they wake up.)

The game is interesting because it actually has a form of A.I. to foil the players. Gameplay is cooperative, that is, the players work together against the game mechanics. Using their characters the players gather spells, items, and clues to seal the gates through which monsters, undead, and cultists are entering the city. The game gets easier as more players are added, obviously, but it can be a real pain to win with only 1 or 2 players (yes, it can even be played solo.)

The encounters and events that occur in the game are driven by decks of cards (and believe me, this game as a SHIT TON of cards and tokens) and many of them have a dark humor about them. Obviously, references to characters, events, and places from Lovecraft’s work are rampant.

Lovecraft may have been a mediocre writer and a blatant racist but I’ve gotta hand it to him, he created a pretty interesting mythos. I actually prefer playing the game to reading the stories, to be perfectly honest. The stories are like an instruction manual to a grander device. They lay out the framework of a compelling world of horrors while leaving plenty of room for imagination on the part of the reader. The reason something like Arkham Horror can exist is that Lovecraft encouraged others to use and expand his own concepts.